Ezra Collective at the Royal Albert Hall Reviewed
Lucas Zurdo SymonsTuesday, 7th November 2023
Midway through their headline concert at the Royal Albert Hall, Ezra Collective abruptly leave the stage.
The band’s rise has been, by the metric of a UK jazz group, genuinely meteoric. After only two EPs (Chapter 7 in 2016 and Juan Pablo: The Philosopher in 2018), it was their first album, 2019’s You Can’t Steal My Joy, that saw them proclaimed the flagbearers of a vibrant new generation of London jazz. Last September they became the first jazz group to win the Mercury Prize for their second album, Where I’m Meant to Be; by the time of their headline gig at the Royal Albert Hall, the critical and cultural fervour surrounding the band had reached fever-pitch.
Re-emerging several minutes later, Ife Ogunjobi, Femi and TJ Koleoso, and James Mollison sit down in the middle of the stage in front of Joe Armon-Jones’ grand piano, glinting white against the blue-lit stage, and face the crowd. Armon-Jones plays a soaring, pulsating improvised solo, and for ten minutes the others simply look out at the six-thousand faces who have come to see them.
A Mercury is only recognition of an artist’s already widespread critical acclaim. But the prize’s reach is real; the exposure it brings to its recipients is significant. Ezra Collective, and the jazz scene they are part of, is officially moving mainstream. Exactly ten years before, the band had played to the Royal Albert Hall for only minutes in a national youth jazz award, a fact Femi Koleoso reveals early in the set. This should be considered the final show of their ‘pre-Mercury’ era. It marks an end to a decade begun as teenagers in jazz youth project Tomorrow’s Warriors and ended as Mercury prizewinners, bookended by performances on the very stage where they now sit, quietly moved.
The night is a sweaty, celebratory affair, an entire decade of tracks and collaborators collapsed into one cavernous room. Zara McFarlane, Emeli Sandé and Nao feature early on; Kojey Radical, JME and Loyle Carner towards the end. The band’s riotous renditions of their most famous tracks from across their career are fanfares to what is, for just one night, a self-paid homage to their own journey. In the quieter moments, in the eyes of thousands, they reflect.
On the bus home, in the afterglow of the show, my friend turns to me: “that was a show dedicated to themselves.”
More precisely, this was a show dedicated to what, and who, made Ezra Collective. London’s jazz scene is blossoming, in corners of the capital away from the dark rooms of such mythical central London clubs as Ronnie Scott’s. Steam Down, a collective who also feature graduates of Tomorrow’s Warriors, played spiralling, free-form sets every Wednesday in intimate brick tunnels under railway lines in Deptford (they’ve now relocated to Peckham). Orii Community’s Monday-night open jams in Hackney Wick see aspiring musicians playing with the likes of tubist Theon Cross and MC Germane Marvel. Jazz Re:freshed, whose promotional events of young UK jazz showcased Ezra Collective themselves in 2019, are platforming Shabaka Hutchings and Nubya Garcia. Far from Soho, homes for budding jazz talent are thriving.
As Ezra Collective reaches its final revelrous numbers in the Royal Albert Hall, the stage is flooded with some forty young horn players and dancers from the Kinetika Bloco youth group. The band close their headline show with a look back to their roots and a glimpse of what, and who, is to come for London and UK jazz.