“Edwards is out there extensively researching scenes, genres and artists, cutting through the convenient listening of your latest ‘Made For You’ playlist and helping us remember what true discovery should be” – Dazed and Confused
Tina Edwards is a music multi-hyphenate, recognised as an international DJ, broadcaster, curator and music journalist.
Championing new music is what makes Tina’s heart race. On the radio, she’s premiered tracks and interviewed both huge names and rising artists on Worldwide FM, BBC Radio 3, Soho Radio, Tokyo’s J-Wave, Bandcamp Weekly and much more. She hosts My Year in Sound on behalf of KEF, available across all typical podcast platforms. She also shares music recommendations with a community of 180k music lovers on Instagram.
Given her degree in Music Journalism, Tina expresses her love for music with the pen, too. She’s Editor for Listen Zine, which she works on with the creative team at high-end speaker brand KEF. Each issue is genre-less and focused on a different global scene, enabling Tina to take readers on a journey through her eclectic recommendations. She’s also written for Downbeat, The Guardian, The Telegraph, Monocle, Composer, Mixmag and many more music and culture publications.
Beginning to DJ just before the pandemic landed, Tina’s name has been rising steadily on International line-ups, now sitting alongside some of the artists that she’s been supporting. Her penchant for eclecticism, with jazz and club culture at the core, have seen her share line-ups with Coco Maria, Colleen ‘Cosmo’ Murphy, Toy Tonics, LeftO, Gilles Peterson, and many more. In 2024, she warmed up for Ron Trent on We Out Here’s main stage. She’s performed at festivals such as North Sea Jazz, Lost Village, XJazz Berlin, Wilderness and Camp Bestival amongst others.
Come to her bi-annual Jazz dancefloor parties Love Is Everywhere at GROW Hackney, and you’ll find a following of dedicated dancers that come to hear Tina play jazz, samba, latin, house and more from her rotating selection of records.
Tina’s been curating both live and DJ line-ups for several years, and has been of the most vocal cheerleaders for UK Jazz that you could find; she booked the likes of Sons of Kemet, Yussef Kamaal, KOKOROKO, Nubya Garcia all early on in their journeys, for shows as varied as SXSW, The Great Escape and various UK residencies. Not to mention CHICAGOxLONDON; an ambitious project that she curated with her successful multimedia blog EZH (2014-2018) with label International Anthem. It brought together the biggest names in UK and Chicago Jazz, forging music relationships which are strong today.
It’s all of this that led her to presenting BBC One TV documentary Jazz UK: Spitting Fire. Check out the accompanying playlist with thousands of followers.
Today, Tina is curating events and making playlists alongside Tim Garcia under re:sonate, and co-running Queer Jazz, a platform that spotlights LGBTQIA+ jazz artists which is supported by Arts Council England
. She’s a DJ in demand Internationally, with a busy Summer of festivals ahead. She broadcasts monthly on Soho Radio and is in production for the sixth series of her British Airways new music series, Next Big Thing; it’s listened to my millions of passengers every year. Check out the adjoining playlist on Spotify.
Tina is also a vocal cheerleader for neurodiverse people in the music industry, and is sitting on a book proposal about the relationship between Jazz and ADHD which she’s yet to pitch.
7 May - re:sonate residency, STEREO, London
15 May - re:sonate at Ellen’s, House of KOKO, London
17 May - Love is Everywhere ft Handson Family, London
4 June - Ray-Ban, SXSW London
7 June - Queer Jazz Showcase, SXSW London
27 June - JazzX Festival, Romania
11 July - Montreux Jazz Festival, Switzerland
12 July - Montreux Jazz Festival, Switzerland
26 July - Greenwich Jazz and Food Festival
31 July - Queer Jazz, A L P H A B E T, Brighton
2 August - Green Island Festival, Manchester
2 August - Somewhere Soul Compilation Launch, Fox and Firkin, London
8 August - Cafe 1001, London
14 August - We Out Here (Main Stage)
16 August - We Out Here (WOH Radio)
22 August - Lost Village, Lincolnshire
6 September - Campfire, London
12 September - Bar Kuja, Tamepere, Finland
13 September - Lasipalatsi Square Open Air, Helsinki, Finland
19 September - Detour Disco, Italy
21 September - Detour Disco, Italy
26 September - EFG London Jazz Festival takeover, Fethiye, Turkiye
3 October - Dishoom Permit Room, London
22 October - re:sonate residency, STEREO, London
29 October - re:sonate residency, STEREO, London
30 October - Kasheme, Zurich, Switzerland
31 October - Kasheme, Zurich, Switzerland
1 November - Kasheme, Zurich, Switzerland
6 November - Enjoy Jazz Festival, Mannheim, Germany (listening session)
8 November - Enjoy Jazz Festival with Jazz Is Dead, Mannheim, Germany
14 November - TBA, London
22 November - Love is Everywhere with Charlie Dark, GROW Hackney, London
27 November - re:sonate at Ellen’s, House of KOKO, London
More TBA
I’m a Music Journalist specialing in Jazz, club culture and underground music. I’ve written for Composer, Monocle, WeJazz, The Telegraph, The Guardian, Mixmag, Downbeat, Selamta (Ethiopian Airlines), Carlyle and Co (Hong Kong) and more.
I’m Editor of Listen Zine presented by high audio speaker brand KEF. It’s a printed zine that zooms into the underground music scene of a particular city, with Issue 1 focusing on Amsterdam, and Issue 2 on Tokyo. Issue 3 on London comes later in 2024, The zines are distributed across the world with an adjoining event in the featured city. I’m incredibly proud of it.
You can read my monthly column Slow Listening on KEF’s sister website, Sound of Life.
Contact me with commissions.
The northern English city of Leeds is good at reinventing itself. Once a flourishing hub for wool and textiles production during the Industrial Revolution, the city’s factories and mills, now repurposed as shops and residences, stand tall and proud amongst a plethora of small venues and music-loving pubs, and Europe’s largest outdoor market. A candidate for European Capital of Culture in 2023, after Brexit nullified the bid, the city went ahead with its own year-long cultural program called “LEEDS 2023” to showcase local musicians, artists, and performers. It’s with help from this community, which also includes bookers, promoters, and mentors, that Leeds’s rock scene is shaping the sound of British rock music right now.
Jacob Collier started to build his fanbase back in 2011 when he began sharing intoxicating arrangements to popular songs on YouTube. One of those fans was Quincy Jones, who in 2015 flew to Ronnie Scott’s Jazz Club in London to watch Collier’s solo show. Jones began managing him soon afterward. The rest, as they say, is history … but not quite. Just turning 30 — with five studio albums and four world tours under his technicolored belt — the multi-instrumentalist, producer, arranger and educator is just getting started.
Nai Palm’s home is as quirkily ornate as you might imagine. We sit in her lounge laden with red walls—not the muse of her band Hiatus Kaiyote’s Red Room track though; she moved in only recently. Synthetic white flowers hang from the entire span of the ceiling. To my right, a framed bat skeleton catches my eye—a gift from a friend who said “watch this” as Nai had no interest in watching TV whilst she recovered from illness a few years ago.
In March 2023, we lost an exceptional woman: musician and nun, Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou, who would have turned 100 years old in December 2023. Her life tells a story that is as moving and as eventful as any film.
When Composer asked if I would interview living legends Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, I had to exercise restraint, not to WhatsApp the school friends that I’m no longer in touch with - the ones that I listened to Nine Inch Nails with as a teenager, whilst we drank on the beach and watched the sun reach towards the sand.
