AROWAH BIOGRAPHY
Arowah (formerly Anjelica/Jelly Cleaver) is an award winning and internationally recognised musician. Having been a Resident Musician at St George’s Hospital for a year and a half, they developed a deep interest in how music could help with healing and started to explore different sound healing traditions. After attending the Plum Village meditation retreat and receiving the five mindfulness trainings and the dharma name Healing Harmony of the Source, they decided to take this interest further in leading guided meditations for healing. They did their 200hr teacher training in Nada Yoga (the yoga of sound) and traditional Sound Healing at Nada Yoga School in Rishikesh, India, studied Tibetan mantra under Drukmo Gyal, and Sankofic mantra under Fred Johnson, and went on to found Musical Meditation.
As a musician, they see the role of an artist as a philosopher, community builder and healer, with their work being a meditation on the social and the spiritual. Having danced around many scenes and styles including jazz, punk, experimental, classical, disco and dance, they have always remained uncategorizable, defined only by fluidity.
They move freely from composing for orchestra to performing on line-ups with some of the UK’s most exciting DIY and indie bands, and to playing Afro-Brazilian jazz mainstage at Brazil’s largest Black culture festival. A familiar face across several music scenes, they’ve performed with Angel Bat David, Rebecca Vasmant, Jalen Ngonda and Liv Winter, supported Ishmael Ensemble, Lady Blackbird, Steam Down and Public Service Broadcasting and been label mates with Sports Team, English Teacher, Binker and Moses and Theon Cross.
Enjoying an extraordinarily multi-hyphenate career in music, the full list of talents is producer, composer, arranger, poet, guitarist, bassist, singer-songwriter, multi-instrumentalist (including keyboards, saxophone, percussion and others), activist, founder and community builder, DJ, studio and mix engineer, event curator, radio host and producer, music journalist, label owner and sound healer.
Alongside performing around the world and receiving praise from key tastemakers, they have embodied the artist as activist by bringing music into their activism and activism into their music. They have performed their politically charged songs at many protests and fundraisers, including to 15,000 at Trafalgar Square and 60,000 outside Parliament for Climate Justice marches. They've been commissioned by activist groups Global Justice Now and Debt Justice to write compositions addressing vaccine apartheid and neo-colonial debt agreements. Creating a workshop on ‘How to Be An Active Anti-racist’ in light of the Black Lives Matter Movement, they brought the workshop to Brainchild music festival as well as giving it at protests, to universities and to many regional groups of Extinction Rebellion. They also founded Healing Justice Collective to connect various Healing Justice practitioners, as well as forming an Arts and Culture Sangha for cultural workers to practice meditation together.
They have also fought to make the music industry more inclusive and diverse. They have often performed in all-female or queer bands as well as working with female engineers and producers, as women are shockingly under-represented in these industries. They led an all-female disco band ‘All Day Breakfast Cafe’, who’s debut EP received over 1,000,000 plays, landing them on the cover of Spotify’s ‘Jazz UK’ playlist, and selling out shows at Pizza Express Holborn, Royal Albert Hall’s Elgar Rooms and two nights at Ronnie Scott’s.
They founded one of the first jam nights in the UK to have an explicitly all female, queer or BIPOC house band, and regularly give artists their first gig or radio play with their brand ‘Jelly’s Jams’. Going through many incarnations, ‘Jelly’s Jams’ was an emerging artist showcase, radio show, experimental improvisation night and record label which supported many artists in the grassroots London music scene. Described as ‘joyful, intimate’ and ‘welcoming’ by Jazzwise, the nights showcased artists like O., Léa Sen, Quinn Oulton, Xvngo, Ebi Soda and Holysseus Fly as well as interviewing Goat Girl, Shunaji and more.
Launching for Pride 2023, they co-founded Queer Jazz alongside DJ Tina Edwards, with the aim of celebrating queer jazz artists and nurturing a nascent queer jazz scene. Queer Jazz have been featured in Clash Magazine, Jazzwise and Jazz FM and funded by Arts Council England.