'It's so easy and quick to lose a language'
Wellington jazz fans can see acclaimed Australian First Nations singer and composer Bumpy at the San Fran later this month.
Bumpy is bringing her blend of soul, folk, funk and jazz to Aotearoa for the first time this month.
Her debut album Kanana - translating from Noongar as “Land where the sun sets" drops this weekend before the Naarm/Melbourne-based jazz artist and Noongar woman makes her very first trip across the Tasman.
“I feel really lucky and honoured that music gets to bring me there. And I'm just so excited," she tells RNZ’s Music 101.
Bumpy performs at the Wellington Jazz Festival this month,
Youthworx 2018
"I'm going to try and fill up my days with running around and seeing what I can. I just can't wait.”
Bumpy uses her indigenous Noongar language in Kanana, a process that has been a journey of reclamation, she says.
“My nanny wrote the first Noongar dictionary. And it was also just ensuring that we uphold that legacy … it's so easy and quick to lose a language. So it's important that each of us is doing what we can to bring it back into our bodies.”
Bumpy, performing at the Wellington Jazz Festival this month, has played the London Jazz Festival, headlined the Sydney Opera House, and shared stages with jazz legends such as Herbie Hancock and Marcus Miller.
“We were yarning to Marcus backstage [at the Sidney Myer Music Bowl], he's just talking about when he was working with Aretha [Franklin] and all these huge, huge, beautiful inspirations and names and just very surreal that music can just connect you with people like that.
“But also, we're just people who love music. And it was a really nice, beautiful moment to kind of come down to that level when you put these people on platforms. But at the end of the day, we're all just doing the thing that we love.”
Bumpy plays the Wellington Jazz Festival on 15 October at San Fran.
