Coffee House Sessions present Geejay

Gina Jane, 24 and Jacob Lobo, 25, are from the outset an unassuming pair of friends, and they happen to make good music. While Lobo was brought up in and attended an independent school in the UK’s capital – on scholarship – Jane is a country girl from the village of Gastard in Bath. Contrary to its name, she chuckles, her hometown has “no gas, no shops, no post office…nothing. I went to a basic comprehensive and sang at school competitions. But four years ago I decided that I couldn’t keep singing to the sheep and the cows.” Moving to London, she met Lobo in Harringay, North London, whilst working alongside him as a barista at Music & Beans, a cafe-cum-music school and shop at which they also taught music. Now, they live in a house-share together, and each work separate jobs to sustain an income whilst also making music. Lobo is a daytime dog walker and Jane, having been a backing vocalist, is now a music booker for venues and finds time to study for a degree. Only after doing a day’s work do they really get down to business – the business of music-making. “We end up working into the early hours of the morning sometimes. But it’s not like we have to – we’re able to do it because we enjoy it.”

Although both teach music, it is only Lobo who grew up with classical training. Starting out with saxophone at the age of 7, and piano at 10, he was subjected to the “exam rigmarole – Mozart, scales and that” but eventually grew tired of the structured manner in which he was taught and at 16 turned his attention to production. It was only after university that he realised the virtue of his training, and began to fuse production and instruments to create the sound embodied by his work with Jane. Meanwhile Jane’s childhood constituted music parties hosted by her parents. “They liked to have their friends over and wear crazy wigs and play lots of disco.” As a child she listened to Soko and later the neo-soul sound of Erykah Badu. But the pair’s influences overlap more often than not: Lobo cites Bob Marley, Jamiroquai, reggae, motown, 70s and 80s soul, and Caribbean-influenced and West African music. What Lobo likes in UK rap and grime though, Jane likes in 90s garage.

Jane points out that Lobo had brief brush with fame as one of ten boys in Her Majesty’s personal choir

After some deliberation, the two agree on a definition of their sound. For the drums and bass, the defining genre is hip-hop whilst the chords and melodies are an amalgamation of jazz and soul. Each have separate roles in music-making: “Jacob writes all the saxophone melodies and all the chords and grooves; I write all the lyrics and vocal melodies.” Yet Jane points out that her counterpart had brief brush with fame as one of ten boys in Her Majesty’s personal choir, and that, according to Jane, “he has perfect pitch” lends some hope that their voices will unite on a track someday.

Branching out lyrically, Jane says she may consider social media and its consequences as a subject. She recalls watching the communication, or lack of, between a father and son at a pub lunch. “The child spent the whole time looking at the iPad. The father’s going to get older and the child will be unable to take care of his dad for lack of communication…I really obsess over how we can sort out this issue.” Lobo instead acknowledges the importance of a media presence in the music industry but, addressing Jane’s concerns, refreshingly concludes that a balance should be found with real-life interaction – what his counterpart, in reference to this tour, calls “PR with a difference”.

This pattern of primitivism is seen throughout the setlist but does not disadvantage their sound

I walk mid-song into the duo’s gig, whilst they are performing ‘Direction’, a song written after the death of Jane’s father. Fittingly, this begins as a piano-based, melancholic number but develops into a less weighty, more easy-going track as drums, bass and jazz filter in. The next song is GeeJay’s first single, ‘Horizon’, which alternates repetitively-phrased lyrics with improvised saxophone melodies. Jane says her parents’ love of fishing and the seaside as a method of escapism influenced the lyrics (“the sea is all you see until it reaches the sky”) which appears simplistic and yet harmonic in its use of a prominent rhyme scheme. This pattern of primitivism is seen throughout the setlist but does not disadvantage their sound. After a short interlude, GeeJay perform ‘Blink’, an acoustic song, and ‘Happy’ a brand-new song which they’re “trialling out” successfully, its chords punctuating the track as its basslines do. They perform ‘End’, and then as their penultimate song a rendition of ‘Flowers’, Sweet Female Attitude’s 2000 garage anthem. It begins a little like Camila Cabello’s Havana, but focuses instead on slowing the tempo and keeping only the lyrics and chorus melody the same. Finally, ‘Vibrate’ is described as “channelled” and not much else, but is captivating nonetheless. Jane considers the difficulties of these first few gigs – “playing whilst people are eating their lunch – it’s sort of like you’re intruding on them. It’s teaching us to harden up already.”

Apart from this, Jane says their biggest critic is her mother. “’She says we do too much. There’s Jacob’s saxophone and keyboard and ableton and then my voice, but man [to Jacob] I think you smash it.” Looking to the future, if Jane would learn an instrument now it would be piano above guitar, for example, whose “sound just doesn’t resonate with me”. However, the concept of band in years to come is exciting, though it would be limited to light percussion, or live drums in a festival setting. Though each with different visions for potential festivals – Love Supreme for Jane and any for Lobo as long as it’s Mediterranean – they are clear on their direction: making music a full-time venture.

Look out for GeeJay’s second release, Direction, on April 5th.