ESSIE JAIN

BIOGRAPHY

Essie Jain is an acclaimed British born singer/songwriter now living in New York. Her 2007 debut album “We Made This Ourselves” was compared to folk music legends Sandy Denny and Vashti Bunyan. The follow-up, “The In-Betweens,” appeared in 2008. Jain took a two-year break from the music business, returning with a lullaby set, “Until the Light of Morning,” in 2010. Her current project (slated for a May, 2012 release) is an ambitious audio-visual album, “All Became Golden,” featuring new songs recorded and filmed before a live (but silent) studio audience.

EMMANUEL JAL

BIOGRAPHY

Emmanuel Jal is a Sudanese-born rapper who overcame time as a child soldier in the Sudan People’s Liberation Army before being smuggled to Kenya by his adoptive mother. There he studied music and by the time of his first album, 2004′s Gua, was fluently rhyming in English, Arabic, Swahili, Dinka and Nuer. Considered by Peter Gabriel to have “the potential of a young Bob Marley,” Jal has released four of his own albums and appeared on six others, including War Child’s “Help!: A Day in the Life” and “Instant Karma: The Amnesty International Campaign to Save Darfur.” Jal is also a spokesman for Amnesty International, Make Poverty History, Control Arms, the Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers and Oxfam, and he created his own charitable foundation, Gua Africa, to build schools and provide scholarships for Sudanese war refugees.