There have been many difficult moments in the 33-year history of the Mercury Prize. The annual award ceremony has witnessed inebriation (Klaxons), a casual discarding of the £25,000 cheque (Badly Drawn Boy) and even an attempt to punch a member of the judging panel (Luke Haines of The Auteurs). In 1994, M People won ahead of Blur, Pulp, The Prodigy and Paul Weller. There is also the fact that no Irish act has ever taken home the top gong (mere oversight?).
One of the most unexpected and unadulteratedly joyous occasions, however, was last year, when the rank outsiders Ezra Collective became the first jazz act to scoop the influential award. On hearing the announcement at the Hammersmith Apollo, in London, the five group members – drummer and bandleader Femi Koleoso, bassist TJ Koleoso, keyboardist Joe Armon-Jones, trumpeter Ife Ogunjobi and tenor saxophonist James Mollison – collapsed into a rapturous and brotherly rugby scrum. To say they were surprised, and elated, may be the Mercury Prize understatement of all time.
“It was just, like, one of the best nights of my life and one of those very, very special moments that all of us will treasure forever,” Femi Koleoso says. “It was also one of the least cool, least hip-hop things that’s ever happened on television. When Little Simz won, the year before, she just looked so cool. When we won we all ended up on the floor, crying.”
While leading UK jazz musicians such John Surman, Courtney Pine, Soweto Kinch and Nubya Garcia had previously been nominated for the prize – often as a token addition, only there to demonstrate a degree of diversity, carped many critics – the 2023 award seemed symbolic of something far greater than itself.
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For one thing, it showed that jazz in Britain, and many other places around the world, including Ireland, has never been in a better place, that it’s possible for a music sometimes considered solidly special-interest to have a broad appeal. To those who have followed the fortunes of jazz in Britain over the past decade or so, Ezra Collective winning the Mercury is testament to the vitality, multiplicity and sheer open-mindedness of the music, nothing less than the apogee of the UK jazz explosion.
“We were the first jazz band to win the Mercury Prize, but I don’t think we were the first to deserve it,” Koleoso says. “Our win represented a whole group of wonderful people who have been making this music for a long time. And it was just an honour to be a part of that story, you know. It ended up being the scene’s win, not just Ezra’s win.”
Naturally and seamlessly synthesising an audaciously wide range of adjacent styles, such as Afrobeat, grime, hip-hop, dub, reggae, salsa, jungle, calypso, dance hall and funky house, Ezra Collective’s transformative music is also a celebration of young, multicultural London – a good-news story for our often troubled times. “We’re going to make positivity cool again,” Femi’s younger brother TJ told the New York Times. “We’re going to rebrand what young London looks like.”
Femi and TJ’s own story is archetypal of the UK capital’s long history of immigration and assimilation. Their parents came to Britain from Nigeria in 1990 to work in the NHS; through dedicated study and hard graft their mother, Kemi, became a palliative-care nurse and their father, Tope, a biomedical scientist. Today they work full time as pastors at the evangelical, non-denominational Christian Jubilee Church in the north London suburb of Enfield, where the brothers were raised.
“We grew up working class, maybe even just below working class, in a flat above a shop on the main road,” says Koleoso, who is 29. “We later moved to a house with a garden, but both places were very much open-house – many people saw them as their second home, especially after school and church. It was a house full of love and joy and generosity, and those values have fed into our music – it’s very inclusive, and we strive to create a joyful atmosphere and experience wherever we are.”
Koleoso’s parents bought him a second-hand toy drum kit when he was four, and it soon became “his favourite thing ever”. Being brought up in a religious household, he was soon playing drums at his parents’ church; his bass-playing brother would later join him. By the time Femi was 12 he had both passed his grade-eight drum exam and developed an abiding interest in religion. He still attends, plays and volunteers at Jubilee Church. “Before being a black British-Nigerian, a Londoner and a musician, I consider myself a proud Christian,” he says.
The first music he heard was Afrobeat, the vibrant, groove-based, horn-heavy fusion of west African sounds and American funk, soul and jazz pioneered in Nigeria in the late 1960s by the inspirational multi-instrumentalist and political activist Fela Kuti. “My dad would play Fela CDs in the car, and that was the first time I fell in love with music,” Koleoso says. “Everything I do with the drums, composing and music is filtered through Fela Kuti. He is the musician who has influenced me the most.”
