Nala Sinephro Is Subverting Jazz Tradition One Immaculate Note at a Time

In this Rising interview, the composer talks about mystical synth frequencies, the racist undertones of certain jazz institutions, and why she doesn’t want to be known as “the harp lady.”

Nala Sinephro is seated in a north London café, already quite caffeinated but determined to pour every drop of hot water into her cage of loose-leaf green tea. Although her hushed voice barely competes with the café’s blaring pop-house, she radiates a meditative energy, eyes widening and shrinking behind her round-rimmed glasses. She pretends to yell while imitating people who tell her, “I can’t hear you!” but even this outburst scarcely rises above a whisper. “In my head, I’m really loud,” she says, grinning. “I’ll be speaking out of my belly with all of my abs, trying to scream.” A houseplant with cobwebbed fronds peers over her shoulder, as if craning to listen in.

The shop’s floristry reminds Sinephro of her green-fingered aunties in Martinique, who would dispense botanical wisdom when her family visited the Caribbean island every Christmas. She spent the rest of her childhood on the outskirts of Brussels, in an abandoned house renovated by her classical-piano teacher mom and jazz saxophonist dad. In rare quiet moments, birdsong drifted over from an adjoining forest. “We were the only people of color for a 20-minute drive, safe and secluded but also isolated,” she remembers. “The woodland felt like part of my garden.”

Natural wonder is a cornerstone of the jazz composer’s philosophy. In two month-long bursts during the pandemic, she returned to Martinique to pursue a mountain bird across the island’s tropical woods, trampling twigs in winter and dirtying up her slippers in spring. It would “pop out” around 5 p.m., at which time—armed with headphones, a recorder, and a noise filter—she began hunting the elusive bird’s song. The assignment is ongoing. Once the recording is captured, she plans to feed it through synths and patch it into a secret project. For now, she is preparing another stint in Martinique, where the bird will draw her ever deeper into the mountains.

This laborious quest for a tranquilizing sound may sound paradoxical, but paradox suits the enigmatic 25-year-old. In the café, dressed in a black jumpsuit, Sinephro thinks hard but laughs easily, vibrating between seemingly irresolvable personas: one a soft-spoken sage, the other a fiery disruptor. Both inform her mesmerizing debut album, last year’s Space 1.8, which contrasts the rigor of her formal jazz schooling with a penchant for storm-brewing and mystique. Even her collaborators went into sessions asking what, exactly, they were getting themselves into. “I loved that no one knew,” she says. “You want to have people who love you for what you are, not what you make.”

Sinephro composed the album’s songs on piano before recording synths and harp at home and then hitting the studio. On Space 1.8, her friends’ taut drumming, cashmere-soft keys, and shy guitars snake through her geothermal synths. Elegiac sax parts, performed by bandmates including local star Nubya Garcia, glide across the topline like a funeral pyre across a lake. “I’m not gonna try and impress people with 60 chords and crazy tunes,” Sinephro remembers deciding early on. “I wanted to check out simplicity: the possibility of pressing one note with a shit-ton of intention.”

We jump in a cab to the house in nearby Tottenham that she shares with a masseuse friend. The harp Sinephro has rented since 2018 lurks monstrously in a reception room. In the high-ceilinged lounge are copious greenery, an upright piano, and a bowl of impossibly red tomatoes, of which she eats three a day. “I am the tomato lady,” she announces with a laugh, before raiding the fridge. “I eat like an NBA player: I breathe, and my metabolism thinks I’m sprinting.”

She hunkers over the table with a takeout box and unspools her origin story: that of a fearless child whose teen years were derailed when doctors found a tumor in her jaw. “No one at school knew what was happening,” she says, forking salmon into her mouth. “It was only my mum whose eyes were always tearing. But I shrugged it off: ‘Fuck it, I’ll be a superwoman. I’m totally going to survive.’”

She did—a quick operation excised the tumor—and in the ensuing months, she embraced hedonism, exploring “hardcore sounds” in Brussels clubs that established electronic music as her “way of escaping reality.” Her fast years thrilled and then tired her; as her nocturnal passions flared, her school life splintered. “I remember thinking, You know what? I don’t need to talk. Ever. You can learn so much when you just shut up.” Beneath her bubbly exterior, a knotty inner world beckoned.

