Oscar Jerome
Saturday 27th April
8:30pm - 9:30pm
Village Underground
“Oscar Jerome is as well-read as he is talented, and his far-reaching influences, steeped in diversity, have helped make him one of the jazz scenes most exciting arrivals.”
Oscar Jerome hibernated to make what became The Spoon, his second album. He found himself alone in Berlin in mid-pandemic, at a crossroads in life, needing some space and time to reflect on how to move forward in a healthy way. According to Jerome, this is where many of the tunes that make up The Spoon came from. You can feel that interiority on The Spoon, a laconic piece of work steeped in melodic melancholy. He’ll move from a whisper to a scream throughout the album, and he’s as ready to talk about his feelings of depression as he is to rage about the injustices of his home country.
All of this is to say that The Spoon feels like a culmination of two distinct sides of Jerome’s career. On a song like “Feet Down South,” not only do you hear the jazz guitar chops that Jerome has been mastering since he was fourteen (along with the techniques that he studied at Trinity Lab and Conservatoire), but you also get introspective lyricism about anxiety. According to Jerome, he thought deeply about the challenge of representing himself personally as a performing musician, and recording this album was “therapeutic” for him.
The Spoon also represents a change in Oscar’s creative approach. On The Spoon, Jerome inhabits different personas. There is Ice Guycicle, who represents the liminal yet generative space of creative melancholy, and there is also Jerry, a parody of a toxic City banker that we become acquainted with in the video ‘Berlin 1’, drinking coffee with 50 sugars and diving into a lake in a full suit. Jerome plays both characters in the video for “Sweet Isolation,” a standout song from the album. Jerry walks around with the arrogance of someone who doesn’t need to care about anyone, and he has a surreal feast in the middle of a mountain. Guycicle is more contemplative and he sits alone in a dark landscape, deep in thought. Jerome co-directed the video with his brother in Iceland, and allows him to provide a visual representation to the theme he contends with throughout the album: finding the beauty in melancholy and reflection.
Village Underground
54 Holywell Ln, London EC2A 3PQ
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