Discovery: Emma-Jean Thackray and Laura Jurd
Badass Brits With Trumpets And Visions
I’ve been spending a lot of time with the music of two women who superficially have a good deal in common but who prove yet again that in jazz, artists are as specifically inspired as their fingerprints. Laura Jurd and Emma-Jean Thackray are both British, bespectacled women in their 30s who play the trumpet and who compose beguiling swirls of funk, hip-hop, trad jazz and ambient music. They’re band leaders, producers and visionaries who’d appeal, in my trusting mind, to anyone who enjoys rap, metal, prog or classical music of any kind. They strike me like earnest band nerds who became the hippest kitties in the city, that city being London, which is enjoying a “new and thrilling jazz movement” according to The Guardian. I am here for it.
It’s not like I’m breaking news of obscure unknowns here. Jurd and Thackray are both celebrated young artists with commissions, collaborations and great press. Yet odds are you are not spinning their work, and I think you should. Besides loving their music, I see them as answering two big concerns. First, we need (indeed deserve) more women in jazz. And we need more conceptual, aggressively creative music that will appeal to young audiences steeped in pop, indie, jam and hip-hop. I hear ample connections, and I hope others will as well.
Emma-Jean Thackray comes from the city of Leeds in the north of England. She went from brass band in school to two music degrees in jazz and orchestral composing. On the way she became enamored with Miles Davis, Gil Evans, certain world fusion music, the 90s hip-hop programming and producing of J Dilla and electronica. She became an omnivorous musician who was able to play all the instruments on her breakout debut EP Ley Lines. That got her noticed and included in many jazz projects including an appearance with the London Symphony. Then came her ambitious 2021 album Yellow, a fulfillment of her ethos, to make “music to move the mind, move the body, move the soul,” to be, as her bio puts it, a “standard-bearer of a spiritually-minded, dancefloor-angled take on jazz.”
You’ll hear music here that feels most grounded in neo-soul with aggressive drums and percussion and a brass heart that pulls us to New Orleans and the English brass band traditions that Thackray heard and learned growing up. I love to hear a sousaphone playing bass lines, and we get it in the slithering, dithering “About That,” along with some gorgeous woody bass clarinet and Emma-Jean’s trumpet solo, against a vocal chorus chanting the title. “Third Eye” feels like an anchoring track. It uses lead vocalist (Thackray or not, I can’t tell) singing with a soul choir about matters most cosmic.
“Say Something” acts as a kind of single (sharp video here) with its accumulative song structure and big, broad vocals. And there’s a music geek trick secreted in the first and last tracks, “Mercury” and “Mercury (In Retrograde),” in that the melodies and structure are the same, only in reverse. Intellectual as she is, EJT is soulful as hell, adept with computers and synths, master of multiple instruments, and obviously a talented recruiter of talent and bandleader. She’s unafraid to remind us that she’s whip-smart and possessed of a sense of humor.
Laura Jurd is even more exciting to my tastes, with one of the most explosive and expansive imaginations I can think of in contemporary music. She grew up in a really small village in the far south of England and seems to have been blowing everyone away with natural talent in her school music programs. This Guardian profile (from when she was just 22) suggests she found some striking teachers and mentors who helped cultivate her twin passions for classical and jazz. She claims The Beatles and Stravinsky as core influences. By her conservatory years she was winning national prizes, including a jazz prize from the delightfully named Worshipful Company of Musicians (est. c. 1350!). She gets praise for her eclectic scope and her sensitivity to folk music traditions in what can be some pretty esoteric composing.
I found Jurd via a recommendation - algorithm as I recall - for the band Dinosaur, a quartet she founded in 2010 with Elliot Galvin on keyboards and synthesizers, Corrie Dick on drums, and Conor Chaplin on bass. They collaborated with the string group the Ligeti Quartet on 2014’s stunning Landing Ground, a third-stream hybrid music that earned everyone involved a ton of attention. It’s distinctly contemporary but rarely clashing or hard to enjoy. When I say music is made of tone, time and timbre, it’s recordings like this one I have in mind, works where you have no map or expectation of what’s next, and what’s next is invariably interesting use of sound and interplay and harmony. There’s plenty of groove and relatable melody, but it’s also free and rapturous.
Dinosaur’s own solo debut came in 2016 with the breakout album Together, As One, and while it’s more traditional than Emma-Jean in its jazz forms - more tunes with improv - it’s even more blockbuster in its beauty or originality. In my (provisional) favorite tune “Robin,” a synthy kind of fanfare opens the tune against drums. It pauses, then Jurd enters, playing a theme on trumpet with her true, bold tone and phrasing. That gives way to an ultra-funky bass line that completely shifts the flow to a cruise mode, with the drums even more involved. To that Jurd adds the fanfare from the keyboard at the start of the tune, and from there the band engages in semi-improvised variations on the established heart of the song. It really goes places and features the band delicately dancing around one another, against golden harmonic changes. It contrasts the electronica of the keys with the sweetly natural tone of Jurd’s horn. She composes clean, lovely passages and then plays freely as if composing on the spot. “Robin” reaches its apex with a long, wheeling trumpet solo - rounded out with some pretty breathy gestures. It’s amazing.
That’s immediately followed by “Living, Breathing,” which kicks with a shiny synth loop under a bass solo out of nowhere. Jurd plays more of a support role upon coming in. You have to understand that I love groove in music more than cornbread and this song and the whole album are overflowing with it. Jazz is a language chiefly of rhythm, and the complexities and games and angles here are hard to top. Yet there’s nothing un-lyrical about it, wordless as it is. The album ends with a free jazz tune titled “Interlude,” which means between other works, so it seems Jurd has a sense of humor too.
Dinosaur’s next outing Wonder Trail from the spring of 2018 came out more digital, poppy and whimsical. The trumpet sounds a bit more affected, the composing more far out. I’m still getting to know it. I’ve listened a lot though to the 2020 album To The Earth, which lives up to its title by heading more into acoustic jazz territory and old forms than anything from the band so far. Hearing Elliot Galvin on a natural piano is a thrill and a treat. While Jurd wrote six of the seven tunes, they play one from the repertoire, Billy Strayhorn’s sneaky “Absinthe,” in a noir style with some toe dips into weirdness. Next comes a tune I put a star by early, the high stepping “Banning Street Blues,” which is a blues if you really follow its stretched out form and which features a fantastic long bass solo. The title track, which opens, is as foggy and mod as the cover image.
If Jurd and Thackray have one thing deeply in common, it’s their devotion to mastery of the post Miles Davis trumpet. What I mean by that is that with the exception of some antic effects and gags in 20th century band music, the trumpet was, for decades, almost exclusively a melody instrument. In Dixieland, Louis Armstring, big band, bebop, the trumpet spoke in clear, concise tones, easy to transcribe into notation. In the 60s, the trumpet became far more versatile and expressive, with cries, smears, air effects, exclamations and so forth. Jurd and Thackray truly play and play with their horns, sometimes drawing clear lines, then wilding off into sonic realms akin to fingerpaints and blowtorches. They are ultra-vibrant voices who speak in sound with exceptional expression and daring.