uring lockdown, UK jazz artist Bumi Thomas has found space to spread out in her local park. “I take my guitar and howl,” she laughs. “I love it!” As the world starts to understand just how much black women feel they have to reduce themselves, it’s soothing to think of a carefree Thomas filling public space with highlife and jazz melodies. She tells me about a Peter Adjaye livestream she’s been dancing to and speaks with what she calls a “transatlantic twang”, a blend of a Hausa accent from her years living in Nigeria, the place of her parents’ birth; a distinct international-school American lilt; and strands of Glasgow and London. Then there is the influence of Yoruba, “a very deep and brooding language that comes from a different part of your mouth and body,” she says. “I learned it later in life singing Fela Kuti songs. And there’s a connection to the blues I grew up singing, like Miles Davis and Muddy Waters.” Last year, Thomas was preparing to bring that rich voice to bear in a performance in LA with the Moroccan visual artist Hassan Hajjaj. The next day, she woke up to a letter and felt the earth give way. Thomas was born in Glasgow in June 1983 after the British Nationality Act was passed by the Thatcher government in January that year; it stated that children born to parents from the colonies were no longer entitled to automatic citizenship. The letter informed Thomas – who has lived in the UK solidly since she was 17 – that she had 14 days to leave the country or make herself subject for deportation or detainment. “I couldn’t believe what I was reading” she says. “I felt nauseous. I sat down; everything was spinning. It was terrifying. There’s a section at the end that says: you do not have the right to work, you do not have the right to rent property, your bank account can be frozen. It’s like someone is suffocating you.” LA was off; she started making calls. “I picked up the phone and heard myself telling people, ‘I just got my refusal.’” Thomas was one of thousands of people with roots in former colonies, including the Windrush generation, who were made suddenly precarious thanks to a renewed “hostile environment” policy. She had, like many others, assumed she was a British citizen with dual nationality – the 1983 change “was not well communicated to the public in the UK or in the colonies”. After all, her sister, born in the same circumstances but before 1983, was British. Community activists crowdfunded Thomas’s legal fees, created a petition that drew 25,000 signatures, and alerted the media. An immigration tribunal judge ruled in favour of withdrawing the threat of deportation, but she must wait two years before she can apply for British citizenship. Her status is still at the mercy of a divisive immigration policy. During this period of statelessness, somehow, Thomas was writing songs. They ended up on Broken Silence, her gloriously joyful jazz EP, out last month. On it, she defines herself not by the language of the British state but in the power of ancestral sounds across the African continent and beyond. She describes the devotional-sounding udu drum that appears on Black Child with reverence: “A vessel used by Igbo women to fetch water from a stream, and based on the amount of water in it, it has this fantastic bass sound and you can tune it to different tones.” The hostility of the Home Office renewed an urge to root herself in her own history. In the early 70s, Thomas’s parents owned a hair salon in Glasgow called Hairlynks, the site of significant black music history that attracted artists and creatives, and saw a young Sade singing there, according to the memory archives of locals. “Before that, if you were in the Highlands, you’d have to go to London to get your hair done,” Thomas laughs. Through the shop’s sound system, the young Thomas took in the rhythms of a black artistic community through the braids and chatter. Further back, she discovered her father’s Afro-Brazilian roots dating back to the 19th century, and the musical hangover of Nigeria’s historical Portuguese occupation. On Lesso Lesso, she pays homage to this, singing in Portuguese, English and Yoruba, featuring a sample from her dad sent over WhatsApp voice notes. The loose translation of his Yoruba instructs her: be careful with your heart, go gently, gently. Gently advocating for black joy feels radical in a world often unsympathetic to global black trauma. For Thomas, this moment of mobilisation chimes with her own personal battle with a system that has uprooted her sense of home. “At times, the music feels likes protest,” she sighs. “When I sang before, it had meaning, but not the same resonance. I went to a Black Lives Matter protest a few weeks ago and someone had a boombox and played A Change Is Gonna Come. It is all … emotional.” She takes a breath. “I’ve been feeling so much. You are forced to choose to shrink or expand yourself.” For now, she chooses expansion: taking her guitar to the park, singing songs that cross borders, restricted by nothing. Broken Silence is out now on 528 Music Global.