The first song she wrote, was a tale of a woman late for work at age 10 in her hometown of Taranaki, NZ.
Weaving in and around school, Jessy accomplished many of her growing ambitions – fronting a band aged 11, recorded an EP at age 12, came 5th in the Play It Strange songwriting competition, and played a lead role in a 3 month production of Oliver.
Following high school, Jessy went to Australia to check out the music scene and was recruited to sing in touring blues band “Frank Sultana & The Sinister Kids”. After 4 years with Frank, her desire to perform her own songs, in her own band, had become impossible to ignore and she decided it was time to leave Sydney.
Instead of heading home, she headed toward somewhere that felt almost as far from home as you could get – Central America. In Guatemala, she discovered that she could get paid enough to live on, playing her own songs. The 18 months there proved to be an important development period in her solo career, and as a songwriter. She honed her songs in front of audiences every second night, while also squeezing in trips North to perform in creative hot spots Austin and San Francisco.
But there’s no place like home base. With the intention of building a band as a foundation, she moved to Auckland, and fortuitously, into a home with a basement. A basement with musical bones. Piece by piece, within a few short months, she meticulously built her band – The Volunteers – and emanating from that basement are the sounds of their future; a sexy, bluesy meld of funk, rock, and soul.
In their first year, they played a live broadcast show from their basement to a live audience online audience of 3k people, filled live shows across Auckland and played Earthbeat festival at Atiu National park in Mar 2019. Their debut video “Phone Face” has been a hit this winter with the Official NZ Music charts mentioning them in their “Ones to watch”.
With an incredibly strong drive to create and inspire other young Kiwis, Jessy & The Volunteers are working on two EPs with producer Nathan Judd of Rageous Records (Hipstmatics/Lou’Ana)
Jessy & The Volunteers are spending the summer in the studio in preparation for their debut album launch mid 2020