It started with a record player. Debra acquired one when she was seven and within five years had a proudly-catalogued collection of around 120 seven inch singles. A form of DJing started when she regularly slipped her own tape cassettes on at parties to show friends what good music sounded like…later she was very lucky to become part of the vibrant UK club scene of the ’90s playing at Bar Rumba, the Blue Note and Jazz Cafe. Debra still DJs on occasion playing at the Worldwide festival in Sete, Montreux Jazz Festival and We Out Here festival this year.
It was joining the music festival team Match&Fuse, whose programmes focused on emerging European artists, that opened her up to forms of jazz and improvised music that take a ‘no rules’ attitude. It is that new music her radio shows on Worldwide FM, Radio X (in Basel) and now One Jazz take as a starting point.
Alongside radio, Debra has been a music journalist since the 90s, first with her own column in Blues & Soul magazine and writing articles for magazines such as Straight No Chaser, Jazzwise and Dazed & Confused. She was an Interactive Editor at BBC Radio and currently writes for the quarterly magazine published by the We Jazz team.
