Good morning TNC crew,
We hope you had a good weekend, but not so good that it’s completely derailed your Monday morning. Annoying when that happens isn’t it. It’s easy to get over-excited. What you need to do is be more like Ezra Collective’s Femi Koleoso, who followed up a big weekend at Carnival at the end of August by arranging to meet Niall early the next morning to talk all about his band’s excellent new record and more.
We don’t mean you need to arrange a meeting with Niall. We just mean you need some of Femi’s get-up-and-go attitude. You can arrange a meeting with Niall if you want. He doesn’t leave Southend for just anyone though so don’t get your hopes up.
Now, onto today’s edition, which is free, like every Monday, because we’re nice like that.
Enjoy the edition,
Ted, Niall and Chris
Start The Week With… Femi Koleoso
Ezra Collective are at the centre of a wave of groups redefining the sound of modern jazz, and Femi Koleoso is at the centre of Ezra Collective. The drummer and bandleader formed the band as a teenager in London when he got fed up of playing jazz standards at youth club and they have gone on to establish themselves as one of the most exciting breakthrough acts in the UK. Their expansive second record Where I’m Meant To Be, out next week on Partisan, is their best work yet, drawing Afrobeat, grime, samba, dub and hip-hop into their vibrant sound, an album with proper crossover potential for a band who are determined to break the ceiling for how big a jazz band can be . Back at the end of August, Niall met Femi, who also plays drums for Gorillaz, bright and early in East London to hear all about it.
Hello Femi. It’s the morning after Carnival. How was your weekend?
It was good. We found a guy playing salsa records, that was amazing and then I found Aba Shanti-I at the end and he was really going for it, that was sick. I had a wicked Carnival, although I noticed I’m getting older. A lot of people were younger than me, but also I was a lot more chilled out than I have been in previous carnivals. Before, I was very much a hand grenade ready to explode with energy, dancing and sweating and making friends. This year I was very content is walking around, enjoying the sound systems and yeah, it wasn’t much jumping around.
Congratulations on the record, it’s brilliant. It’s a good November release, even though it’s quite upbeat and there’s moments perfect for summer, there’s an autumn vibe to it as well.
I like that you said that, because I feel like that as well. It starts at summer and ends in autumn and winter.
Take me back to how it started. How does an Ezra Collective album begin?
Well, it begins with the itchy fingers of ‘I want to play some different songs’. People start gently writing songs but when a theme or a message or something underpins how we’re feeling, once that message comes through, an album starts to craft itself. Previously, it was always feeling like different things were happening out of our control that were taking away our ability to be ourselves and express ourselves and be free and then a rebellion mindset of ‘well, you can’t steal that away from us’ started to grow and that’s where You Can’t Steal My Joy came from and then we started writing songs in that way of thinking. With this one, we finished our Asia tour March 2020, then the world closed and we weren’t together as a band for months after that.
How did that affect your approach to making music, given Ezra Collective have always been about people squashed in a room together and playing live?
I think it changed a lot for me, because all of the music and songs we’d written up until that point had been written in the context of in a room, chiseling it together in a soundcheck kind of thing and now I’m on my own. I ended up listening to loads of music and getting really inspired by the different songs I was hearing and the different music. I was watching loads of Boiler Rooms and listening to a lot of radio, Worldwide FM and Radio 6, Reprezent and I think it ended up I was being influenced in a far deeper way than I normally am. Normally I’m influenced subconsciously but during the pandemic, I was very consciously influenced by the stuff I was listening to, down to the point of working out, ‘oh, how did they do that, how did they do this?’. I was watching a lot of huge parties on YouTube cos that’s what we were missing.
Sometimes I interview artists and they’ve only just finished their record and they’re almost too close to it still to make sense of it, but you finished Where I’m Meant To Be a while ago. What do you hear when you listen to it now?
I hear a lot of honesty through the music. We’ve written so many different types of songs, I can see the songs that are really popular and I can see the songs that are really popular with real big Ezra fans, and we could have written an album of songs that are really popular with everyone. But we didn’t, we wrote a very honest record. It has a bit of everything. I hear everyone’s personalities in the record. Joe’s a very different person to TJ, Ife, James and I hear everyone’s personalities coming up. And then I hear that we’re better at our instruments, we’re definitely better our instruments. It sounds good, sounds mature, sounds like big men. Sometimes I listen to Chapter 7 and I hear the teenagers in us. We grew up, contrary to popular belief!
