Mercury prize winners Ezra Collective: ‘A bassline and drumbeat puts everyone on the same page’
As the genre-hopping London group visit Lagos – the home of Afrobeat – ahead of a Royal Albert Hall gig, bandleader Femi Koleoso explains how music can create positive social change amid poverty and youth violence
Lagos is a pulsing mass of infectious energy. Densely packed houses stretch to the horizon below a visible halo of pollution. The streets are busy at all hours, with people eating, drinking, talking, getting haircuts and buying and selling anything and everything. Nigeria’s biggest city is complex, diverse and unequal, but all over it, the same music vibrates: at any hour, the world-conquering sound of Afrobeats pours out of cars, bars, windows and parks.
In the northern suburb of Ikeja, tucked away amid warehouses and factories, is the home of that sound, the New Afrika Shrine. This cavernous auditorium, with its corrugated metal roof and walls drained of their colour by years of humidity, is a reincarnation of the musical home of Fela Kuti, whose Afrobeat style – defined in part by the polyrhythmic drumming of Tony Allen – pointed the way to today’s Afrobeats sound. Although he died in 1997, Kuti’s life and influence are celebrated with Felabration, an annual week-long festival of music, art and politics.
Ezra Collective, one of the most exciting bands to come out of Britain in years, have been invited to grace the stage at the Shrine for this year’s festival. It is more like a pilgrimage than a normal gig. Bandleader and drummer Femi Koleoso arrives at the venue by 2pm looking excited and tired: “I went back to the studio with some local musicians last night so didn’t get much sleep.” It must have been a late one as he was still dancing on the side of the stage to Made Kuti, grandson of Fela, at 1am. Clearly, he was determined not to waste a minute of the trip.
The quintet won the Mercury prize last month for their album Where I’m Meant to Be, the latest peak for a UK jazz scene fizzing with talent. “What a special moment for me and all my friends,” Koleoso says. “Such an organic journey to it as well. It was a beautiful moment that happened – but it’s not the top of the mountain, so we just keep going.” They are now booked to play at the Royal Albert Hall in November, making them the first jazz act in the venue’s history to go from playing its 200-capacity Elgar Room to selling out the main auditorium.
Despite Koleoso’s lack of sleep, excitement oozes out of him. “This right now,” he says, pointing around a near-empty Shrine as the detritus of last night is still being cleared up around him, “is something even greater than the Mercury prize. I never sat down with a pen and paper and thought: ‘I need to write something to win a Mercury prize,’ but I’ve definitely sat down and thought: ‘I need to get me and my brothers to the Shrine.’”
The band’s tenor saxophonist James Mollison agrees, calling the band’s first show in Africa “a massive privilege and honour. I’ve been checking out Fela for so long that his music is in my heart, so to actually be in Lagos to play is surreal.”
Koleoso wanted the booking so badly that he made it happen. “I came here in December last year and I spent ages in this building asking: ‘How do I get my boys here? I don’t care about money or flights – just tell me how to get on that stage. And I got it.” He becomes visibly emotional. “I wouldn’t be surprised if I cry when I’m up there tonight because it’s such a special, special feeling. This is actually who I am in a venue. In music form. It means so, so much. I can’t eloquently put it into words.”
To understand his emotion, you have to go back to when he first picked up sticks. “I had two Nigerian parents and they bought me a toy drum kit when I was about three or four years old. It was my favourite thing ever. But also, my dad used to play Fela Kuti records on CD in the car. The drum kit was my favourite toy and Fela was why I fell in love with music. And the combination of the two ended up being why music is everything to me.”
You can hear that love of Kuti’s music from the very earliest Ezra Collective records. The band – also featuring keyboardist Joe Armon-Jones, trumpeter Ife Ogunjobi and Koleoso’s brother TJ on bass – formed in 2012 at the Tomorrow’s Warriors youth club run by celebrated British jazz musician Gary Crosby. “I wanted to fuse my love of Afrobeat and Fela Kuti with the bebop jazz I had been learning. That was the very first form of what Ezra Collective was.” If you caught those very early shows you’d have heard them play Zombie or Colonial Mentality by Kuti; Koleoso went on to be taught by Tony Allen, who died in 2020. “Zombie is not Zombie without Uncle Tony,” Koleoso says, with a fond smile. “He taught me the way of leaning back, of letting beauty speak and letting the little you do be done with power.”
While always building on those hours of practising the jazz standards and Fela Kuti records, they have now infused their sound with hip-hop, salsa, dub and reggae to make a modern, powerful and uniquely British sound. “London has such a melting pot of cultures, and the jazz musicians are able to react to that eloquently,” Koleoso says. Mollison agrees: “If our environment has all these different sounds in it, then we’re going to include all those sounds.”
If Ezra Collective music reflects the musical diversity of London, it also shines a light on the troubles faced by the city. Politics was at the very heart of Fela Kuti’s music: the struggle against colonialism, police brutality, poverty and oppression. Koleoso believes Ezra Collective can highlight similar things, but in a different way. “You will never hear me say: ‘Vote for this’, ‘I don’t like that’, ‘Campaign for this.’ That’s not the language I’ll use,” he says, getting ever more animated.
For Koleoso, the solution is for everyone to do whatever they can to help the people around them. “I live in north London and I look poverty in the eye every single day. I’m working at a youth club attached to a food bank and I’ve got kids coming up to me talking about their schools crumbling before their eyes, literally and metaphorically. Youth violence is heartbreaking. But I just don’t feel the solutions are found in screaming: ‘Vote for this.’” Instead, he says, they are to be found by “looking at what I can do to fix this”.
During his Mercury prize acceptance speech, Koleoso spoke passionately about the importance of youth clubs to the band’s success, and he is now offering the same kind of support. “When all this Mercury stuff is done, I’ll be at assemblies helping kids out, I’ll be at the youth club taking kids paintballing. You then make a decision about what it is you can do to help people.” Koleoso also believes that the music he creates can have a positive impact on its own. “A good bassline and a drumbeat puts everyone on the same page. And when you’ve got everyone on the same page, you can achieve change.” He looks around the Shrine. “If you had the entire world stood in front of you and you pressed play on Fela Kuti’s Zombie, the whole world would start agreeing about things they didn’t think they could.”
It is unclear what time the band will take to the stage. “I’ve been told both 8pm and 1am,” says Joe Armon-Jones, the band’s wizard keyboardist, wrestling with chewy pre-show chicken. In the end, they go on just after 9.30pm, greeted by a seated and sceptical crowd unsure of what to expect from a British band at the Shrine.
But from the moment Koleoso thumps the opening beat of Welcome to My World, joined by the locked-in horns of Mollison and Ogunjobi, the audience perks up. By the time a cripplingly funky bassline from TJ and squelching keyboards by Armon-Jones come in, plastic chairs are being jettisoned as people rush to the stage.
Femi Kuti, son of Fela and a brilliant trumpeter, walks on unannounced during No Confusion, to roars of delight from audience and band, who finish with a cover of Fela’s Water No Get Enemy. They have won over their audience of Afrobeat connoisseurs, any scepticism long dissipated amid a haze of hash smoke. “It’s a beautiful thing: the kid that used to pick up a guitar because they wanted to be like Blur, they’re now picking up a trumpet because they want to be like Ezra,” says Koleoso.
Interview: Joe Mullhall
Source: The Guardian
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