In her mid-teens, Sinephro dreamed of training as a biochemist. A teacher at her overwhelmingly white school had other ideas. “She kicked me out and said, ‘There’s no place in science for you.’ Looking back, I’m like, fuck, that was racist!” Dazed, Sinephro transferred to an arts high school with a jazz department, where she would spend the next two years. During long evenings in the practice rooms (she is proficient across instruments as obscure as the fiddle and bagpipes), she took to eyeing a fellow student’s harp. One day, imagination piqued, she delicately uncased the instrument and ran her fingers along its strings. “It felt like my language,” she recalls. “Strong, but with a quiet voice.”

As fascination turned into private obsession, the teen wunderkind enrolled in a jazz summer camp in Spain, where the teachers recommended her to Boston’s prestigious Berklee College of Music. But when she got there, the dream dulled. The electronics courses needed endless prerequisite qualifications, and within a few months, her side hustle as a live sound engineer was providing a more practical—and affordable—education. After a year, she dropped out, moved to London, and swiftly quit a second jazz college. “There were only 10 people of color in this big school,” she says of the London institution, which she prefers not to name. “I wanted to study there but it felt so off. You can’t have a jazz department and only accept white students.”

The topic awakens her wider distrust of formal education, notably the systemization of jazz and academia’s ritual scorekeeping. “It’s interesting how you take this thing called jazz, mold it into what white people think it is, and then white people teach it in this frustrated old way,” she says, hands clasping her neck. “These teachers never got to do what they wanted, so they’re telling kids they suck.”

Her arrival in London came at a fertile, fragile time, she adds. “I didn’t want to let anyone break me.”

Sinephro proceeded to immerse herself in the London jazz scene. “People thought I was soft and calm and airy with the harp,” she recalls, “but I’m a hard ass bitch! I do and say what I want, and I’m not scared at all.” The city mirrored her energy. In the mid-2010s, a new sound was bubbling through lodestars like Sons of Kemet’s Shabaka Hutchings and programs such as Tomorrow’s Warriors, which guided luminaries like Hutchings and Nubya Garcia through education and artist development. Crucibles like east London’s Church of Sound and the ramshackle Total Refreshment Centre were cross-pollinating with informal crews like south London’s Steam Down, attracting revelers unbound by jazz orthodoxy. Sinephro found her tribe.

By this time, she was submerged in the primordial soup of Space 1.8 but felt something holding her back. She flew her little sister over from Brussels (“She was born with the wisdom of an 80-year-old monk”) and probed her own psyche to shake loose an epiphany. “Deep down,” Sinephro recalls, “I was really scared of dying, from that 15-year-old time.” The revelation unknotted six years of denial, and with it the album’s life force. “It’s not about the tumor,” she clarifies. “It’s about the conversation around mortality. The beauty of creating space for my fear and looking it in the eye was life-changing. The moment I accepted that [repressed] fear, the album flowed.”

Even at its most personal, Sinephro considers her music “super political,” albeit only by necessity. “I didn’t come out of my mum’s womb like, ‘I’m gonna make political music now,’” she says. Instead, she used jazz to respond to racially loaded provocations, which include France’s continued influence on Martinique—a country filled with colonial statues and other “constant reminders that the land was stolen.” French banana plantations, Sinephro adds, poisoned Martinique soil with cancerous pesticides until 1993, despite their being banned in mainland France years earlier. “They swept it all under the rug,” she says, pausing to breathe deeply. “They’ve killed lots of people. It’s a scandal.”

To decompress, we wander upstairs to a studio lined with her synths, which are all tweaked to the mystical frequency of 432hz, said to induce profound relaxation. “I’m still discovering what it all means—there’s a lot of crap out there. ‘I’ll heal you with the frequency of abundance and money!’” she jokes, mimicking a huckster and waving her arms around. “But when I play in 432, I feel like I’m in a warm bath of goodness.” The minimalist decor, she adds, is similarly healing, though she is wary of how that word has been co-opted by the wellness industrial complex. For her restorative music, she prefers the term “medicinal.”

