Deline Briscoe

2018 - Deline Launched Solo Album "Wawu"

“Miss Briscoe’s music shimmers evocatively…”
- Jazz da Gama

“Groundbreaking”
- Partime Audiophile

"A powerful message this is contagious...This is uplifting music in a time of sensory overload.”
- Sound in Review

"Wawu - A Yalanji word encompassing spirit heart and love - is a triumph!” - Songlines UK Nov 2018.

“yes yes yes! I love these vocals so much - just want to sing along and all day, it's got that choral vibe mixed with jazz and Beyonce's dig in, biting percussive delivery.” - Roots N All, Triple J, Nkechi Anele

SHORT BIO
Deline Briscoe is an internationally acclaimed singer songwriter hailing from the Yalanji Nation of North Australia. Her soulful, intimate sound has defined her as one of Australia's finest voices.
A principal artist in one of Australia’s leading performing arts company Black Arm Band, Deline has performed to over a million people worldwide, alongside artists such as Tiddas, Archie Roach, Bart Willoughby, Dr G Yunupingu, Emma Donovan and Mission Songs Project.

LONG BIO

Deline’s career has seen her collaborate with some of Australia’s most celebrated vocalists including Bart Willoughby, Archie Roach, Lou Bennett, Paul Kelly, Shane Howard, Emma Donovan, Iian Grandage and has toured the world with two vocally exquisite ensembles, Black Arm Band and Mission Songs Project.

The 2018 album "Wawu" is the realisation of Deline’s creative vision and experience. Sung in both Yalanji language and English, the songs extend a gentle call to people struggling in life; an acknowledgement of their pain, and a tender reassurance that can only come from women who have risen, triumphant, from the darkest of times. The songs reveals a strong Yalanji matrilineal line spanning four generations from Deline’s grand mother, her mother, herself, and her daughter. While the songs speak of the older women’s journeys through the trauma of separation from their families and of her own experiences with personal relationships, the mood of the album is compassionate and redemptive. In both subject and style, the album’s acoustic soul/jazz fusions draw parallels with Lauryn Hill’s The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill.

Deline’s live vocal delivery has the ability to change hearts, minds and even change the weather. Interweaving Wungarrbadi (yalanji traditional singing) with a jazz, hip-hop, folk, soul infusion, her show is an absolutely necessary experience.

In 2018 Deline released her debut Solo Album "Wawu" then 2019 witness Deline receive prestigeous Award for the APRA AMCOS Professional Development Award in the Aborignal and Torres Straight Islander Category. "Wawu" has had success with the 2019 USA release seeing the Album and some of the tracks charting into 2020 on the Roots Music Report world music charts and NACC World music charts.



THE MUSICIANS
Deline’s extraordinary jazz-infused vocals are enriched by all-acoustic instruments brilliantly played by Jamaican pianist Stephen Maxwell (Jimmy Cliff, Sly & Robby), Airileke (Yothu Yindi, Sorong Samaria) on drums, at times bringing a Papuan flavour, and Melbourne’s own Robbie Finch on double bass, Paul Coyle on trumpet, and Phil Bywater on clarinet and saxophone as the core band.

Special guests include ARIA award-winning jazz pianist/composer Andrea Keller, with whom Deline co-wrote the exquisite Sonrise. Ignorance Is Bliss, written by Tiddas (Lou Bennett, Amy Saunders and Sally Dastey), is given a contemporary re-working and features the reunited Tiddas on harmony vocals. Deline’s 12-year-old daughter, Jade’Amali Leuga, lends her assured spoken-word vocals to In The Night. Sister songstresses from the Mission Songs Project, Jessie Lloyd, Jess Hitchcock and Emma Donovan, harmonise throughout.
In Ngadijina, a spoken-word piece, Deline recites her Nanna’s memories of being witness to her family taken by the police in the era of the first stolen generation. (quoted verbatim from her Nanna’s interview for the Bringing Them Home report), while the ethereal Tree (co-written by Deline and Bart Willoughby, based on a poem and lyrics by Kevin Gilbert), is a hymn to creation and nature.