The award winning, husband and wife duo 'Aro' is made up of Charles (Te Rarawa, Ngaapuhi, Ngaati Te Ata Waiohua, Ngaati Mutunga) and Emily Looker, who share a passion for the power of language and music to tell stories celebrating our cultural identity.
Blending Emily's honey-voiced jazz with Charles' full throated percussive sound with shades of haka, Aro's performance adds up to a warmth of experience, wholly original, anchored in Aotearoa that leave all who are present with the feeling of having been let in on a special secret.
The pair have become well known for their multi-genre offering of music & storytelling, exploring the ideas of kaitiakitanga and manaakitanga - looking after ourselves, each other, and our environment. Finalists for several NZ music awards, most recently longlist finalists APRA Silver Scrolls 2024, finalists for 3 awards at the Waiata Māori Music Awards (2024) - winning Best Pop Album, as well as finalists at the Waiata Māori Music awards (2022), Maioha Award at the Silver Scrolls (2019) & twice for Best Children’s Song award (2019 & 2023).
Aro are have recently released their genre bending album ‘He Rākau, He Ngārara’ - the 4th major project for the duo, an “immediately and immensely likable album which celebrates native plants and insects in te reo Māori and English language songs which sometimes sound like classic tunes from the Fifties (the lovely Tōtara with sweeping strings and Kaikōmako), beautiful folk (Pukatea) and contemporary pop (Namupoto, Wētā).” - Graham Reid, Elsewhere April 2024. “The husband and wife duo invest their music with a large amount of research.They merge this knowledge with waiata that skips between jazz, folk and other genres, but always sounds like an invitation to lean in and hear a well crafted story.” Tony Stamp, RNZ review 2024.
The duo's past albums have received support from Commercial and student radio nationwide, National press coverage, National TV performances and airplay and online coverage/support, this along with their huge nationwide fanbase has resulted in combined album/single streams in excess of 1million.
Aro have been performing nationwide in Aotearoa since 2017 when they were established after meeting while both studying Music at Auckland University. The pair have completed four nationwide tours, and played to thousands at numerous festivals including Auckland Arts Festival, Cuba Dupa, Festival of Lights (Taranaki), Festival of Colour (Wānaka), Wellington Gardens Magic, Auckland Folk Festival, and Music in Parks. They have also been featured on RNZ several times, have been consistently broadcast on Māori Television, and have been featured on and performed on radio & TV stations across the country. Consistently growing their audience over the past few years, the pair have reached over 1 million streams over their waiata on Spotify, and have released several music videos which have been broadcast nationwide.
As the band have a strong focus on tamariki and encouraging young people to be proud of who they are and their unique identities, in 2018, Aro developed an education programme delivering workshops, informed by matauranga Māori of our natural environment in Aotearoa New Zealand, to schools and Kura Kaupapa Maori. They have taken this resource to communities around Aotearoa with their past projects, and will continue to build on this with 'He Wai', visiting coastal communities in particular in 2021. Feedback from the past workshops was immense and overwhelmingly positive, resulting in the 2020 & 2021 education programmes growing year on year and taking place with the support of Creative NZ in 2020 and the NZ Music Commission in 2021. Aro aims to keep building on this success, and to increase the number of schools & Kura kaupapa Māori visited in 2024-2025 threefold.