The token jazz album has always been something of an anomaly in the history of the Mercury Music Prize. It’s the giant watermelon that gets presented for a “Best Marrow” competition at a village fete; it’s the well-coiffed Siamese that somehow finds itself at Crufts.
Only now the token jazz album has only gone and bloody won it. Ezra Collective’s album Where I’m Meant to Be, released last year on the Anglo-American independent label Partisan, was the rank outsider according to the bookies but has somehow managed to pip favourites Arctic Monkeys, Loyle Carner and Fred Again to the gong. The band’s leader, drummer Femi Koleoso, a devout Christian, started his speech by thanking God. “If a jazz band winning the Mercury Prize doesn’t make you believe in God, nothing will.”
