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Sydney Blues & Soul.

MestUp Souls have been performing in and around Sydney for five years.
Come with us on a deep dive into the Blues and Soul repertoire of America, all spiced up with improvisations, original arrangements and a whole lot of funk.

Video

MestUp Souls - Promo Video

MestUp Souls - Promo Video

The Band.

The souls of MestUp Souls come from diverse backgrounds: Italy, USA and of course, Australia.

Marco Rafanelli

Guitar

Marco has been playing blues guitar since the late 90s. In Italy he played rhythm guitar as a member of three major Chicago Blues Bands of the Piedmont region: Dario Lombardo's Blues Gang, Chicago Sound Machine and Fast Frank & the Hot Wires. In the following years he founded The Shade Tree Mechanics (Tuscany) and The Juke Joint Shakers (London).

Marco formed the MestUp Souls in Sydney in 2019 with the idea of bridging from Blues to Soul and aiming to bring entertainment to a diverse audience ranging from funk dance addicts to pure blues enthusiasts.

Jayda Tham

Vocals

Jayda has been a devout "musical dabbler" since childhood. Violin, saxophone, guitar, bass, and that cringy early 2000s stint as a DJ... she played them all, barely adequately. Then she discovered The Blues and with it, her Voice. She sang with popular Sydney-South Coast Blues outfit Horse Drawn Cadillac for four years - performing at Kiama Jazz and Blues and Gumball festivals - before hanging up her reins and becoming the newest MestUp Soul. She loves Koko Taylor, Etta James, Taj Mahal and Allison Russel to name but a few... And dogs, Jayda really likes dogs.

Ian Ackerman

Bass

Ian has been playing music since he was old enough to hold a fiddle. He picked up the bass in his rebellious teenage years and played in local orchestras and myriad unsuccessful Seattle and Olympia punk bands, one of which was called Captain Sickness and his Fabulous Maladies. Later he recorded and toured playing fiddle with Eastern European/country rockers The Strangers and bass in indie disco outfit Romanteek. Ian was part of a collective (then called Problems), that was awarded an artist's residency that involved recording an album inside an unused nuclear cooling tower in Washington. He also played baritone guitar in Istanbul garage rock band Medical Phalanx of Space. Ian joined MestUp Souls after his friend dragged him to a Blues Jam in Ashfield, where he met Marco.

Seth McIntyre

Drums

Bam bam hit-man!

Mick Elderfield

Saxophone

I grew up loving music from a very young age.

I would dance to dad's jazz records. I would dance to my uncle’s Hooked On Classics records. I would dance to my grandad’s ABBA records. One day I watched The Blues Brothers, and that got me started on the saxaphone; I was ten years old.

MAJOR INFLUENCES:

Sonny Rollins, Dexter Gordon, Charlie Parker.

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