Zoë Modiga is obsessed with the colour yellow.“Yellow is my favourite colour,” says the 24-year-old Johannesburg-based jazz musician. “When I was a kid, I always thought it was weird that everyone’s favourite colour was something like pink and mine was yellow. But after a while that started becoming the theme of my life: the idea that maybe ‘being weird’ isn’t such a bad thing at all.”Modiga is unsurprisingly, dressed in a yellow dress and sports a short, blonde-tinged cut and cuts an exhausted figure. Fresh from a performance with friend and soul artist, Langa Mavuso, she reclines into a black leather couch and recalls just how far she’s come as an artist in the last twelve months.

In 2017, Modiga had something of a breakout year. She released her critically acclaimed debut ‘Yellow, The Novel’ double disc that blends folk, gospel, jazz and a bit of blues. It was a daring project, that broached themes such as heartbreak and spirituality. Featuring 23 tracks, the album definitely feels like a novel with the interludes Autumn, Winter, Spring and Summer breaking the album into four parts. You can read whatever meaning you want into that, the first and most obvious being that the seasons moving from autumn to summer represent a full year in Modiga’s life. That makes sense given that ‘Yellow, The Novel’ is a 23 track album released when Modiga was 23-years-old.

“That was deliberate,” she says. “I wanted to introduce myself to the world as I’d like to be seen and give people a view of where I was in life at the time.”

She goes on to mention that the album’s animating force is love and happiness or rather, daring to find joy in a world that constantly begs you to feel otherwise.

Read the full article on Red Bull Music’s website.