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Ezra Collective’s music demands movement. Which is saying a lot, given they play jazz – a genre of music stereotypically listened to from a seated position. Granted, their take on jazz is an all-encompassing one, folding in the irrepressible sounds of calypso, dub, Afrobeat, jungle, grime and carnival.
Last year, Ezra Collective brought the party to the Mercury Prize, where they escaped the doomed fate of so many token jazz acts before them and became the first to actually take home the award – all the others only made it to the shortlist. Now, the group’s follow-up record finds them mid-victory dance, halfway through a hip swivel and a shimmy.
The title of Dance, No One’s Watching is both an invitation and an invocation. Thrillingly kinetic, it beckons the most apprehensive listener to the dancefloor – powerless to resist the funk groove of TJ Koleoso’s bass or the beatific blasts of trumpeter Ife Ogunjobi. Ezra Collective have long espoused the power of dancing in their music, and this third album is their most joyous yet.
It makes perfect sense that Dance was written in snatches of time on tour as they bounced across cities like a five-person pinball. All 19 tracks embody the livewire energy of those moments, the innate ability of musicians to swap ideas in real time. On the opener, it takes a minute for Femi Koleoso’s jazzy drums to rise above the clamour and hubbub of excited chatter, as the album drops you off in the middle of a busy bar at the beginning of a night on the town.
Second track “The Herald” is an uptempo mood-setter, bouncing between James Mollison’s tenor saxophone and Ogunjobi’s squawking trumpet, but the party reaches an apex on “Ajala”. Named after the 1963 memoir of Nigerian writer Ọlábísí Àjàlá, it’s an unbridled pursuit of pleasure: a geyser of ecstatic horns swept along by the steady undertow of Tony Allen-style drums and the raw flourish of Joe Armon-Jones’s keys.
Arriving halfway through the tracklist is “N29” – a laidback groove that pays homage to the night bus that chugs slowly from Trafalgar Square back home to Enfield. But after the party is the afterparty – which is where we’re headed as the bus bypasses bedtime for the jaunty piano of “Shaking Body”. From there, it’s onto the fast-paced funk of “Expensive” and late highlight “Streets Is Calling” – a deliciously dense layer cake of highlife, amapiano and Afrobeat savoured by two guest vocalists, Ghanaian rapper M.anifest and South Africa’s Moonchild Sanelly.
Ezra Collective are undeniably virtuosic, with musical chops in abundance – but it’s always been their melding of sounds that has singled them out. That glorious, flagrant disregard of genre is on full display here, a merging of sensibilities smooth as a rich, dark rum.
