Dance, No One’s Watching

“This record is the documentation of travelling the world with the band. And one of the things that became a rocket fuel for the band was the crazy feeling of making people dance.” – Femi Koleoso

Since becoming the first jazz band to win Britain’s prestigious Mercury Prize (Record of the Year) in 2023, Ezra Collective have been playing full tilt. Across the world on a lengthy tour and across 19 tracks of a brand-new album, the London-based quintet is one of music’s most exciting improvisatory groups. Upbeat and razor-sharp, the band jumps genres and generations – seamlessly fusing elements of calypso, Afrobeat, dub and reggae, Latin swing and soul into their hypnotic, jazz-based sound. Driven by the sibling rhythm section of Femi and TJ Koleoso, the stellar keys of Joe Armon-Jones, and the brassy punch of Ife Ogunjobi and James Mollison, Ezra Collective makes music that makes you move.

Apropos, their featured album, “Dance, No One’s Watching,” is both an invitation and invocation. Written and honed on tour and recorded at Abbey Road Studios, it’s a thematic celebration of a night-on-the-town around the world – from the “Palm Wine” highlife of West Africa to the meditative dance of Berlin, from the house beats of Chicago to the “N29” bus ride home in London. As guest vocalist Yazmin Lacey soulfully sings on one of the tracks, “Give me bassline, give me dollar wine. God gave me feet for dancing, And that’s exactly what I’ll do.”