Jess Ribeiro Bello Winter Music | Sat 13 July & Sunday 14 July
Ribeiro’s Rock in Roll Romance
Ribeiro’s songs are cinematic in scope: it’s music that travels, across deserts like a Western, through city streets like Film Noir, diving headlong into hazy rock, landscape ambience, and melodious 60s psych.
Have you always felt your musical creation process to be like that?
The music process and creating is oceanic and forever ongoing for me; it’s a messy and mysterious thing but it comes together in the end.
What were your earliest experiences of music and how did your process to where you are today as an artist begin? Did you grow up in a musical family?
I didn’t grow up in a musical family but fortunately music was everywhere. The recorder in kindergarten. Singing songs about Jesus at school. Listening to my dad’s record collection at home, which included Cantonese pop music because he is Chinese. Listening to the radio and watching Rage as a teenager. Seeing the occasional live band, and tinkering on guitar and violin in my bedroom with a few throw-in lessons in singing too. It was what I always loved. I always made up songs and started writing them down from around age nine. After I finished school, I studied teaching and classical music, specifically the voice. I worked as a teacher in Indigenous communities in the NT, writing songs with children and adults in Yolngu language, as well as making my own music with a friend in Darwin. We were picked up by Triple J and I’ve just continued onwards from there working with amazing artists and mentors along the way.
You’re on your way to play Bello Winter Music this year. What can your fans heading to the festival expect from your performance there?
A rock show with some standup comedy in between. I like to talk about my misfortunes in love. People seem to enjoy this.
What else does 2019 have in store for Jess Ribeiro? Anything else you would like to tell all your people here in Byron Bay, Bellingen, and northern New South Wales?
I’m happy to be coming home. It’s been a while since I’ve visited the Shire so I’m looking forward to catching up with old friends and family.
Jess Ribeiro will play Bello Winter Music on Sat 13 July & Sunday 14 July. Tickets and info at www.bellowintermusic.com
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