High up in the penultimate tier of the Albert Hall, two spotlit heralds blast out a fanfare on trumpet and tenor sax. They are answered by a deep dub bassline on stage. A wild-haired pianist limbers his fingers across a keyboard while drummer and Ezra Collective band leader Femi Koleoso – arriving on stage like a boxer to the ring – raises his arms, acknowledging the crowd’s roar, before he’s even hit a snare.
Ezra Collective have many things going for them: conservatoire musical chops on the one hand, and an instinctive understanding of how genre barriers are there to be dismantled on the other. Their jazz throws its arms around grime, carnival and J Dilla; it’s built for Afro-Cuban links. But one of the strengths that has served this north London fusion party band particularly well in their decade of progress to their recent Mercury music prize win has been their commitment to putting on a show.
“We’re on a mission to bring joy to this building,” declares Koleoso in one of his effusive chats to the crowd. The Mercury win for EC’s 2022 album, Where I’m Meant to Be, marked the first time in 31 years that the prize’s token jazz act had seized the ring.
Koleoso – who also moonlights as Gorillaz’s drummer – recounts how in 2013, Ezra Collective played the Albert Hall very briefly when they won a youth jazz award. “It’s the maddest thing, fam,” he notes. Koleoso and his bassist brother TJ grew up in the church, and what once might have been a calling to the pulpit is now channelled into ministering to a population in need of uplift via a cathartic shakeout to salsa-inflected Afrobeat. He makes everyone – photographers and security included – introduce themselves to a stranger.
On a par with jazz, the music of Fela Kuti is foundational to EC’s offering. Somewhere in the flowing opening section of this exultant gig is a remix of Kuti’s 1972 track Lady, percussionist Koleoso and keys man Joe Armon-Jones spurring each other on to greater intensity while sax player James Mollison and trumpeter Ife Ogunjobi (who also plays with African giants Burna Boy and Wizkid) take a break. Armon-Jones (also a solo artist who collaborates widely) appears to have an extra knuckle on each finger, so prehensile are his hands.
Throughout the night, melodies are handed around this all-for-one band, ramping up or changing emphasis on a sixpence. The crowd can easily shout the horn lines back to the players – especially when it’s a sample from EC’s track Togetherness (one that paraphrases Damian Marley’s Welcome to Jamrock, itself quoting Ini Kamoze’s World-a-Music).
It would be tempting to call this generous show in this bosom of imperial bling the peak of Ezra Collective’s career to date. There’s even time for a pop-star wardrobe change for the three most mobile players – TJ Koleoso, Mollison and Ogunjobi – and arena gig-style confetti cannons at the end.
But that would be doing this well-travelled outfit a disservice as well as bolstering an outdated idea of “high” culture. Ezra Collective sold out six gigs in three nights at New York’s Blue Note Café in April this year: a notable jazz-world anointing. The time they played Quincy Jones’s musician-studded birthday party might have been even more nerve-racking.
Like the rapper Kano’s magnificent gig here in 2019, or driller Digga D’s show a fortnight ago, however, there remains something fantastically symbolic in the sound of young, diverse, decolonialised London shaking the famous mushrooms – acoustic diffusers – in the Royal Albert Hall’s dome. It’s a special-guest occasion, and EC have brought several, reprising their appearances on Ezra Collective’s two albums and two EPs.
The most transportive performance comes from fellow jazz musician Zara McFarlane, whose wordless emoting during I Have a God, from 2016’s Chapter 7 EP, supplies the emotional peak of a section devoted to female vocalists (Emeli Sandé and Nao are also in the house).
Three rappers hold up the latter half of the set, with Loyle Carner – who headlined here a month ago – gaining the biggest cheer of recognition. But the more voluble Kojey Radical, who rips up the stage on No Confusion, and veteran grime MC JME (Quest for Coin II) add more barbed focus.
The trajectory throughout is relentlessly up, and these seasoned musicians remain tirelessly eloquent, diverting into Latin forms here, breaking a track down to its bare bones there. One passage lingers long in the memory – Armon-Jones playing solo piano, with flurries of notes cascading across a rapt hall, playing something silvery and beyond genre.
After a triumphant You Can’t Steal My Joy, Koleoso divides the crowd like Moses parting the Red Sea. He travels to a B-kit near the sound desk and Mollison and Ogunjobi follow, playing the aptly named Victory Dance from the middle of the crowd.
That seems hard to top – until Ezra Collective gather the 40-odd young horn players and dozen or so dancers of the carnival-inspired Kinetika Bloco performance group on stage for the closing numbers.
Koleoso doesn’t need to explain: his band, and so many of the London jazz renaissance players, were formed by a seminal youth jazz organisation, Tomorrow’s Warriors. Nurturing the next generation seems a natural climax for a band so big on community. These teenagers might be back in a decade, recalling the first time they shook mushrooms.
