A slight sense of disbelief attended the announcement that Ezra Collective’s Where I’m Meant to Be had been awarded the 2023 Mercury prize. You could hear it in the audience’s reaction – the cheer was underpinned by a sort of delighted gasp – and you could certainly see it in the band’s: they literally collapsed in a heap on the floor by their table. Their acceptance speech began with a thank you to God: “If a jazz band winning the Mercury prize doesn’t make you believe in God, nothing will.”
You could see why. The joke about the Mercury prize’s tokenism when it comes to jazz and folk music has been running for almost as long as the prize itself. Virtually every year, a solitary artist from those fields gets nominated and invariably goes away empty-handed. It’s been mocked as a patronising pat on the head, but you seldom hear the artists themselves grumbling: mainstream exposure for jazz and folk is scanty at best and sales figures are seldom huge, making the publicity surrounding the prize and any resulting bump in sales more important than you suspect it is for, say, Arctic Monkeys.
This year, however, felt slightly different. As evidenced by the performances at the ceremony itself, it was a strong field, but there was a sense that Dublin quartet Lankum might actually be in with a chance – their intense, experimental approach to traditional Irish music is suffused with influences from deep in the musical left-field and has attracted both blanket critical acclaim and an audience that one suspects don’t usually spend much time with trad arr tunes.
And the reception Ezra Collective’s reading of Victory Dance was afforded seemed noticeably different from the polite applause that usually greets the jazz nominee on the night: it got a spontaneous standing ovation. You could see why: it was joyous and funky and party-starting, as good an advertisement for seeing them live as can be imagined.
You can also see why Where I’m Meant To Be won. It stirs together Afro-Cuban rhythms and post-bop with rap – both Sampa the Great and 2022 Mercury nominee Kojey Radical are among the guests – dub, funk and dance music and transforms Sun Ra’s Love In Outer Space into slick jazz-inflected soul with a vocal by the singer Nao, another former Mercury nominee. It’s an album where the influence of spiritual jazz coexists with Afrobeat; it successfully captures the band’s live energy, its kinetic power never dipping despite its 70-minute running time. It’s approachable and celebratory without in any way seeming lightweight or drifting too far from the band’s roots: an album that people who don’t normally consider themselves jazz fans might fall for, but still resolutely a jazz album.
There are times when you wonder aloud at what the point of the Mercury prize is: when it feels like a meaningless addendum to mainstream success, when it appears to be simply telling people something they already knew. A jazz album winning may well prove an aberration, and things may go back to business as usual next year, but if their victory means that Where I’m Meant To Be finds a wider audience than it has thus far then the 2023 Mercury prize has done a good thing, and made itself seem worthwhile in the process.
