She’s up there with the very greatest musicians working today – not only "one of the most important singers in the UK,” as Gilles Peterson rightly put it, but a composer, arranger, producer, conceptualist and actor whose artistry spans genres, disciplines and institutions, from underground improvisation scenes to fashion houses. ESKA brings a rare fusion of technical mastery, emotional depth and fearless experimentation to everything she touches.

This is someone who has the talent to be a household name – if she wanted to make the necessary compromises. She’s written for the BBC’s hit prime-time drama This Town, arranged and performed for fashion houses like Hilfiger, Hermès and Rick Owens, and collaborated with Grace Jones, Tony Allen, UNKLE, Kae Tempest, Zero 7, Shabaka Hutchings, Nitin Sawhney, Matthew Herbert, Baxter Dury and many more. She can leap from sweet jazz-folk to radical avant-garde improv at the drop of a hat – but the “Magic Woman” ESKA sees in herself, and who inspired her latest album The Ordinary Life of a Magic Woman, lives far from the spotlight, rooted in the rhythm of everyday life.

That duality – between worldly acclaim and the inward pull of the domestic – is the heartbeat of her latest work. It draws from lived experience, tracing themes of love, loss, creativity and radical self-definition through the lens of motherhood and personal transformation. As ESKA puts it, “Those small, overlooked, mundane things are just as powerful as all the razzamatazzy ones.” The Ordinary Life of a Magic Woman is the sound of a life fully lived — soulful, intricate, majestic, and deeply human.

Born Eska Gillian Mtungwazi in Zimbabwe, she moved with her family to Lewisham, SE London at a young age. Her father was a primary school teacher, her mother a midwife. Music was everywhere. At home, her dad acted as house DJ, spinning his eclectic vinyl collection on Sunday afternoons. Her school years were just as rich: playing recorder in a madrigal group, singing classical and popular repertoire in the choir, writing for and directing the choir in her community church alongside earning a music scholarship to play violin at the local conservatoire. These early experiences shaped a musical language that is now unmistakably her own.

As a teenager, ESKA immersed herself in London’s vibrant live and club scenes – gigs at venues like Dingwalls and the Jazz Cafe, and clubs like the old Blue Note, where hip hop flowed into jazz and new sounds were always being born. She joined the acclaimed jazz group Quite Sane, led by bassist and composer Anthony Tidd, and found kinship with musicians who shared her appetite for boundary-less experimentation – where grooves met orchestral complexity. In the early ’90s, she gigged and recorded with the band, absorbing the future-facing M-Base movement in jazz and the energy of the UK club scene.

That spirit of curiosity and collaboration became a lifelong pattern. ESKA could be making UK garage bangers one day; the next, playing keys for prog-soul icon Lewis Taylor. Her creative circle and sonic palette grew accordingly. “It was curiosity,” she says. “Curiosity led me to be such a prolific collaborator.”

Among those vital connections was guitarist and producer David Okumu, who introduced her to Matthew Herbert. A pivotal creative relationship with Herbert helped bring her self-titled debut album ESKA to life. Released in 2015, it was a critically acclaimed masterpiece – shortlisted for the Mercury Prize – fusing folk, jazz, classical and soul into a sound that was complex, deeply personal and genre-defying.

Though the wider music world already knew her, the album marked a new level of visibility and confidence. And again, she didn’t rush. She took on projects that genuinely excited her – and, more than anything, became a mum. Her daughter Wonder arrived unexpectedly early, just before the album’s release, launching her into a life-changing chapter; the evolving and eventually breaking relationship with Wonder’s father, along with the experience of motherhood, form the emotional landscape of The Ordinary Life of a Magic Woman. “I wanted to shine the spotlight on the woman who’s holding it down in the daily grind. There’d be no ESKA if it wasn’t for the Magic Woman; The Extraordinary Life Of An Ordinary Woman,” she says wryly. It’s a record about how life happens – how we make, we lose, we love – and how all of it belongs to the same creative thread. It honours the quiet heroics of daily life.

The Ordinary Life of a Magic Woman is a bold new chapter: emotionally rich, sonically expansive, and unafraid of pop forms, even as it remains utterly idiosyncratic. It’s triumphant, grandiose, glorious, immense. Because life is. The tiny actions and shifts in relationships are where the deepest transformations take place. And maybe it takes a musician like ESKA to express those small glories. A musician who’s seen through the cracks in the scenery, who’s been there and done it, and knows how illusory the walls between styles can be – and how real the shared language of music truly is.

In some ways, The Ordinary Life of a Magic Woman sounds nothing like her ESKA debut – it’s bigger, shinier, crunchier, in a strange way more pop. But it absolutely sounds like ESKA. And that’s the vital thing: it’s unmistakeably and inimitably the sound of one utterly distinctive artist’s process and life.

ESKA continues to expand what British music can sound like – a visionary artist of rare calibre – and doing so with a depth and grace that continue to inspire both peers and audiences alike.

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