Jazz

A madman savant of the keyboards, who knows his Herbie Hancock like the back of his hand, Joe Armon-Jones offers yet more proof of the rude state of health of the British jazz scene. Previously published in the compilation We Out Here (a Qobuzissime record!) which came out on Gilles Peterson's label Brownswood Recordings in February 2018, this co-founder of Ezra Collective has now brought out his first record as a bandleader. Like his spiritual siblings who come from the same scene, Armon-Jones was brought up on a thousand different sounds. So this is jazz: but fusion too, and club music, afrobeat, hip hop, neo-soul, acid jazz, dub and funk, all rolled up in his Starting Today which also features artists like Nubya Garcia, Moses Boyd, Ras Asheber, Oscar Jerome, Big Sharer, Kwake Bass… Never deeply jazz in the classical sense, this record holds echoes of the late Seventies and early Eighties, when soul and funk infiltrated the genre, for better and for worse. Old-timers will think of Roy Ayers, Bernard Wright, Ramsey Lewis, Ronnie Laws, Ronnie Foster, the Blackbirds, the Headhunters, Alphonse Mouzon and a few others. But Joe Joe Armon-Jones never loses sight of the fact that he's living in 2018 and not 1978, and he points this out from time to time, which means that his album remains free of any whiff of formaldehyde, and retains a sense of fun, as a furious and groovy bout of channel-surfing. © Marc Zisman/Qobuz