To mark the release of her brand new EP Mother’s Arms, the award-winning Liverpool-based neo-jazz artist Ni Maxine will take the project on the road this spring for a run of intimate UK live dates, a sober-friendly, emotionally open space designed for connection, reflection and release. These shows are created as places to feel deeply, to dance, laugh and cry, and to be in community with like-minded people. The kind of night you can attend alone and leave having spoken to someone new, or feeling a little more understood than when you arrived.
“Growing up, I didn’t feel like there were many spaces FOR me, spaces where I could show up as 100% myself, without having to pretend to be something I’m not… Spaces that allowed for softness and for rage, for me to be honest, and free… I am creating the space that little me needed, and I hope you’ll be there with me.” – Ni Maxine
The tour opens in Liverpool on 24 April, a city deeply intertwined with Maxine’s personal and creative journey. Relocating there in 2019, close to where her mother grew up, allowed her to reconnect with family history and have the conversations that formed the backbone of Mother’s Arms, which has garnered support from a host of tastemakers including Gilles Peterson, who named her a ‘new voice on the UK Jazz scene’.
What began as a search for “The Mother Land” gradually became something more intimate: an understanding that identity lives in people, not places. Returning for the opening night at 24 Kitchen Street, the show carries particular significance, a full-circle moment where the story behind the record meets the place that helped bring it to life, anchored by its title track, ‘Mother’s Arms’, a direct and unguarded meditation on maternal love and the complicated inheritance passed between mothers and daughters.
“There is love and safety in being held in your mother’s arms,” Maxine says. “When I was a child, my mum would hold me tightly until I stopped crying and caught my breath. That feeling stayed with me.”
Growing up as a light-skinned girl in a darker-skinned family, Maxine often felt like the outsider. That dislocation fuelled years of internal conflict which she began unpacking on ‘Not For Me’. The EP also reflects a period of personal turbulence, including a chapter of addiction that forced Maxine to confront herself with painful honesty. Across Mother’s Arms, she mothers her younger self, acknowledges inherited pain, and moves toward freedom rooted in acceptance rather than escape.
Anchored by previous singles ‘Time’ and ‘Not For Me’, Mother’s Arms is an emotionally unguarded body of work that confronts identity, generational trauma and the lifelong search for belonging. It traces a movement from chaos toward grounding, exploring how inherited trauma and displacement continue to shape who we become. Drawing on timeless jazz and soul influences, Maxine crafts songs that sit in emotional duality – balancing tenderness with strength – qualities that are carried through into her live performances across the tour.
Singing has been central to Maxine’s life from a young age. From church choirs to Soho dive bars, she nurtured a voice that feels both intimate and expansive. Following a breakout year that saw her crowned Breakthrough Act of the Year at the Jazz FM Awards 2025 and earn a NOTION New Music Awards nomination, Maxine has delivered commanding performances at We Out Here, EFG London Jazz Festival, Africa Oyé and Brick Lane Jazz Festival, alongside support slots for Corinne Bailey Rae, Bel Cobain and Emma-Jean Thackray.