Eska mtungwazi biography sample

I wish Eska Mtungwazi had been my primary-school teacher. For her school’s nativity play she got the children to dress up in fluorescent gloves, yellow and green and pink and blue – a different colour for each year – and perform the Nativity song in sign language. One child did the splits at the end.

“It was so beautiful! It looked so good!” cries Eska when we meet at a cafe on Deptford High Street in London. “It’s just this primary school but I’m running it like it’s the West End you know!” she says, bubbling with energy.

The creative outpouring into her year-six classes might have been a sign that Eska was feeling somewhat creatively stunted in her musical life. Despite a career as a singer, songwriter, producer and multi-instrumentalist, a lot of her work was for other people, like Zero 7, The Cinematic Orchestra, Courtney Pine, and Tony Allen, which she did alongside her teaching job. Vocally, she was compared to Kate Bush, Laura Mvula, and Björk. Grace Jones called her up and asked if they could work together.

“In, it was about 2007, I started getting praise as an artist and I wasn’t even thinking of myself as an artist. There were small gigs I was doing around town that started getting hotly ti

•

How ESKA went from being a session musician to releasing a remarkable debut album in her forties

An artist releasing their debut album in their early forties? In an industry governed by the cult of the young, Eska Mtungwazi is something of an anomaly. But the Zimbabwe-born and London-bred session musician turned solo artist has a good reason for waiting so long: simply, that it’s taken her that time to discover what she wanted to say.

“I kept upping the ante with every year that would go by,” she explains. “I’ve been involved in three Mercury-nominated albums, and with every collaboration that you do that’s successful, you might get a press mention from being a side player in something. So, people start putting this bizarre pressure on you, saying, ‘You should do an album now, you’re getting older, the press are talking about you and that’s going to go away’.

“No one is saying, ‘Have you got anything creative to say? Have you made anything that’s worth putting out that you feel proud of?’ I’m old enough to know that it was a long time coming and that’s OK, I’m fine with that. If anything, it’s the music industry that gives you the perception that it’s almost impossible after you’re 25 to have anything creative to say, which doesn’t make any sense.”

In any case, it