FEATURE:
Modern-Day Queens
Jazzy
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I have featured…
Jazzy before, but I am revisiting now, as she recently released her debut album, Peace & Patience. I will end with a review of it. Even though I wrote about her a few months ago, as her debut album is out, I wanted to come back to Jazzy. I am starting with BBC and their recent feature about this sensational Irish artist. She is someone who I have been following for a while. She is currently touring the U.K., so if you can get to see her then do so:
“Releasing your first album is a big step for any artist, but for Jazzy it's one that's followed some huge strides.
The Irish singer and DJ has been streamed more than a billion times and worked with industry heavyweights including Calvin Harris.
If that's not enough, on Saturday she has her biggest gig yet when she'll be playing tracks like No Bad Vibes and Someday in front of a home crowd in Dublin.
For Jazzy, writing an album has always been in the back of her mind and now, finally, it's time to hit send.
She's previously released dozens of singles, building up a monthly listenership over 10 million strong, but Peace and Patience is her first full-length work.
"It's been quite a few years of creating some smaller projects," she tells BBC Newsbeat.
"That's given me enough experience now to feel like it was the right moment."
'I wasn't thinking about going viral'
The 30-year-old, real name Yasmine Byrne, has been putting out music for more than five years and collabed with the likes of Sonny Fodera, Rossi. and KILIMANJARO on some of her biggest tracks.
Dance music has boomed in recent years, with Spotify previously telling Newsbeat that since 2020 the amount under-25s listen to the genre has grown by more than 73% globally.
It also dominated festival line-ups over the summer - including Radio 1's Big Weekend which dedicated all its stages to dance music on the opening night.
But artists in the genre have often moved away from albums, opting instead to release EPs and singles.
Jazzy has noticed the change, saying it feels "a lot different now, with people kind of siding with virality rather than quality of music".
I want to come to Music Week - https://www.musicweek.com/talent/read/jazzy-on-her-debut-lp-the-solutions-needed-for-ireland-s-nightclubs-and-the-laziness-of-ai/095309 - and their interview. As they write, “Here, joined by Polydor Label Group president Ben Mortimer, Chaos Records, Attention Management and collaborator Mark Ralph, Jazzy talks EDM culture, the merits of experimentation, the perils of AI and her enduring love of “a little rave cave”.
“The album’s been in the works for a while so I’m so curious to see what everyone else thinks,” she says with a big smile, also revealing that some of the material was written two years ago.
It checks out that Jazzy is keen to be at Ralph’s studio today. She’s ready to make fresh music, though today’s session is purely for “vibing”, with no specific project in mind. That adds up, too, because as Jazzy reminds us frequently, she lets her life and her music “happen organically”.
Such authenticity lines up with the moment Jazzy finds herself in now. She’s a dance star in her own right, kicking back against the featured artist tag she is sometimes narrowly labelled with.
Making music, she says, is a collaboration most of the time anyway. And when she does link up with other DJs and producers, she debunks any preconceived ideas that she’s purely a vocalist.
“I’m my own artist and I don’t want to be known as a ‘feature artist,’” she says. “So when I go into the studio, I make sure that it’s going to be a collaboration and not just, ‘Oh, you want me to come in and do a vocal for you?’ I very much want to be involved in what the song sounds like and how it’s built.”
Having autonomy and remaining true to herself and her roots is at Jazzy’s core. A Crumlin native, to this day she still lives in Dublin county, where she recently purchased her first home.
A racing green holdall placed at Jazzy’s feet on her new album’s cover provides a fitting metaphor for a life lived mostly on the road in recent years.
“I bring that iconic bag with me as I travel the world, and it represents all that stuff,” she explains. “The album is a big ‘thank you’ to the people who’ve built me, made me the way I am, kept my feet on the ground. I’m glad I’m not getting too big for my boots!”
She needn’t be so humble. Ben Mortimer, president of Polydor Label Group (PLG), praises Jazzy as “a brilliant example” leading the charge for Chaos.
“I’m incredibly proud of what Chaos has built in such a short space of time,” he tells Music Week.
Chaos launched in 2023 and achieved a chart breakthrough with its debut release, Giving Me, which was also Jazzy’s maiden single.
“Within its first few years, the team has established a label with real weight in dance and electronic music, rooted in great A&R instincts and a real understanding of the culture around artists,” Mortimer adds. “Jazzy is a brilliant example of that. The label has become an important part of PLG, and combines a great team with exciting, creative new artists.”
That appreciation of where Jazzy is from is part of Chaos’ approach in honouring her heavy involvement in Dublin’s club and hip-hop scene (she formerly fronted the rap collective Powerful Creative Minds: PCM).
It’s a strategy spun out of Jazzy’s ethos – which has been “Dublin to the world” from the start – shares Chaos GM and director of dance marketing, Silas Howison-Waughray.
Putting Dublin on the map has taken “a lot of graft and continues to do so,” he adds, but she is “well on her way to making it a reality”.
Howison-Waughray puts that down to the fact that Jazzy is a “unique” artist.
“Being an Irish singer-songwriter and touring DJ, with all original vocals on her own records and a strong creative vision, puts her in a totally different space to a lot of acts in dance music,” he explains. “She’s able to put herself both visually and sonically at the forefront of every aspect of the campaign, which removes the limits of success in our minds.”
Jack Duckworth, A&R director at Polydor and head of A&R at Chaos, signed Jazzy after a lunch in Dublin four years ago. He knew from the off that it was imperative to recognise her background as a singer, songwriter, DJ and raver.
