Emma-Jean Thackray’s Yellow LP is an essential work of cosmic jazz-not-jazz informed by club culture and unlike anything else around
Trumpeter, multi-instrumentalist, vocalist, producer, club and radio DJ – Emma-Jean Thackray is many things and brings them all together on Yellow, her debut album released via her own Movementt label. The current UK jazz scene isn’t bound to antiquated notions of what jazz must be and there are any number of unique voices within the ranks, but it must be said that even in this context Thackray is forging her own distinct path. Yellow is fiercely original while conversant in what has gone before and is an experience unlike anything else you will have this year.
Whether outer or inner, space is the place from the very beginning here, with the planets aligning on the mostly instrumental “Mercury”. It’s a righteous cosmic jam with searching trumpet, deep funk bassline and electronic vapour trails, before Thackray’s voice is beamed in with the universal message that “to listen is to know and to know is to love”. That idea leads beautifully into the album’s first single “Say Something”, which joins the dots between the current UK jazz scene, house music and the great American funk songbook. Emma-Jean Thackray’s take on jazz has always been informed by club culture and this is the sound of an artist with a distinct voice able to ignite dancefloors and, as her song goes, really say something. A point of comparison might be Scott Grooves featuring Roy Ayres doing “Expansions” by Lonnie Liston Smith for Soma Records, but as wholly original material in the twenty-first century. “Venus” keeps the cosmic energy levels high, with its goddess-invoking call and response, fuelled by a broken beat meets p-funk groove machine, whereas the consciousness raising “Third Eye” employs an out-there-soul wall of sound and “May There Be Peace” is a spiritual interlude channelling late period Alice Coltrane.
Thackray combines the intimate and epic on “Spectre” with similarly invigorating results as Little Simz with “Introvert”. “Spectre” thus feels like the universe collapsed in on itself, the listener pulled into Emma-Jean’s head and heart. A relationship reduced (or indeed elevated) to a haunting or perhaps a musical exploration of mental health – whatever the specifics, the emotional content seems to speak of these troubled times that we find ourselves mired in. It would be fair to say that it is difficult not to feel alone during this pandemic, despite those around us, and many have found music to be a lifeline. That music doesn’t need to be unremittingly joyous, but it does need to connect; Yellow connects and then some.
Emma-Jean Thackray is shaping up to be a latter-day Sun Ra or Alice Coltrane, with her music increasingly without boundaries. Yellow is the most fully realised manifestation of this to date. Spiritually nourishing, community-minded, introspective, celebratory and enlightening, this is a record that you need in your life.
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