music

A primer on London’s bright-burning young jazz scene, this new compilation brings together a collection of some of its sharpest talents. A set of nine newly-recorded tracks, We Out Here captures a moment where genre markers matter less than raw, focused energy. Looking at the album’s running order, it could easily serve as a name-checking exercise for some of London’s most-tipped and hardworking bands of the past couple of years. Recorded across three long, fruitful days in a North West London studio, the crossover between each of the groups speaks to the close-knit circles which make up the scene.

This debut album, by prodigious keys player, composer and producer Joe Armon-Jones, is buoyant, celebratory and welcoming. With a background in jazz, he draws from influences in dub, hip-hop and soul. Different traditions are infused and commingled together. Soulful brass arrangements are coloured with carefully-tuned atmospherics; individual flashes of brilliance are bound into the album’s bigger picture. He’s part of London’s young, jazz-influenced music scene. Drawn from that same close-knit circle, the album features the likes of Moses Boyd, Nubya Garcia and Oscar Jerome. It’s playing with those – along with Ezra Collective, which he co-founded, and touring with the likes of Ata Kak and Pharoahe Monch – which has honed his playing and grown his ideas.

Aspects: The new wave jazz funk album. STR4TA is a new project produced by Gilles Peterson and Jean-Paul “Bluey” Maunick. Long-time friends and collaborators, STR4TA sees them mine new musical possibilities out of that shared formative era, bringing a fresh slant.

The six-piece group, led by bandleader Jake Long, bring a fresh slant to the weighty spiritual jazz tradition. Spiritual jazz is a tradition that's leaden with its own traditions, histories and stories. Maisha carve out out their own style through that weight of expectation: they take stock of that history, channelling the greats like Pharoah Sanders, while filtering their own influences - which range from jazz to Afrobeat - through every part of their musical process. It's a sound which rests on trance-inducing rhythms, instinctive musical interchange and repeated, deeply enriching melodic refrains. It's a combination which has made for their own singular sound. Each of its tracks provokes a feeling of intense revery which is timeless, on the one hand, but realised through a confluence of sounds and circumstances which are undeniably of the present.

The borders between London's musical tribes have always been porous. For Yussef Kamaal, the sound of the capital - with its hum of jungle, grime and broken beat - has shaped a self-taught, UK-tipped approach to playing jazz. In the states, the genre's longrunning to-and-fro with hip hop - from Robert Glasper to Kamasi Washington - has reimagined it within US culture. On 'Black Focus', Yussef Kamaal frame jazz inside the bass-saturated, pirate radio broadcasts of London. Taking inspiration from the anything-goes spirit of '70s jazz-funk, on albums by Herbie Hancock or the Mahavishnu Orchestra, it's a loose template with plenty of room to experiment. The pair, made up of Yussef Dayes and Kamaal Williams (aka Henry Wu), have had little in the way of formal training. Instead, their musical tastes - and approach to playing - are indebted to Thelonious Monk's piano as much as the drum programming of Kaidi Tatham.