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10 years of Bristol24/7: NGAIO
NGAIO graced the cover of our 62nd print magazine in 2019.
Dubbed a polymath by the team, when I caught up with her to see what has happened since it became apparent that the title was neither overstated or undeserving.
It’s hard to define who NGAIO is. She is a singer-songwriter, dancer, event producer, founder of Booty Bass, spoken word poet, inclusion officer and was even a columnist for Bristol24/7 at one point.
is needed now More than ever
Even her close friends and family have to continually ask “what is your career?” – it’s whatever she’s interested in at that particular moment, she tells me.
She continued: “I feel really blessed to have been given so many opportunities to just keep experimenting and not get boxed into doing one thing, because that’s just not how my brain works.
“I’m led by my values and things that I’ll also learn from as well. I really like to do jobs where I’m always learning something new.
“I didn’t think that I was necessarily a good learner, because I wasn’t great at school. I didn’t go to university because there was nothing there that interested me. And so, I think I didn’t really consider myself a sponge for knowledge until I started learning again when I was a little bit older.
“I just need to figure out what knowledge I enjoy taking in. I love critical thinking. I guess I’m taking more of a philosophical approach to knowledge…of going, what don’t I know?
The artist is led be her values – photo: Charley Williams Photography
“How can I approach these subjects in a different way that makes me expand the way that I think? And a lot of that has to do with working with lots of different types of people and cultures and communities and mediums.”
She believes that this is the reason she works on such a breadth of projects, from working alongside Cathy Mager and Spectroscope on the Lantern Project, to presenting the documentary Monumental – Black Bristol After Colston, and leading the way as a tutor for Bristol Beacon project Bristol Youth Studios.
You might not be able to pin down what NGAIO does, but who she is and what she stands for is as clear as the view from one of Bristol’s many hills on an (albeit rare) sunny, cloudless day.
“The underlying thread through all of it is around diversity of voices and inclusive storytelling. I feel like we can change the world with the arts because they help everybody, I think, to see things from slightly different perspectives.
“With music, with stories, we can really tap into empathy and understanding without putting people in a defensive space, which I think can happen quite a lot when we look at how individualistic societies become.
“Also, when we have a vehicle like art, whether that be creating a documentary, or creating a soundscape, or speaking on a panel – I think when we have these, they become catalysts for conversation.
“It also helps people to get deeper into an understanding of one another than it would be if they would just sit down to talk.”
NGAIO wants to get to the people, rather than the product. She doesn’t want to see people creating their art solely to commodify it, or to make money off of others.
She explains: “You can really tell when it’s coming from a place of authenticity and love and has been embedded in the community.
“Ensuring that everyone feels like they can be part of that community, and not gatekeeping that, it’s just really important to me.
“As soon as a song goes out into the world, it doesn’t belong to you anymore. It doesn’t belong to me anymore. It belongs to the people who listen to it and what they take from it and what they see in it, and how they feel after they listen to it.”
“People would just look at me and go, I’m not racist. But that’s not the point” – photo: Charley Williams Photography
As she speaks, I’m reminded of a recent gig of hers at the Bristol Beacon where she encouraged the audience to give notes to strangers with empowering words on them.
She reminds me that she gave out cards for people to write notes on while she sang Baggage, a song all about shaking off ancestral traumas, shame and guilt “that gets projected onto us from the patriarchy and all those fun things”.
She continued: “It was a beautiful moment. We should be connecting. We shouldn’t be afraid of strangers. We should be able to feel safe in any given context.
“But I think we’ve become as a society so brainwashed to be afraid of people who don’t agree with us, or who don’t come from the same background as us, or who don’t seem to have the same values as us.
“We’re not always going to agree on everything 100 per cent but let’s find the things that we do agree on, because there are so many more things that we have in common with one another than the things that are different.
“There’s so many surface things that make people think that the other person might be different to them, whether that be race, religion, sexuality, gender.
“But, actually, the things that really matter, like how much you love your friends, how much you love your family and how much enjoyment you get from music and how art makes you think…all of these things that actually make us human. Those are the things that so often we actually do connect on.
“So, for me, it’s about finding those moments where you can say to people, hey let’s connect.”
And apparently, those moments have been impactful. NGAIO says that after some performances some audience members have approached her to tell her she helped them tap into emotions and feelings they couldn’t quite articulate.
The November 2019 issue of Bristol24/7 sits proudly on the wall of NGAIO’s home and the Bristol24/7 office
At the time the 62nd issue of the Bristol24/7’s magazine went to print, NGAIO released her EP We Fly.
This was just before 2020, a year where there was a resurgence of support for the global Black Lives Movement.
“Everyone was forced to be in trauma with the Black community. The trauma we’ve been in for years.
“So much has changed since 2019. Some things for the better. Its been really important for that moment to have happened, so that we’ve been able to have these conversations more openly.
“Conversations around race, equity (and) around inclusion and diversity which, often at that moment, the people who were inside of these conversations felt like we were just banging our heads against the brick wall and that people didn’t want to listen.
“But then, four years later, how much has really changed? Conversations are being had, absolutely, and that is important. This is going to be a process, (not an) overnight solution. Equally, there hasn’t been as much of a shift as I think a lot of people would have liked.
“I feel like so often when these things happen, these big moments, like with George Floyd, everything is so reactive.”
In 2019 NGAIO also released a single called Blackbird. As she told Bristol24/7 at the time, the single was “written for Black women“.
NGAIO says that before 2020 she was “playing Blackbird all the time. I wanted people to wake up to the fact that these racial micro and macro aggressions are happening every single day.”
It’s exhausting, she says, having to engage in conversations with people around race and racism: “People would just look at me and go, I’m not racist. Yeah, but that’s not the point.The point is that the people in my community are not having a good lived experience, because we live in an institutionally racist space.”
After 2020, it got much harder for NGAIO to sing Blackbird.
She describes a sort of guilt people would have. That they would come to the shows to seemingly to just talk about how they felt bad about racism.
Reflecting on these awkward encounters, she remembers having an internal dialogue: “I’ve just performed that song for 12 minutes. I actually don’t want to talk about this in depth right now, because I’m feeling vulnerable already”.
NGAIO combines West African percussion and trip-hop with jazz, dub and soulful lyricism to create a sound that is truly innovative – photo: NGAIO
The response to Blackbird prompted her to adopt a different approach with her new EP Four Quarters.
Self-produced and released in June of this year, the album is a ‘deeply personal and introspective journey‘.
When diving into this new project she says she was thinking, “How am I going to create something that is actually spreading love and joy, as well as making people go away having thought about stuff still?”
The answer for her was to lead with love and support for others.
She said: “People were looking at all of these community groups to start leading (in 2020), but we were also just trying to survive, because this has actually been a lot for us.
“So, it’s been really lovely actually to start performing this new project and it having that sense of love and support and connection with each other. Just knowing that we’re all on this journey to do it the best that we can.”
Early bird tickets have already sold out
This article is part of 10 Years of Bristol24/7, a series taking a look back at some of our magazine covers ahead of our anniversary party at the Spiegeltent on November 30.
The event is supported by Ujima Radio and sponsored by Streets Steele.
To get your tickets, visit christmasspiegeltent.co.uk/product/b10-celebrating-10-years-of-bristol-24-7-30th-nov.
Main photos: Charley Williams Photography
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