London Jazz
Horns over broken drums — jazz rebuilt by kids raised on grime, Afrobeat and soundsystem weight.
What you're really asking
You're asking about a generation, not a style. These players came up through the same free youth programmes, the same Lewisham and Hackney warehouse parties, and they play jazz the way London actually sounds — carnival percussion, dub bass, grime tempos, West African horn lines.
The common thread isn't harmony, it's rhythm: the drummer is usually the bandleader.
Where it sits
The infrastructure came first. Tomorrow's Warriors — Gary Crosby and Janine Irons, running since 1991 — put instruments in the hands of Black and female teenagers for free; Ezra Collective's members met there and formed the band soon after.
Jazz re:freshed started weekly nights in Notting Hill in 2003. By the early 2010s the Steez parties in Lewisham and Deptford had an audience dancing to jazz instead of sitting through it.
Total Refreshment Centre in Stoke Newington became the studio-clubhouse; Church of Sound started up in a Clapton church in 2015. Then Gilles Peterson's Brownswood cut the 2018 compilation *We Out Here* over three days at the Fish Factory, Shabaka Hutchings curating, and the scene had a calling card.
, Concord, Partisan. Ezra Collective took the Mercury in 2023.
The scene
Who: Shabaka Hutchings, Moses Boyd, Nubya Garcia, Femi Koleoso, Theon Cross, Sheila Maurice-Grey, Joe Armon-Jones, Cassie Kinoshi. Rooms: Total Refreshment Centre, Jazz Cafe, Church of Sound, Steam Down in Deptford.
What: tuba or synth bass instead of double bass, two drummers on some records, Caribbean and Nigerian rhythms treated as home turf rather than borrowed colour. Solos stay short; the groove is the point.
How it works: everyone plays in four bands at once. Garcia plays in Nérija and Maisha; Armon-Jones sits in Ezra Collective and Garcia's band; Kokoroko guest on Ezra's Fela cover.
The records document the personnel map.
The leading records
Sons Of Kemet
Your Queen Is A Reptile
2018
Tuba, two drum kits, no chord instrument — nine tracks each named for a Black woman, and the record that put this music on a major.
Ezra Collective
You Can't Steal My Joy
2019
Jorja Smith and Loyle Carner on a jazz debut — the album that proved the scene could hold pop vocalists without flinching.
Nubya Garcia
Source
2020
Dub and cumbia carried inside a tenor saxophone record; the title track runs on a bassline, not a head.
Kokoroko
Could We Be More
2022
Eight-piece led by trumpeter Sheila Maurice-Grey, arriving eight years after the band formed — highlife guitar and three-part horn harmony doing the work melody usually does.
Various
We Out Here
2018
Shabaka assembled nine bands at the Fish Factory in three days; the scene's census, pressed on Brownswood.
Moses Boyd
Dark Matter
2020
Drummer's solo record built like a producer's — grime, broken beat and Kano's London in the same forty minutes.
Oddballs
Yussef Kamaal
Black Focus
2016
Brownswood's spark record, and the band had split within a year — a scene document by a group that barely existed.
Shabaka And The Ancestors
Wisdom Of Elders
2016
Cut in Johannesburg with South African players in a single day; the London sound's other parent, rarely credited.
Joe Armon-Jones & Mala
A Way Back
2022
Keys player meets a Digital Mistlines founder on Aquarii — dubstep and Rhodes, proof the jazz was always soundsystem-adjacent.
Keep digging
- What came out of Total Refreshment Centre?
- Which of these pressings are still findable?
- How does Steam Down differ from Ezra Collective?