By his early teens he had also developed a passion for jazz, in particular the music of Charles Mingus, Miles Davis and drummers such as Art Blakey and Max Roach. After persuading his father to take him to Ronnie Scott’s jazz club in Soho, however, he increasingly felt the music was not for him. “It wasn’t like being in church, or at an Arsenal game, or even at the local chicken-and-chip shop,” Koleoso says. “No one looked like me. It seemed very elitist, a whole different world, like playing the violin or going to the races.”
Two things changed his mind. First, he discovered the adventurous cross-genre sounds of the American pianist and producer Robert Glasper. “Glasper had a massive influence on me,” Koleoso says. “I knew Dizzy Gillespie had mixed jazz with Afro-Cuban music, and that Herbie [Hancock] had mixed jazz with electronic music, but until I heard Robert Glasper I didn’t understand that you could mix jazz with music, like hip hop and R&B, that was being made right now.”
Second, at 15 he began attending the free workshops organised by Tomorrow’s Warriors, the remarkable education and development organisation founded in 1991 “to champion diversity, inclusion and equality across the arts through jazz”. It was here that Femi and TJ would meet James Mollison and Joe Armon-Jones and in 2012 form Ezra Collective. Later, at the south London youth music charity Kinetika Bloco, they would hook up with Ife Ogunjobi.
“You can’t imagine how exhilarating it was,” Koleoso says. “No one else my age that I knew was listening to jazz, let alone loving it and playing it.”
Koleoso and Armon-Jones would go on to study jazz performance at London’s prestigious Trinity Laban Conservatoire.
Highly ambitious for the music and the band right from the off, Koleoso organised gigs at newly formed, and now legendary, grassroots DIY London venues such as Steam Down, Jazz Re:freshed and the Total Refreshment Centre. Fans were quickly drawn to Ezra’s infectious energy and all-embracing enthusiasm.
The band released their irrepressible debut album, You Can’t Steal My Joy, in 2019; three years later came the quintet’s affirming and Mercury-winning Where I’m Meant to Be, a record that also featured the vocalist Emeli Sandé, the rapper Sampa the Great and snippets of a phone conversation with the film director Steve McQueen.
Ezra Collective have played Glastonbury and All Together Now, sold out the Royal Albert Hall and toured the world, from the United States to Australia, Japan to Nigeria. Koleoso has also drummed for Gorillaz and Jorja Smith; recently he has presented shows on BBC Radio 6 Music. “One of the beautiful things about coming from a city like London is that it has a way of making you feel like absolutely anything is possible,” Koleoso says. “I mean, you might as well reach for the sky.”
That rapid ascent is likely to continue this month with the release of Dance, No One’s Watching, a 19-track collection recorded at Abbey Road that unfolds like an exuberant concept album: it imagines a night out dancing, from getting ready to taking the night bus home, with Ezra Collective as the lively house band.
An egalitarian and liberating “ode to the sacred yet joyous act of dancing”, the record is not, Koleoso says, simply about cavorting in clubs. “The venue could also be a church, a carnival, a wedding, or even a funeral – the Irish and Nigerians have got a lot more in common than Guinness, you know! One of the tracks on the album is called God Gave Me Feet for Dancing, and when you have a good dance, in the moment, void of anxiety and insecurity, you realise there’s such a soulful and spiritual element to it.”
In November Ezra Collective bring their upbeat and uplifting party-band vibe back to Ireland as part of a European tour that, for the first time for a headlining UK jazz act, also takes in London’s 12,500-capacity Wembley Arena. “A lot of musicians will tell you that when they’re in a sad place it helps them make music, but for us it’s the opposite,” Joe Armon-Jones has said. “The best music we make is when we’re in a good place.” Expect an electrifying set, a communal atmosphere, standing ovations and a far more diverse and fashionable crowd than usually seen at jazz gigs.
As much as Koleoso is wholly committed to the band, concerts, albums and music, he explains that there is something bigger and more important than all of them. He has always supported schools, church and youth organisations by giving talks, teaching music, mentoring, donating some of his concert fees and advocating for greater access to music. He leads by proactive example. And he is a pragmatist.
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“I’m very honest and realistic about the fact that this Ezra Collective moment will not last forever,” Koleoso says. “One day we will put an album out and The Irish Times won’t want to hear from us; the attention peaks and troughs. But what doesn’t peak and trough is what you give away to people. My ambition is always: what can you pass on? Because that is really what a legacy is about. It won’t be how many venues I played, to how many people. It’ll be how many secondary schools and how many assemblies I spoke at. That’s what’s going to change things.”
Dance, No One’s Watching is released by Partisan Records on Friday, September 27th; Ezra Collective play 3Olympia Theatre, Dublin, on November 11th