Sinephro’s next trip to Martinique promises another kind of medicine: It is the only place where the avowed night owl can sleep at regular hours. Besides, she adds of cloudy London life, “The vitamin D spray is only doing so much.” And then there is her continued pursuit of the mountain bird, a remedial endeavor in its own right. “There’s always one by itself, singing deep and far and high in the mountains,” she says, eyes full and dreamy. A lone bird, head in the clouds, making noise in a quiet way. “I want to record that one.”

Nala Sinephro: It’s very much a place where I say the things I can’t in life. I’m incredibly blessed for the opportunities I have, but women of color lose a lot of energy trying to navigate society. The way people think and tell you things. There was a period [making the album] when my friends were like, “You’re in the clouds.” I was at a place where, subconsciously, I hit my off button. That’s why healing is such a sensitive word: It was out of necessity that I had to tap out. The way for me was through the sky.

Until recently, I didn’t even know what ambient music was. It’s only when I finished the record that my friend showed me Jon Hassell, Harold Budd, Sam Wilkes, Eberhard Weber—and I was like, “Fuck! I made something that was already a thing.” I use synths that are soft, but the intention was not to make ambient music. For me, it was connected to deep healing. Women of color are the least taken care of, so it was like: Fuck that, I’ll take care of myself. That’s why I find it hard to be connected to ambient music.

It’s true! I’ve been feeling that with the “harpist” and the “ambient jazz.” I don’t see myself as a harpist; I see myself as a composer. I made some heavy metal music last year, playing a bit of guitar as well. I also made a weird, folky indie record. I might play bagpipes for five years. The more people try and call me “the harp lady,” the more I’ll end up making that heavy metal album. If someone’s trying to push me in a certain direction, I’ll do the opposite.

Yeah. Jazz has been completely institutionalized, sold, taught in the wrong way. It’s been made into this thing where people sit in a bar snapping their fingers. But jazz is really alive. When it was created, it was a way for people who felt oppressed to communicate things that couldn’t be said. To me, it’s a language. I was able to say some deep stuff through those synths.

I love being at home in my cocoon, but I love being at parties and seeing my friends, too. So [my early stretch in London] was probably the best time of my life. It was such an honor to be there at the moment it was blossoming. Women had space to dance how they wanted, and I was always there to dance. There was zero judgment, zero pretension, zero “you have to do this to fit in.” It was very open-armed.

But I did notice that I played differently from the everyday, conventional jammer. My music is some vulnerable shit! If I’m at a jam, there’s a lot of men, and it’s like: the louder, the better; if you can blast it out, everyone will be like, “Whoa.” But what about playing a note really quiet? If you’re saying your truth with someone who has a shit-ton of weird ego, it can feel sticky, and you end up leaving the session exhausted. This was the opposite. I felt energized.

I thought about that as well: Am I turning quiet because I’ve been silenced? High school sucks for most people. It breaks you and, by the time you’re 18, builds you into someone you’re not. In the end, I was trying to come back to my 5-year-old self.

With racism and sexism, I’m just not about it anymore. I’m not on Earth when it comes to that stuff. You can say what you want, do what you want; it doesn’t touch me anymore, because when someone says something rude, I’m in the sky looking at Earth.

You began playing harp in private, and hid the hobby from friends and family for as long as possible. Why the secrecy?

Financially, it was weird. If I told you I had a £15,000 instrument in my room that I can’t play, you’d say, “Don’t do that!” [laughs] When I was 17, I told two close friends who were guys, and they’re like, “That’s an instrument for pussies.” From then on, I played in private until I could show people. Making the album, I intentionally took off a lot of harp at the end, because I didn’t want to be “the harp lady.” It’s stronger than me, I guess.

Elite!

Absolutely! This shit’s loaded. The girl who played the harp at school was quite... you know when a girl has half heels and a skirt below the knees? She was nice but very upper. If she’d known I had touched her harp, she would’ve killed me. She would have had me expelled!

The real classical harpists would go crazy if they saw a video of me playing. My thumbs are down, I’m using my pinkie, my knees are all over the place. I’m doing whatever the fuck I want. I am aware that I’m breaking a lot of traditions that went on for centuries. But you’ve got to say “fuck you” to a lot of people.

That’s why I don’t want to be the harp lady. I’m a composer. That’s what I studied, and what I know I’ll do for the next 80 years. My family and I still laugh about it. The fucking harp! Who would have thought?