25th October 2026

Review by: Alan Connor

Oxford Art Factory

Photos by: @_shanerozario

Tucked away beneath Oxford Street, the Oxford Art Factory is easy enough to miss, which seems rather at odds with Aja Monet, who certainly isn’t. Downstairs, the room is packed, dark, intimate and close, a good setting for a performer whose words depend as much on silence and proximity as they do volume. It’s standing room only by the time I get there.

Monet is ostensibly a poet, but that description feels inadequate once she is on stage. Her spoken word arrives wrapped around jazz, soul and something looser and more improvisational, sitting somewhere between poetry reading, concert and sermon. It can be mesmerising.

The voice, though, is extraordinary. Deep, smoky and wonderfully controlled, Monet can move from an intimate murmur to something genuinely commanding without appearing to force it. At her best, words and music become almost inseparable, the band creating a shifting backdrop while Monet floats above it, sometimes singing, sometimes speaking and occasionally occupying the intriguing territory between the two.

At one point Monet sings through an old telephone, using it less as a prop than an instrument, distorting that deep voice until she sounds like the world’s most soulful automated telemarketer. It is strange, theatrical and certainly memorable.

Monet wears her politics very much on her sleeve. Race, identity, injustice, liberation, feminism and resistance are not simply themes in the evening, they are its architecture. Born in Brooklyn, Monet brings with her a political vocabulary that felt familiar to me after 14 years living there: forthright, unapologetic and rarely in danger of leaving you wondering where she stands. At times it is difficult not to think of Gil Scott-Heron, another poet who discovered that political argument goes down rather well with a bass line. There are moments when the politics illuminate the poetry, giving it urgency and weight. There are others when the message arrives rather more emphatically, albeit with a terrific rhythm section.

Some songs are genuinely absorbing; others seem to drift. Monet is such a compelling performer that she can carry material that might otherwise struggle, but there are stretches where atmosphere is doing rather more work than melody.

Perhaps the surprise of the evening is the support band, Monstress, who are truly wonderful. Musically assured, energetic and immediately engaging, they seem to be having as much fun as the audience. There is real personality in the performance too, with the sort of confidence that quickly makes you forget you are watching the support act. They play as though the room belongs to them, and for a while it does.

Aja Monet, is difficult not to admire. There is conviction in everything she does, occasionally an abundance of it, but there is also warmth, intelligence and an unmistakable musicality. One of her friends was standing near me in the audience and, with the authority of someone who had presumably heard it rather more often than I had, simply said, “Her voice is like butter.” She wasn’t wrong. Rich, arresting and wonderfully smooth, it can turn an ordinary phrase into something that hangs in the air long after it has been sung.

Not every sermon persuaded me. But when Aja Monet allowed that extraordinary voice, and the music around it, to do the talking, she was superb.

This performance formed part of the 2026 Sydney International Women’s Jazz Festival, ten days of local and international artists spanning jazz, improvised music and contemporary sounds.