Debuting their new album, Where I’m Meant To Be, Ezra Collective straddle the past and future of free jazz to create a sound as ineffable as signature.
At the band’s sold-out show – and the beginning of their UK tour – the audience becomes a heaving, injurious mass. Fans sling themselves lazily over banisters just to be pressed there for hours. The only salve is the music they’ve come for.
After their first song – an eight-minute epic – the crowd are asked to say hello to a stranger. The band want us to become part of a collective, too. People smile instead of going to all ends to avoid eye contact. People start to say what they think.
The brass elements begin by playing from the rafters of the O2 Academy; this is a band that will bring the house down from the roof.
They move from percussive ambience to high energy performance; their music whoops and scats between them. They heat themselves up just to cool down to ice. They create a freight train of sound, following in the footsteps of iconoclasts like Kenny Burrell, Pharoah Sanders, or Thelonious Monk.
Their music whoops and scats: Ezra Collective have an innate ability to switch between the two with the ease of a puppet-master crossing his strings. The change is blade-quick, and the skill as sharp.
The shadows of bodies flicker across the wall. The venue might be bigger now, but they’ve always known how to make grand spaces feel like places that could be crossed in ten paces. There is a sense of real intimacy, and it feels honest.
The band tell their fans how they found their beginnings in Bristol; that The Canteen – one of the city’s iconic live music venues – was the first time they played outside of the M25. That Thekla was the reason they got their first stage at Glastonbury. Ezra Collective want their fans to know what they have done for them. They want them to understand that roots don’t always grow from the same place they were planted.