The BBC’s Sound Of 2025 runner-up is Ezra Collective, a band that has won the Mercury Prize and become the first jazz act to sell out Wembley Arena. The charity Tomorrow’s Warriors introduced Ezra Collective to jazz, which they thought was an elite and inaccessible genre at first. The quintet rips the genre rulebook to shreds and uses elements of Afrobeat, hip-hop, grime, reggae, Latin, R&B, highlife, and jazz. Their music is life-affirming, and their ideals are community and musical kinship.
The band’s foundation is Tomorrow’s Warriors, a charity that offers training to musicians who can’t afford private tuition, focusing particularly on “those with a background from the African Diaspora and girls, who are often under-represented in the music industry”. Koleoso recalls meeting his best friends at Tomorrow’s Warriors and remains a strong advocate of youth clubs. He believes they can help with issues such as domestic violence or the male suicide rate by teaching people how to deal with rejection, love people, control anger, and respect others.
Ezra Collective’s second album, Dance, No-One’s Watching, features a short, aborted performance and background noise, expressing their desire to document life in its entirety. The album is about how dancing and losing yourself in music with others can be a sacred and healing experience. The band is infectiously energetic, involving the crowd in their shows and making fans a part of their ensemble. They hope to inspire the next generation of musicians to overcome their fears and be fearless on stage.
Koleoso’s A-level music teacher gave him a D, which proved embarrassing and challenging to convince his parents that playing music would be okay. However, he believes that exams determine just one type of intelligence, and music shouldn’t be defined by them. Instead, music should be a truly authentic, real, and raw experience, where no feelings are held back, as long as what you’re hearing is very, very real, according to Koleoso
Read the full article from The BBC here: Read More
