Ezra Collective to get the week started – recorded at the BBC 6 Music Festival on March 27 of this year.
An amazing set and a standout performance by one of the must-check out bands of recent years. Ezra Collective has been generating an onslaught of good vibes since 2012 and has achieved a mind-boggling mashup of afrobeat, calypso, reggae, hip-hop, soul and jazz into a nonstop blast of high-octane energy that most likely listening via your speakers or headphones doesn’t do justice to seeing them live and in-the-flesh.
Ezra Collective are composed of drummer and bandleader Femi Koleoso, bassist TJ Koleoso, keyboardist Joe Armon-Jones, trumpeter Ife Ogunjobi, and tenor saxophonist James Mollison, who met at the jazz youth program Tomorrow’s Warriors and formed their group soon afterwards. The group fuses elements of afrobeat, calypso, reggae, hip-hop, soul and jazz, and frequently collaborates with fellow London-based jazz musicians such as Nubya Garcia and Moses Boyd. They were the recipients of the 2023 Mercury Music Prize. Their 2024 single “God Gave Me Feet for Dancing” was chosen by Barack Obama for his list of 25 favorite songs of the year. At the Brit Awards 2025, the Ezra Collective became the first jazz band to win the “Group of the Year” accolade.
They are currently on tour – sadly, every other country in the world but the U.S. at the moment – no surprise, but . . .
If you aren’t already familiar with Ezra Collective go to their website – and go exploring. Got nothing to lose and a whole new world opens up. Not to mention it gets the week moving in a solid direction.
We need all the encouragement we can.
Dig in and enjoy.
Okay – now for the begging and pleading part:
You know we’ve been weathering storms, hysteria, lock-outs, shutdowns and malfunctions since 2012 and in all that time we’ve never stopped making Past Daily a place where you come and discover things – old things and new things you may have missed. Past Daily is a huge endeavor and it normally would take a bunch of people handling different chores to pull off the day-to-day that we do. But it’s just me and my archive – this batch of sounds that I refer to every day is what I do because I don’t want to be part of the problem. Knowing things, especially History makes you an informed person – someone who can look at the world objectively and make up your own mind. We don’t do click-bait, come-ons, phishing expeditions or thirst traps – what you see is what you get – and hopefully what you get is a different perspective on things that can only help and not hurt you.
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Do what you can – we keep the hounding down to a minimum because I want to let the posts speak for themselves – but we can certainly use the company.
Now back to your program.
