The EFG London Jazz Festival and Kings Place proudly present a double bill show featuring International Anthem talent - drummer, composer, and sound designer Frank Rosaly, and multi-media performer, theatre maker, vocalist, visual artist, musician and teacher Ibelisse Guardia Ferragutti. The double bill show also features Los Angeles-based composer and performer Tashi Wada joined by composer, performer, and recording artist Julia Holter for an evening of sonic explorations.

Partners in both marriage and art, the Amsterdam-based Ferragutti and Rosaly dove into the sounds of their respective ancestral roots in Bolivia, Brazil, and Puerto Rico to create a deeply personal meditation on decolonization and the defiant power of ritual and protest. They chose the title MESTIZX – a non-gendered version of the sometimes slurred Spanish colonial word for a “mixed person” - as a means of both challenging and embracing the liminality of their identities and artistic practices.

The music creatively infuses Latin rhythmic patterns and oblong swing from pre-and post-colonial Latin America into a collision of avant jazz, art punk, Chicago post-rock, bomba, plena, cumbia, Andean, minimal, electronica, and folk. A wholly original but undeniably universal sound – both of-the-moment and alluringly futuristic - MESTIZX contains points of reference and resonance for fans of Juana Molina, Café Tacvba, Max Roach & Abbey Lincoln, Liquid Liquid, Arto Lindsay, As Mercenarias, The Ex, Tortoise, Tom Zé, Elza Soares, La Mecanica Popular... It’s a vast, vibrant and encompassing spectrum of sounds, but at its core MESTIZX is a lucidly conscious collection of auto-biographical statements from Ferragutti & Rosaly on the deeply personalized effects of colonialism on geography, history, and identity. Despite its heavy subject matter, however, MESTIZX finds a lifeline in communal, celebratory, soul-bearing and movement-inducing music.

Los Angeles-based musician Tashi Wada works within a heady, intergenerational slipstream bridging storied East and West Coast art music institutions, and the DIY experimental scenes that emerged in the 2000s and2010s. Between recording and performing with his partner, Julia Holter, and running his record label Saltern, Wada has carved a unique path as a forward-thinking composer alongside a tight network of collaborators, drawing on diverse influences and exchanges. Wada’s new album for RVNG Intl., What Is Not Strange?, strips away preconceptions of the scope of his music, presenting complex, pop-informed compositions that bristle with joy.