KEY POINTS:
Tyra Hammond reaches into her bag, pulls out a DVD and clutches it in both hands.
"Oh my God, have you seen the new Beyonce live DVD?" she beams, as if she wants to find a TV in this central Auckland pub and put it on right away.
Do you carry that round with you everywhere?
"Yeah," she says excitedly. "Just in case anyone wants to watch it with me."
The 22-year-old singer, who's making a name for herself as the booming voice of funk band the Tornadoes and hip-hop-soul collective the Open Souls, has grand ambitions of putting on shows of Beyonce-sized proportions in the future.
"With dancers and lights ... and making it more theatrical. This is what needs to happen. But I don't know if New Zealand is ready for it," she laughs.
You can imagine her making it happen one day because this girl not only has a voice, she's got presence. Throughout the interview she breaks into song many times with Chaka Khan renditions ("My mum used to sing and she had a voice like Chaka Khan.") and snippets of Aretha Franklin's Rock Steady ("To sing that you really gotta open your mouth.").
But for now Hammond is happy to "ride the wave" that both bands are currently on.
For her, that wave started when she moved to Auckland from Christchurch in the early 2000s and joined the Open Souls, who released debut album Kaleidoscope in 2006.
The Tornadoes, who started in 2005 as a "purely funk" offshoot of the Open Souls, have become known for their fiery funk shows. They play tomorrow night at the three-day Splore festival, at Tapapakanga Regional Park on the Firth of Thames.
On record the Tornadoes have released limited edition vinyl singles and are currently recording their debut EP; the Open Souls release their second album later this year; and most recently Hammond can be seen singing and shaking it alongside her cousin Scribe in the video for Say It Again.
Not bad for a shy Samoan girl who grew up in Christchurch and Invercargill, singing at family barbecues where she also remembers seeing a young Scribe perform - "We'd all be sitting there watching him, going, 'He's like Will Smith'," she giggles.
She's always had a good voice - "I could sing but it was really nasally," she laughs - and it won her $200 at Rockquest one year so she shouted her friends dinner at McDonald's.
But it wasn't until her cousin and fellow soul sister, Ladi6, encouraged her to move to Auckland that she got more into music and singing.
When she moved north she had a part-time job packing jewellery, which she didn't like. Then the Open Souls asked her to jam with them and said they would pay her $100.
"I was like, 'You're going to give me $100 to sing? Of course I will come'. I didn't even know what I was singing but I went along for the ride because they were an awesome band of musicians and they always made me dance, which is quite a hard thing for a shy person to do," she smiles.
However, it wasn't until "the boys" decided to form the Tornadoes and do a funk night at K Rd pub the Rising Sun that she truly found her voice.
Having grown up on mainly hip-hop and R&B she had never heard "raw funk" before, and when she did she was hooked.
"It was like I got possessed by someone and this voice came out of nowhere, and these dance moves came out of nowhere. Before that my family used to tease me that I was like Mariah Carey because I could sing but couldn't dance, 'cause she can't," she cracks ups. "But ever since I found the funk there's something about it that everybody can dance to it.
"And because the Tornadoes was a bit of fun it didn't matter if it didn't sound perfect. What I love about the Tornadoes is the funk, and what I love about funk is this: you listen to the old records and they are only just reaching those notes but it sounds great. That's what I love about it, I can just go off and it will only just work, but it sounds great."
As well as Beyonce and Aretha, her musical heroes include singers like Sharon Jones, Alicia Keys and pint-sized British diva Alice Russell, who Hammond fell in love with after hearing her version of the White Stripes' Seven Nation Army.
Similar to Sharon Jones and her band the Dap-Kings, the Tornadoes aim to capture the old school funk and soul vibe of yesteryear, and to do that Hammond says you have to feel the music rather than mimic the past.
"If you can mix that skill in with the feeling, that's how you get the end result. Technique is good, but black people have always said it's all about the feeling and the soul," she says, pounding a fist into her heart.
Lowdown
Who: Tyra Hammond
What: Soul diva in bands Tyra and the Tornadoes; The Open Souls
Albums: The Open Souls - Kaleidoscope (2006)
Playing: Splore main stage tomorrow at 7.15pm
