JusMoni

BY STEPHANYE WATTS | PUBLISHED: APRIL 4, 2016

The west coast has truly had the wave for the last few years. The next generation of soulful, vibey R&B has been rooted in Cali via artists like The Internet and Iman Omari. This time however, we’re adjusting our eyes north to Seattle thanks to the Saint Heron premiere of JusMoni as Saffroniaa.

We first heard JusMoni on her song “Need” and have been waiting with baited breath for a full length project. Enlisting producers like Denitia Odigie (from Denetia and Sene) and 10.4 ROG, she’s created a body of work ready for summer. You can press play and let the music ride over you like sunrays at high noon.

Highlights include “I Could Just Eat You Up,” “Hot Potato,” featuring THEESatisfaction’s StasTHEE Boss, and the album single “Axela.”

Let JusMoni’s current take you away. - Saint Heron

By M. Anthony Davis Tue., Apr 12 2016 at 05:49PM

On the back patio of the Station Café on Beacon Hill, Moni Tep, aka R&B singer JusMoni, asks if I mind if she smokes a cigarette.

With her soulful singing voice, which hits you like clear ocean water washing over a sandy beach, I didn’t expect her to be a smoker. Noticing my surprise, she immediately offers not to. I quickly tell her it’s cool, but that I’ve heard singers say smoking messed with their vocal cords.

“I like my raspy thing,” Tep replies. “I like it—shit. I feel like I came in the wrong time. Imagine if I came in like the ’40s. I’d be at some jazz bar chain-smoking, drinking cognac, and singing. That would just be my life.”

While Tep says she’s ready to give up the cigarettes, she is not ready to give up weed. That smoky element is strong on Tep’s sophomore LP, JusMoni as Saffroniaa, which was indeed made with the aid of the herb. As she puts it, “Marijuana is a part of my meditation. I believe in using medicinal herbs to assist in elevating your higher being. When you partake in smoking weed, during the act of inhaling and exhaling you should be intentional about where you want your mind to be and where you want your spirit to be.”

Take Tep’s favorite song off the record, “I Could Just Eat You Up.” “I started working on that song while I was in Toronto,” she says. “It was a very fun, hot summer. That song just fit perfectly. It was like, ‘Yeah, let’s smoke weed and drink bourbon.’ ” The tune’s laid-back swagger perfectly recreates the ambience of a humid summer day.

Fittingly, Tep allows natural vibes to guide her in the creative process of making music. Most of the time she doesn’t write lyrics. She enters the studio and “vibes out for mad long” before entering the booth and singing based on the vibrations she feels. When she finds herself swept up in the momentum of a beat that moves her, she will often create music on the spot. This is how Saffroniaa’s “Hot Potato” was made—a sporadic, bubbling hip-hop song where Tep and with THEESatisfaction’s StasTheeBoss rap about taking someone’s girlfriend.

“Stas and I were in Oakland,” Tep says. “[Saffroniaa producer] Rog lives in Oakland and he was only a block away from our hotel, so we went over there. We had some great kale and turkey, and then we listened to this jam man! Rog played us this beat, and we were like ‘Yeah, OK, let’s do it.’ It was all on the spot. We finished it in, like, a one-hour sitting.”

That playfulness carries over into Saffroniaa, a record full of valleys and peaks of lightheartedness and seriousness—but an album that, taken altogether, as Tep puts it, is something “holistically tender, sweet, and flirtatious.” - Seattle Weekly