From winning The Star R.age competition back in 2012 to performing in Urbanscapes and even internationally, this trio called Jumero is certainly what you call the “IT” factor. Due to the extensive connection that they have built with people over the years, it led them to land gigs in places like Korea, Japan, China and Indonesia. Jumero members consist of siblings, lead vocalist and guitarist Jared Lim, bassist and backup vocalist Michael Lim, and lastly a close friend to the Lim’s, their drummer/percussionist and back-up vocalist Ryan Gomes.
These three friends grew up together and harmonize their way through their original songs and arrangement of covers. We delve into Jumero and how it all kickstarted for them.
When did you all start playing music?
Jared – I was introduced to my first guitar at the age of 9 years old. My uncle and dad played the guitar but I didn’t teach myself until one day I decided to pick it up and started exploring the chords and thus begins my songwriting skills too. Music and art have always been a part of my family, especially during Christmas gatherings.
Michael – The first instrument I ever played was the piano when I was just 10 years old. I was classically trained and continued to be so until I completed my grade 8 at age 17. As for the bass guitar, though, I was self-taught and only picked it up at age 16.
Ryan – I was born into a musical family as both my parents are professional jazz musicians. At the age of 8, I started taking piano lessons but was more interested in the drums. However, I never took drum or percussion classes, but picked it up on my own from observing how others did it; getting some pointers from professional drummers when my dad would have band practices. By the age of 16, I had my first gig playing the drums.
Every sibling have arguments, but what about you both brothers? Have there been any instances as such?
From our perspective, I don’t so. This is because we both started by playing in church at an early age thus, we know the dynamic and how we work together when it comes to music. Back then, we don’t have connections nor contacts with any musicians, so to have someone who you can rely and trust on, who also happens to be your brother, I couldn’t ask for anything more.
What was your aim when you formed Jumero music?
Our aim goal was purely to create music. It was never formal or do we imagined it to be our career. Since young, we love to jam together. We just thought why not with Jared’s songwriting skills and our musical ability, we should enter into the competition that has now snowball our career to where it is.
We don’t have the perks of the musical academic background. After we graduated from college, Jared was in multimedia design, I (Michael) was in Mass Communication and our drummer was studying Psychology. So, we never envisioned ourselves to go this far in our music careers.
Why the name Jumero?
Our band name has a pretty interesting origin actually. What happened was that years ago, before any of us owned a car, all three of us always happened to be stuck at this same bus stop for hours. We stayed a little far off from the main city of Malaysia, and the only bus that would bring us back home could take up to 2 hours to come. With so much time to kill, we’d always come up with random games and stuff to do to help keep us occupied. So much so that we even decided to name the bus stop after our names. Hence, the name Jumero. Jumero is basically the first letter of each of our names with which we each of us got to choose a vowel to be placed after our respective letter. Of course, at that time, we had no idea that we would be forming a band. So years later when we did form a band, we were cracking our heads for a band name when one of us said, “Why don’t we name our band after our bus stop, Jumero!” And that’s how we got our name Jumero.
Who are your musical influences?
What we have listened to over the years subconsciously became our roots and guidance to our song. Our influences would have to be Ed Sheeran and John Butler (Australian artist). Both of them started out by busking on the streets and worked towards getting their music heard the hard way, and John Butler still busks from time to time even though he has gained musical success. To name a few others would be John Mayer, Jack Johnson, and Jason Mraz.
We’ve all got a different taste in music altogether but we enjoy each other’s preferences.
Why Indie music?
To be honest, we don’t a specific music genre. In today’s world, everything is mixed from human races to food. Similar to bands as well. Not all of the bands stuck to the same genre, probably for few years yes, but as time goes, music genres are slowly progressing towards jumbling up two or more genre into one song.
Over the past few years, our sound has definitely changed a lot. There was a good friend of ours once labelled us as “acoustic hippie beach pop”, if that even makes any sense. Other than that, we’d say we give off very easy listening chilled out vibes with a bit of groove here and there. For the sake of a genre, we said Indie.
Do you think Indie music is an underrated genre in Malaysia?
In our opinion, underrated wouldn’t be the right word. I would say that definitely, English Indie is the smallest music scene in Malaysia. The fluent English speaking areas are in urban places like Kuala Lumpur, Johor, Penang, maybe Sabah and you have the rest of Malaysia who still listens to Bahasa Malaysia’s music. however, even in urban areas, not everyone is exposed to local music, thus we feel our competition in regard should be aiming on an international basis.
What do you think we can do to educate the people on local music?
It can be done with the support of everybody. For example, radio and social media plays a huge part in promoting and further educating the listeners on local talents in the music scene. However, if any local English songs are being played in the radio and majority doesn’t seem to take interest in it, then we can’t blame radio stations because they have to please their listeners too. The best step from a musician’s perspective is to produce good music and putting in more effort so the people’s perception of local music becomes positive.
What are some of the misconception people have towards local talents and Indie music?
Local bands are often misinterpreted. You two types of people in the industry. One is where you have a person who does music for a living or even looking to strike a record deal and there are creative people who just want a platform to sing their heart out and couldn’t care less if people love their music or not. It’s just a sense of satisfaction within themselves. Even the label “hipster” for people who love Indie music is just not right. People are putting words without knowing the true essence of indie music.
Where is your most favourite place to perform?
We have no favourite place per say because we’ve had great and also bad show in the same venue. It all really depends on the number of crowd and how well they vibe to our music. Festivals are always a nice place to perform too. There’s a higher chance for people in the festival who are willing to listen to new music.
Where can we see you guys live?
We don’t have any fixed weekly or monthly gigs at venues, so it’s always different. The easiest way to keep updated on our performances and whereabouts would be on our Facebook page or Instagram.
Facebook : Jumero Music
Instagram : Jumero
To listen to their songs, you can always go through this link here: Spotify .