We out here

"London's vibrant jazz scene [is] reaching a zenith after years of steadily growing in global audience. We Out Here, a new nine-track compilation from taste-making DJ Gilles Peterson's Brownswood Recordings, offers a helpful primer on the community's main players ... Tenor player Shabaka Hutchings (...) is the compilation's musical director ... His muscular, urgent, raw sound fuels music that ranges from the frenetic spiritual jazz crescendos of Shabaka and the Ancestors to the deeply danceable, Afrobeat- and grime-inflected jams of his two-drummer quartet Sons of Kemet. Both projects, like the music on Kamasi Washington's 2015 breakthrough The Epic, feel tailor-made for festival audiences looking for a combination of groove and ever-ascending musical crescendos ... Sons of Kemet also stars tuba virtuoso Theon Cross, whose We Out Here contribution "Brockley" could easily be sampled for a fiery Skepta track. He goes head to head with tenor player Nubya Garcia and drummer Moses Boyd on a grime-y, stripped-down jazz piece that would be at home on a Trinidadian Carnival parade float. Boyd and Garcia also contribute to the compilation as bandleaders".

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"This vivid snapshot of young London's jazz scene, featuring nine bands and a collective pool of 35 musicians, contains close to an hour of daring and uplifting music -from rebooted spiritual-jazz through abstract experimentation to Afrobeat-flavoured dancefloor urgency, a rich mix further enlivened by shots of grime, hip hop and funk. It was recorded over three days last August under the light-touch supervision of its musical director, the saxophonist and clarinetist Shabaka Hutchings, who leads his own line-up on one track and is heard on two others ... The disc explodes the myth that British jazz is in the death grip of caution and conservatism, on a one-way journey to becoming a museum exhibit ... It reaffirms jazz's potential as politically engaged protest-music and as an art form whose creation and evolution would be as nothing were it not for the historical and continuing contribution of black musicians".

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