Ezra Collective – Dance, No One’s Watching

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Ezra Collective – Dance, No One’s Watching

★★★★

Released September 27th, 2024 on Partisan Records

Jazz was party music. Reach back before bop and it was music to soundtrack liquor soaked debauchery (and other forms of debauchery, I’m not singling the booze out here). Somewhere along the lines, by the Eighties let’s say, people got the idea that jazz wore a suit and hung around on PBS soliciting donations. It’s probably Bill Cosby’s fault. At any rate, the technical improvisational skills came to occlude the genre’s early penchant for having a tipping good time together.

This latest generation of jazz musicians, especially the ones coming from that London scene I keep going on about, have remembered the past and have drilled into the core truth of jazz music: people can show off, but the goal is to have a very good time together. Ezra Collective get this.

The quintet won a Mercury Prize in 2023 for Where I’m Meant To Be, and Dance, No One’s Watching continues along a similar line. They let basslines walk and wander, framing them in Afrobeat rhythms but then garnishing them in glitter-chrome Eighties soul, sweltering island reggae, relentlessly moving salsa, and a centerpiece of Seventies jazz-funk. It’s a style that allows for expression but also gets everyone out onto the dancefloor to get their feet moving. Hence, an album about dancing – an album that exhorts you to do nothing but – that doesn’t feel as cheesy or one-dimensional as other albums about the exact same subject.

Throughout the album, collective action gets the goods, as it so often does. The truth of this is hammered home on the closing track “Everybody”, an exclamation of pure joy where everyone supports one of the best jazz motif melodies to come out in recent years. It’s pure playfulness, endless sweat, and a whole lot of fun.

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