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'Rye Lane Shuffle'

The New UK Jazz

Moses Boyd

I can talk about the history of how we met and all of this, but I've always felt there was something bigger than us that I can't explain that was just happening in the universe. I've always felt there's been this thing that's going on beyond all of our control, that we've kind of come at the right time.

There is no clear beginning to the wave of jazz, nor will there be a clear end, for the most beautiful of reasons: because jazz is a lineage. An unbroken tradition of community music stretching back a hundred and twenty years, looking both ahead and behind, straddling multiple generations and styles. Even in 2023, the current crop of UK jazz musicians reaches directly back to the very birth of jazz in just a few steps. Nubya Garcia was taught by Jean Toussaint who played with Art Blakey, who played with Charlie Parker, who played with Earl Hines, who played with Louis Armstrong, who learnt from Joe Oliver, who played with Buddy Bolden.

Courtney Pine

The important thing to know is that it's a chain. And everybody in that link chain is imperative to keeping this freedom of expression called jazz alive.

Nevertheless, our story must start somewhere, and in this chapter I want to pay homage to the excitement and energy around 'the new UK jazz scene', highlighting some of its key artists, releases, venues and promoters.

?'They are the template' (United Vibrations)

For me, the story began with United Vibrations. I first heard them at a OneTaste event at the Bedford in Balham in November 2009: the three Dayes brothers, Ahmad (trombone), Kareem (bass) and Yussef (drums), and 'brother from another mother', Anglo-Caribbean saxophonist Wayne Francis.* Wayne would later co-found the raucous Steam Down nights in Deptford, and Steam Down Orchestra, as well as producing and performing under moniker Ahnansé; Yussef would go on to be one half of the brightly burning but short-lived flame that was Yussef Kamaal, subsequently achieving success simply as Yussef Dayes, and through his collaborations with Tom Misch.

Heavily influenced by the 1970s free jazz and Afrofuturism of Sun Ra, the syncopated grooves of West Africa, a DIY punk aesthetic and the grime, drum and bass and UK hip-hop of urban London, United Vibrations were way ahead of their time. Using Afrofuturist imagery long before Kamasi Washington brought it back into fashion (and the film Black Panther brought it to a wider public), they described their music as 'cosmodelic Afro jazz punk', a definition largely lost on both promoters and audiences. People just didn't know what to do with them.

Aly Gillani

United Vibrations created space for a lot of other people that have come since.

Wozzy Brewster

The first terminology that I gave it as a band manager for United Vibrations was cosmodelic Afro punk, because you couldn't just call it jazz. It really wasn't just jazz. It was something else. And I think when you've got three brothers and the brother from another mother creating such tight pieces. Whoa! Blow your mind. They are the template. If you look at that history, they are the template for the new jazz movement.

Wayne Francis

I think with United Vibrations, there were a lot of people that liked the energy of the music. However, I don't think the music had the ability to travel as much because we were kind of the only ones doing what we were doing at the time. We were just this band that is doing something that nobody knows quite where to place. We were like the misfits of the scene.

Emma Warren

They were just before their time because they were the evolutionary bridge that got to this time. You need those people.

I fell in love seeing them busking at Glastonbury in 2010, setting themselves up in the no man's land between the Other Stage and the Dance Village,┼ rinsing out their independence anthem, 'My Way', with the English mantra sung insistently over a powerful 6/8 groove to make it sound like a West African chant.

I started to work with them, initially as a promoter, putting them on at many Wormfood nights and festival stages. I became their agent in 2011, the first band I signed to my new agency, epitomising the intersection between jazz, African and electronic music that has been the central focus for my own career as musician, promoter, agent, label owner, festival organiser and educator. But from an agent's point of view, I found most promoters baffled as to where to pitch them. Some wanted to put them in peak-time party-band slots, where the political content of the music confused and alienated some audiences; others would try to put them in classic 'jazz' slots, where the percussive energy of the music would demand seated audiences to rise.

Ahmad Dayes

So we start this thing, we go out and we gig, and we know the music's good. We know we've got something special, we're hyped on what we're doing. Sometimes I remember standing up on a stage and looking out at the crowd and they look baffled! Like, 'What the fuck is this? I don't know what to do - do I dance, do I jump, do I focus on what they're saying?' Sometimes you come off stage thinking, 'How the fuck did that go? Was that a good gig? Was it bad?' You wouldn't know! And then people would come up to you and be like, 'That was like, yeah!'. I don't know, them early days, it did feel like we were feeding something to the masses that they weren't ready for.

Lubi Jovanovic

They were so ahead of the curve, what they were doing. That's how it happens. Sometimes those people don't get the respect they should. They were going up the M1, coming to the HiFi Club on a Sunday night, and driving back down, doing their gigs and that. But as the Charlie Parker song goes, now is the time. The young musicians now, I don't begrudge them. 'Cos there's going to come a time when jazz is going to just disappear down that rabbit hole of niche music again. And then you'll be back playing your fifty-quid-a-man gigs in a local pub. So why not?

This was a moment when political content in music, at least in the UK's popular music, was rare. After thirteen years of Labour rule, a generation accustomed to reasonably progressive social policies (while national assets were sold off in the background) and disaffected by the Blair administration's support for the Second Iraq War of 2003, had largely turned its back on politics altogether, with voter turnouts in 2001, 2005 and 2010 at their lowest since 1918.1

This all changed after the 2010 general election, when David Cameron's Conservatives formed a coalition with Nick Clegg's Liberal Democrats - spikily referred to as the ConDem coalition - ushering in ten years of 'austerity'. Public spending cuts off the back of the Northern Rock crisis of 2008, especially to social services for the most in-need communities, created the exact 'double-dip recession' prophesied by Gordon Brown, the outgoing Labour prime minister and long-standing Chancellor of the Exchequer under Tony Blair. By summer 2011, the mood of tension, anger and resentment erupted into rioting in protest at the suspected police murder of Mark Duggan in the same traditionally black areas that had rioted against police brutality and racism in 1981 and 1985: London's Brixton and Tottenham, Digbeth in Birmingham, Moss Side in Manchester and Toxteth in Liverpool.

Seeking to avoid blame by severing any connection between the rioting and their social policies, the Tory government and right-wing media launched a powerful campaign to brand the rioters as 'opportunistic thugs', motivated not by flagrant corruption, inequality and the mass closure of community centres and libraries but lured by the chance to acquire the newest trainers and electrical goods without paying. This was backed up by draconian sentencing for those found guilty, sending a clear message to disaffected urban youth of exactly who was in charge.

Driving back home through Brixton on the Monday of the August 2011 riots, having missed most of the carnage on a hedonistic weekend performing at the last ever Big Chill Festival in Warwickshire, I saw United Vibrations playing in Windrush Square, expressing solidarity with the rioters while appealing for calm amongst the mayhem. I was struck at the time by this connection between the music and the politics: aware as I was of the rich history of jazz as a political music, this was the first time in my lifetime I'd witnessed jazz used in such a way as a direct part of local community politics. By this time, protest and live music had become increasingly separated, with live music rarely performed at marches beyond the obligatory samba band.

While the band's presence in...