Jazz Emu is an unpretentious pseudo-comedomusicologist from London, who writes glistening up-tempo pop for the emotionally stunted. He has garnered a cult following on Youtube, after his first song Light Touch reached the top of Reddit Videos. Since the release of his debut album [sic] in 2020, followed by Vulnerabilité in 2021, his music has racked up 500k streams, been featured on the official Spotify ‘Fresh Finds’ playlist and played on BBC Radio 1 Breakfast with Greg James.
At the age of six, Jazz Emu fell in love with a second hand saxophone and proudly took it to a trial lesson. Within a minute the teacher had decided that Jazz’s hands were unusually small, and his shiny brass hopes were crushed with a plastic beginner’s clarinet. Several years of funk-repressed classical training followed, with the groove bubbling pianissimo under the surface. When he finally heard the syncopated hi-hats in Bill Withers’ Use Me, there was no going back. Jazz pulled out the dusty old sax and got to work. He would stay up late at night recording shining synths and near-silent screaming sax solos (no noise after 10pm) on his mum’s BOSS BR900-CD recorder. The results were too powerful to show the general public.
Ten years later, armed with an Akai EWI-4000S, a right hand calloused by synth-glisses and a handsome selection of suits, Jazz has set out to change the world. Combining the lyrically pleonastic and musically dank, this project is an auditory experiment in high-art meets low-art. Imagine performing a Shakespearean sonnet over The Sims loading-music. Or reading Homer’s Iliad off of a toilet roll. Imagining it? Good. You’re roughly three eighths of the way to grasping the sonic mythos of Jazz Emu.
He has absolutely no delusions regarding the potent artistic value of his Body of Work.
“A very funny man” Greg James, BBC Radio 1
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