Camilla George was born in the city of Eket, Nigeria and has been interested in music since early childhood. In particular, she listened to saxophonists Jackie McLean and Charlie Parker and the music of the politically engaged Nigerian musician Fela Kuti, considered the king of Afrobeat, a Nigerian genre combining West African tradition with American funk and jazz. She began playing the saxophone at the age of 11, when she won a music competition in which she received lessons on the instrument as a prize.  She went on to study with a number of jazz greats and completed the jazz programme at London’s Trinity College of Music. While still a student, she became a member of the acclaimed band Jazz Jamaica. When she released her debut album Isang in 2017, the title of which means “journey” in her native Ibibio language, it was well received by critics and music lovers alike. The Evening Standard hailed the young musician as “the golden girl of jazz.”.

On her latest album Ibio-Ibio, a tribute to the people of her native tribe on the South Nigerian coast, she returned to her African roots and her native language with even greater intensity. The album builds on a hypnotic blend of classical jazz with Afrofuturism and hip-hop. “The bebop scene of Forties and Fifties New York was buzzing with musicians from loads of different styles,” the musician told the Evening Standard. “Proper jazz artists like Miles Davis were incorporating new techniques and sounds, always evolving and changing. Which is what is happening now. In London, LA, New York, everywhere, jazz is being mixed with things like grime, hip-hop and electronica, and it is not any less jazz,” said Camilla – who shares a flat with a black cat named Coltrane – placing her comment in the context of her own work.

Uthando means love in the language of the African Zulu nation. It is also the name of a jazz band that is made up of talented young musicians who met during their studies at the jazz departments of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague, the Janáček Academy of Music and Performing Arts in Brno and the Jaroslav Ježek Conservatory and Higher Vocational School. Five instrumentalists and two female vocalists quickly established themselves on the jazz scene and won the audience and the professional public over with their colourful and imaginative repertoire to which all of them contribute to varying degrees. Their music draws on numerous influences. In 2021, the ensemble won the prestigious Jazzfruit competition and released its first album. The portal Jazzport wrote about it as follows:“Every song gushes almost a gluttony of ideas!(…)  Thirteen compositions share excellent instrumental and vocal performances within a broad emotional range, a strong sense of humour and exaggeration, and a genre range from contemporary chamber music through classical jazz to free jazz and jazz avant-garde.” At its festival debut, Uthando will present the repertoire of its second album, which is scheduled to be released at the end of 2022. Specifically for the audience of the Prague Spring Festival, they will prepare a small surprise. 

Room for the listener’s imagination

From a young age, the Munich native Alma Naidu (*1995) has won admiration for her extraordinary versatility.  Her first appearance at the Prague Spring Festival is also her premiere performance in the Czech Republic, and her repertoire will be taken from her first album titled Alma, which she released this February. She is including ten of her own originals, while the text of the eleventh song Wondering is set to music by Wolfgang Haffner. Her selection includes the ballad And So It Goes by Billy Joel. 

The singer’s lyrical approach does not attack the audience’s hearing with exaggerated expression, but with her controlled emotions and muted dynamics she creates beautiful tension and gives plenty of room for the listener’s imagination. In doing so, she makes wonderful use of her beautiful voice. That vocal beauty is her strength can be seen from enthusiastic reviews that praise her singing with adjectives like lovely, gentle, velvety, masterful, pure, clear, elastic, breathtaking, emotionally charged, full of tenderness, and flawless intonation. Her strength is not only her voice, but also the soulfulness that is also expressed by her first name Alma.