What was the initial idea in your head when you started the band?
We only started because I didn’t want to play jazz standards anymore. That’s all it was. I think it was a case of I was listening to Skepta every day, and then going into youth club to play jazz music. I’m playing songs that were written 20 years before Skepta’s granddad was born, which is cool but it wasn’t musically fulfilling everything in me. I knew that, I could feel it. I just wanted to play something else alongside. It’s a little bit like, I love cereal, but I don’t want to eat it three times a day. That’s all it is it. I still eat cereal all the time. I just want to eat something else. That’s what happened to me musically when I was about 16. And so it’s like, ‘I want to play John Coltrane tunes but I just also want to play Fela Kuti songs, and I also want to figure out a way of playing Skepta tunes as well’, because they all are different types of meals for me.
That’s all Ezra Collective was meant to be, a space for us to play those songs. And then before you know it, people outside of our families wanted to hear us play these songs, in pubs, and then in small venues. Then we’re playing Ronnie Scott’s and I remember thinking we’d hit the peak of music. My thing was, if you decide to play music that’s jazz and you get to Ronnie Scott’s, that is the peak, you’ve done it, ‘I’m from here, I played there, I’ve completed jazz music’. If you want to do anything else in music, you need to jump on like a pop gig or something like that. So when we did Ronnie Scott’s, I remember thinking, ‘completed’, then a few years later, we did West Holts stage at Glastonbury, you can’t see it peaking from there and then it’s still going and going.
How hard is it to keep you guys together in terms of where you want to go because there’s five of you, all working on different projects too.
Yeah, it’s getting harder. Beforehand, where we could go was such limited options, left or right. Now, it’s like a roundabout. But I think because when we talk about the musical journey of our musical tastes changing and a physical journey, we’re not 16 anymore. And there’s some differences in that, and life journeys, where it’s people getting married, and I’m sure that Ezra kids is within five years from now, but then also, it’s a journey through our friendships. They’re changing, but they’re still together. It’s just navigating those things. And by way of steering the journey into the right place, we just have to trust our instincts.
Where does your ambition lie with Ezra? How big do you want it to go?
I want to take on Brixton Academy one day. I would love to do a fleshed-out world tour where you’re doing legit venues everywhere you go. I’d love to take an evening slot at Glastonbury on. The best thing about being billed high on a festival is not about money, not your name being big, not the big crowd, my favourite thing is that you get to play longer, that’s the best thing. Forty-five minutes at Glastonbury, you’ve got to squeeze everything in, but can you imagine having a headliner, one and a half hour planning permission and you get time to get into it. The other band I play in, we play for an hour and a half minimum, two hours quite often. When we did All Points East, we were up there for ages, playing all the bangers, I’d love that for Ezra Collective.
What’s it like switching between Gorillaz and Ezra Collective, is it part of the same thing or do you change your approach?
Both, some of it like, ‘amazing music, amazing songs that makes people go mad,’ but then there’s obviously there’s a switch, like I’ve gotta carry my own drumkit when I’m with Ezra, Gorillaz I don’t. I’m the drummer in Gorillaz, Ezra I’m a lot more than just playing the drums, I have an opinion on every single thing that happens. I learn so much from Damon, he’s a hero. He’s taught me so much and as a result influenced me so directly on this record and the way I see Ezra because he’s a sick bandleader. He’s amazing. I try and take that to the boys and enjoy it. It's inspiring, you have your eyes on some of the things Gorillaz achieve, I spend my time looking at it thinking, ‘I’d love this for Ezra Collective’. But playing-wise, there’s no drum solos with Gorillaz. When we played a couple of weeks ago with Ezra, I was so out of breath. I was exhausted! The parts are so big, man. Gorillaz are my favourite band. Me and TJ [Koleoso, Femi’s brother and Ezra bassist] were in primary school when we discovered Gorillaz, they’ve been our favourite band for years, but there’s nothing that compares to ‘we wrote this song together and we’re playing it and people are enjoying it’, nothing compares to that feeling. Damon would agree. That’s the special thing with Ezra Collective, these are my boys and we were writing these songs when we were 16 in school together and we’re still playing them together.
ND