“It’s always been about making sure she’s had one foot in the underground and the other in the crossover world,” explains Duckworth. “We wanted people to know Jazzy was coming from the culture. When we signed her to Chaos, she was well rooted in the D12 [postcode] Dublin house scene, which was popping off. She’d just come off the back of Make Me Feel Good. We knew we needed to be fluid and nimble.”
And, as is the case in electronic music, fans expect a steady stream of releases.
“We set out a regular flow,” explains Duckworth. “Some tracks would cater to Jazzy’s club audience and others to her crossover one.”
Those crossover tunes include No Bad Vibes, her 2024 collaboration with Zambian-British DJ Kilimanjaro, which takes its cues from the slow, protracted beats of amapiano as well as Afro house. It marked a shift from Jazzy’s punchier dance hits like Giving Me or Somedays. No Bad Vibes, Howison-Waughray adds, became one of Universal Music Group’s biggest-performing sounds on Snapchat.
Securing the “right” collaborations, including High On Me, a No.18 single released last year with Rossi, has been key to “really super-charging the project”, Duckworth adds.
“To quote Paddy McLean,” he says, nodding to the Chaos co-GM, “we wanted ‘to be everywhere, anywhere, all at once’.”
Howison-Waughray echoes those sentiments.
“The primary goal for both the label and Jazzy from the outset was long-term artist development,” he says. “This album is the biggest moment in her journey and we have high expectations in the UK, Ireland and globally, but it’s another milestone in a long career that will stand the test of time and continue to evolve.”
Belying their company’s name, Attention Management’s Jo Eales says that she and founder Iain Watt prefer to work “quietly” behind the scenes, but are “happy to be loud about our pride in Jazzy”.
“She’s one of one: a phenomenal DJ, a brilliant writer and most importantly, genuinely a fantastic human being,” Eales says.
Eales remarks that Jazzy’s success so far is down to her “genuine credibility” in the dance music space.
“In an age where anyone can be a DJ, being a curator is the true epitome of what it is to be a DJ,” she says. “Jazzy eats, sleeps and breathes dance music. We joke that she wakes up and goes straight to 140BPM, which is unbelievable for a person with such a chilled demeanour. Maybe it’s that dichotomy that keeps the wheels on when everything is as hectic as it is for her.”
The album is home to plenty of the kind of house bops you’d expect, topped with her husky, soulful tones, but there is some experimentation, too. On Genuine, she sings over a crisp, 2-step beat co-produced with UK garage legend MJ Cole.
“I’ve explored quite a few sub-genres of house in my music before, but I wanted there to be more variety,” says Jazzy. “MJ Cole is obviously iconic over here, and it was great to have him. We sent Genuine to him and he just really put that 2-step magic into it. It was something I hadn’t really tried before.”
Deeply melodic, bouncy basslines occupy much of the album’s latter tracks including Get Me Started and the Chris Lorenzo collaboration, Invisible. Elsewhere, amapiano, funky, ’90s rave and hip-house can be heard on tracks ranging from Fantasy to Funky Flow and Elevate (feat. Reggie).
If that’s a dizzying array of dance, that’s business as usual for Jazzy. Dance music is, as Eales reminds us, what consumes her. She has an “amazing talent”, says Eales, not only as a songwriter and a DJ, but also as a curator.
“I really do love it so much,” says Jazzy, chuckling. “From the minute I started listening to it, I felt like that, and I still feel like that now. This is what I’m supposed to be doing.”
I am going to finish with a review of Peace & Patience from HotPress. I am surprised that it has not received more reviews, as it is one of the most important debut albums of recent years. People getting to see Jazzy on the road at the moment. There is no denying her brilliance. Someone who is going to be releasing music for years to come:
“Has a recent debut album from an Irish artist ever been more highly anticipated than Jazzy’s Peace & Patience? Perhaps CMAT, Hozier or Fontaines D.C. But that is the Mount Rushmore type of territory we are talking about.
After scoring a massive hit in 2022 with ‘Make Me Feel Good’ (No. 1 in Ireland and No. 4 in Britain) with Belters Only, Jazzy’s debut single ‘Giving Me’ subsequently clocked up a quarter-of-a-billion Spotify streams. Her first solo collection, Constellations, followed in October 2023. Its six tracks established her sonic framework: house, touches of trance, and the dancefloor as a place to shake off your troubles.
Subsequent mammoth collaborations included ‘Somedays’ with Sonny Fodera and D.O.D.; ‘No Bad Vibes’ with Kilimanjaro; ‘High On Me’ with Rossi.; and ‘Satisfy’ with Calvin Harris – records that place Jazzy within the global dance scene. Hence the heavy hitting posse that collaborate on Peace & Patience, including Mark Ralph, Tre Jean-Marie, Theo Hutchcraft and Chris Lorenzo.
The latter features on ‘Invisible’, a heavy bass groover with a superb Jazzy vocal, which clubbers across the world will soon be losing themselves in.
But this is also an origin record. ‘Intro’, for example, features the voices of Crumlin natives declaring Jazzy as one of their own. Indeed, ‘My People’ is a tribute to the Dublin and the community that shaped her – magnificently threading her signature sound of polished nocturnal pop and personal reflection.
When the Choice Music Prize field is announced in January, expect Jazzy to be a bookies favourite.
9/10”.
I will wrap up here. The brilliant Jazzy is someone who I have a lot of respect for. Peace & Patience stands alongside the best albums of this year. If you have not followed her yet then make sure that you do so now, as she is a major talent. The sensational Jazzy is one of the greatest artists…
IN the world.
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Follow Jazzy
