It was at the age of 12 while attending the Dartington Summer School in Devon, southwest England, that Emma Rawicz's musical world tilted on its axis. The classical violin she'd devoted her young life to was suddenly overshadowed by the sound of a tenor sax wailing from a big band. The classical path she'd been walking suddenly forked before her, revealing an intoxicating new direction.
“It was just that incredible sound that the instrument produced,” she tells me. “I felt a connection to it, somehow, it just clicked.” Rawicz, who only started playing the sax at 16, gained an incredible facility on the instrument in a remarkably short space of time, recording her independently released debut album Incantation at the age of 19.
“I didn't really have much of a social Iife,” she laughs. “When I picked up the tenor, I had this feeling, right, this is what I want to do, this is my thing now. I'm going to throw everything at this and hopefully make it work. I was also aware that 16 is still young – but to become a professional musician it's quite late to be starting your first study instrument. I had this feeling of almost panic. Most of my peers have been playing for 10 years already and I'm still figuring out how to play the instrument on a basic level. That idea of playing catch up weighed quite heavily on my mind, so I practised from between eight and 10 hours a day. It was probably a little bit much – I look back on it and I don't think it was the healthiest relationship with practice. It was a frenzied few years, but I do think it has paid off.”
A keen linguist who speaks a number of different languages, it’s noteworthy that both Incantation and the follow-up album, Chroma (released in 2023 on the ACT label), both explore Rawicz’s love of the human voice through the use of wordless vocalese, which acts as an additional layer in the musical fabric. This important textural element wasn't planned but emerged organically during the Incantation recording sessions.
“We were in the control room listening back and I was singing along, and I thought I’d really like there to be voice on this too. I don't really consider myself a vocalist, but I thought, oh well, there's no one else here. As part of my practice and my relationship to writing, composing and enjoying music, singing is something that I think is really fundamental for many people as a very instant human way to connect to either writing or interacting with music. From that point on, I was a lot more open to the idea of including vocals in my music – up until that point I had this mental separation between songs with words or instrumental music. And because I didn't necessarily want to have words, I didn't consider having voice. That broke that boundary for me, and I wanted to explore it more and more.”
Born in North Devon, Rawicz has established herself as one of jazz's most remarkable young talents and has already performed across 16 countries. Twice winner of a Parliamentary Jazz Award (Jazz Newcomer of the Year in 2022 and Jazz Instrumentalist of the Year in 2024), she graduated from the Royal Academy of Music in July last year and was awarded the prestigious Musicians' Company Silver Medal for excellence – unprecedented for a jazz student. Her latest recording Big Visit, an outstanding duet album with pianist Gwilym Simcock, was similarly released on ACT in March this year. Balancing technical virtuosity with emotional depth, it captures a musical partnership almost at its genesis and showcases an already unusually deep musical connection between the two artists.
Rawicz’s distinctive compositional voice explores the almost playful contrast between musical blocks of material: hard-edged, rhythmical and gritty on the one hand, beautiful, otherworldly sound-worlds that stretch out into the infinite on the other. An artist who has been one of Rawicz’s most influential touchstones, to whom she paid heartfelt tribute at her ‘Visitor From Everywhere’ concert at Kings Place during last year’s London Jazz Festival, is the late, great sax player and composer, Wayne Shorter.
“Wayne, for me, is probably my all-round hero of music. He embodies so much of what inspires me within jazz – as an improviser, as a saxophonist, as a composer, as a human being, as a creative person, it's just all there. When I was writing that music I was trying to draw on some of the more essential elements of what makes me love his music. It came from being really inspired by his ability to see things outside the box and get a completely new angle on something that's been done before, but he's somehow making completely unique.”
In addition to her love of language, the human voice, and the music of Shorter, there’s another key element to Rawicz’s musical make-up: she’s a synesthete who experiences music as colour (this provided the inspiration for Chroma), as she explains.
“The slightly visual element to sound that I'm making or listening to is something that's always been part of the way I interact with music. I also think it helps me get away from the notes. When you're playing music that has a lot of detail, in order to play well you have to invest quite a lot of brain power. It's easy to be caught up with this scale on this, and this chord, and then it's a bar of 11 – it can sound a bit cold and it's definitely something I wanted to avoid myself. That focus on the more abstract engagement with music – through something that is actually nothing to do with notes or chords or theory – helps me improvise a bit more spontaneously.”
Joining Rawicz for her Music Network tour are pianist Elliot Galvin, bassist Kevin Glasgow and drummer Asaf Sirkis. “The reason I love Elliot's playing is because he's got the perfect balance of knowing when beauty in music is necessary but having just enough grit in his playing to make it really interesting. He seems to understand when things need to be simple and when there needs to be space, but he can explore and venture out into the unknown as well.”
Glasgow is, in Rawicz’s opinion, “the best electric bass player in the world. I know that sounds hyperbolic but he's one of these musicians who is so special. He's one of the most incredible soloists I've ever played with, but at the same time has this real passion for playing bass in the most rooted way – there's no ego.”
The longest-standing musical relationship is with Sirkis, with whom she’s played for around four years. “He's been with me the whole way through the development of finding more confidence in myself as an improviser,” Rawicz says. “I've learned so much from him as a person and as a musician and continue to do so. He brings so much energy and he's so interactive and involved, but at the same time allows other people to shine in a really special way.
“It's going to be really exciting to explore new and old music together and I'm certain that every night of the tour will be different, musically, and that it will be a pretty joyful affair. I'm really looking forward to the whole thing.”