When Yussef Dayes performs his new album, Black Classical Music, at the Royal Albert Hall this week , it will not be his first time on its stage. “I actually performed there when I was at secondary school, we won a competition, so it’s full circle,” he says, sipping herbal tea at a bar on the high street in Lewisham, south-east London, where he grew up. “The space itself is so vast and beautiful, and to bring this album there is a big moment. More so than other venues, this has been top of the list for me,” he continues, over the patter of rain outside.
Dayes is approaching his fourth decade as one of the most thrilling performers in global music. Much ink has been spilt on the London jazz scene’s renaissance over the past decade, punctuated last month by Ezra Collective’s Mercury prize win, and Dayes is often described as a torchbearer of this generational movement. “I’m not going to sit here and say being labelled a jazz drummer has hindered me,” he admits. “But to call it J-A-Z-Z all the time, that’s cool, but there are other ways to articulate what we’re doing.” Black Classical Music, released last month to critical acclaim, is a showcase of this idea.
“Miles Davis called jazz Black people’s classical music. Rahsaan Roland Kirk [an eccentric mid-20th-century woodwind instrumentalist] called his music Black classical music. Nina Simone was calling her music Black classical music. It got me thinking,” he says. “There are so many nuances that can’t be defined by one thing. I’ve had classical piano lessons. I’ve been to west Africa and seen instruments that predate the cello and violin, drums that were there before timpani. There are other histories that made me realise this is bigger than just a jazz record.”
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Dayes was born in 1993, the youngest child of a Jamaican Rastafarian father who sold fruit and vegetables imported from the Caribbean, and a mother with roots in Somerset who taught at a primary school and was a yoga instructor. He clung to his father’s shoulders while he built their home from timber, one of only 13 houses on their road that were part of a unique council partnership with the Swiss architect Walter Segal. Dayes and his older brothers would peer from its open-plan and adjustable walls out of big windows on to thick, green foliage at the top of One Tree Hill, a patch of woodland where, he says, “You wouldn’t think you’re in the heart of Lewisham.
“A lot of people came by, friends and family. My mum would teach yoga: 30 students, three times a week.” Music was a constant, a comfort blanket. “All of us were playing something. Jamal started first on the piano, Ahmad played trombone, Kareem was a cello player, too. We all had piano lessons. My dad used to play bass. Maybe he was trying to create another Jackson Five or something,” he chuckles. His brothers would hold jam sessions on weekends with crowds of collaborators. Still a small child – he got his first kit when he was four – Dayes would sneak on to the drums, quickly adapting to a level beyond his years.
Obsessed with his parents’ vinyl collection, he discovered the drummer Billy Cobham, a contemporary of Miles Davis. “Other people had David Beckham: I had Billy Cobham,” says Dayes. Aged 10, he went to stay with his grandparents in Bath for a week to attend one of Cobham’s courses at the university. While there, he became taken by the philosophies he learned, planting a seed that grew to become his specialist style: a delicate touch at a fierce pace. “Billy spoke about dynamics, how you can sting the drum. You don’t have to beat it – to break the skin – to get the same tone out of it. Play something quietly, but keep its intensity.”
Dayes’s airy inner world at home and the hardened environment of south London nourished his talent. “I don’t see music as a competition, but at the same time, to persevere in the music industry… being from south-east London, a lickle hustle and bustle is part of who I am,” he says. At secondary school he grew the large afro that graces the cover portrait of Black Classical Music. As grime music was Bluetoothed around the playground, instead of spitting lyrics like his friends, he would beatbox, forming the basis of his earliest drum-pattern compositions.
Music became a source of focus for Dayes, a lifeline. We discuss the hammering that arts education and youth services have taken over the past 13 years. “Mathematics and English and sciences are important,” he says. “But music, art and any creative practice are equally important. We all have a genius, but it’s not always discovered because we’re not given the chance to express it.”
Dayes spent his teens as part of the United Vibrations quartet alongside two of his brothers – Ahmad on trombone, Kareem on bass – and saxophonist Wayne Francis. “Kareem would be like, ‘The whole world’s gonna hear this shit!’” he says. “And those sort of mottoes stuck with me. I always play like it’s the last time I’m gonna play. If I’m in the studio, I’m in there for a reason. Recording is completely different to the live show, and having both in tandem from a long time ago probably put me in good stead. Sometimes you want to catch that live energy.”
In 2010, American singer Aloe Blacc hired United Vibrations as his backing band when he toured the UK, meaning Dayes got to drum on Later… With Jools Holland in his GCSE year. He then left school to pursue drumming full-time with the band. They would busk and put on events, and released two studio albums and an EP.
In 2015, Dayes’s mother died, which made him “lock everything off and put music to the side for a second”. The following year, he formed a duo with keyboardist Kamaal Williams called Yussef Kamaal. After seeing them play at the Worldwide awards that year, DJ Gilles Peterson offered them a record deal on the spot; their subsequent album, Black Focus, became an instant jazz classic.
Dayes had mixed feelings about the attention that came with its success. “My dad, when the album was blowing up, was like, ‘Stay humble… it’s a marathon, don’t start changing who you are.’” He then decided to strike out on his own, founding his own label – Cashmere Thoughts Recordings – and releasing Love Is the Message in 2018, a mindbending track recorded at Abbey Road studios and dedicated to his mum. Featuring electric guitarist Mansur Brown, keyboardist Alfa Mist and Rocco Palladino on bass, it showcases Dayes’s mastery of capturing the energy of live performance on record (a mesmerising YouTube video of the recording session has clocked up more than 8m views). In 2020, deep in lockdown, he released What Kinda Music with producer Tom Misch, which hit No 4 in the album charts.
I ask Dayes about the fact that his rise to solo stardom has happened in parallel to the explosion of social media and the deep polarisation of politics. “I focus on tending to my own garden, my body, my temple, my family, my own periphery. I don’t really delve into politics,” he says. “People are in different situations all over the world. Even just living in the UK is a type of privilege. Sometimes we think we can change the world, but by using my art as a channel to express stuff that is going on in my life, I hope it can make other people feel something,” he says.
This makes perfect sense. Black Classical Music is a meditative celebration of place, family and inner-personhood – a portal for listeners to access the calm of Dayes’s upbringing. For its release, Dayes recreated a room from his family home at a pop-up in Soho, central London. It featured a jukebox, coconuts and food, and his father gave a yoga class each morning. The album itself closes with a recording of his mum teaching yoga. A standout track, The Light, is an ode to his daughter, Bahia, whose voice is sprinkled throughout the song.
“I’m Jamaican, and my mum and dad were open people,” he says. “So I’ve enjoyed sharing parts of who I am. I’ve done that before with other [collaborative] projects, but obviously then you have to cooperate with your co-pilot. Now, I can take charge.”
Yussef Dayes plays the Royal Albert Hall, London SW7, on Thursday. His album Black Classical Music is out now on Brownswood Recordings/Cashmere Thoughts/Warner
