Review of Ezra Collective @ Astra Kulturhaus 15.10.2024

Scattered thoughts on a great night out

We arrived shortly before 8:00 PM. The line to get in easily overflowed out of the RAW Gelände and onto Revalerstraße, where it snaked along the Plakat-laden wall towards the Warschauer corner before it 180’d and began to ran parallel to itself back towards the venue.

Julius, Marco, Leti, and I were there already at the Wendepunkt, eating Döners almost lustfully. Marco, in his off-season, indulged in two.

In Berlin wohn’ ich, also steh’ ich an. I live in Berlin, therefore I queue.

It is impossible to separate the experience of waiting in a line with the reality of making the German Hauptstadt your home. The principle is straightforward enough: most everything is accessible, regardless of your income or status, as long as you wait your turn.

This inherent promise has a meaningful and perhaps underrated effect on the mentality of Berliners. Many believe that their responsibility is simply to show up and they will subsequently get taken care of. Implicitly, showing any kind of initiative more than this will be ignored.

I call this the Deli Counter Mentality and I think it is bad. But I will talk about this another time.

As we edged closer to the entrance, we were joined by Niklas and Moritz. They could not have timed their arrival any better, hitting us at the moment of ingress. The stars were aligning and the excitement inside was palpable.

It was my first visit to the Astra Kulturhaus and I was impressed by the venue. Almost twice the size of Kreuzberg’s better known Gretchen, the space delivers a comfortable vastness and proved quickly to be easily navigable.

Admittedly, my previous exposure to Ezra Collective’s music was rather limited. I know them mostly from the vital South London Jazz compilation We Out Here (2018), in which the group’s track Pure Shade is the “other song” to Kokoroko’s enormous Abusey Junction, which was a mainstay of undergraduate toking sessions at Fauxm and Mulch.

I am rather a fan of the group’s keyboardist Joe Armon-Jones, who closed out XJAZZ! back in May here in Berlin. The light touch of Armon-Jones’ keyboard playing is for me the most compelling element of the group’s sound. His introduction on Pure Shade, where he plays in counterpoint to woody percussion, demonstrates this nicely, as did a warming solo performed 2/3 through last night’s show; a pleasant dose of tenderness amongst a flurry of pulsing, urgent beats.

Interpretations of pop music numbers made up around a fifth of yesterdays concert. Angie Stone’s Wish I Didn’t Miss You was one such track and def a highlight. In general, I liked them, the crowd too. I told Julius in the moment that I appreciated the group doing so because it places them ‘in the tradition’ of the jazz masters of the mid-century, who famously selected popular songs from Broadway luminaries like Rodgers & Hammerstein, such as All the Things You Are and Embraceable You, to develop their own sound on top of.

The funny thing was that we easily identified the melodies but none of us actually could remember the titles of the tracks (Julius got the Angie Stone one later on). In fairness, we often pride ourselves on the obscurity of the music we like, so perhaps not a surprise there.

Regarding the band’s sound. Ezra Collective is not shy about its many influences. While it calls itself a jazz band, the influence of afrobeat looms large (they did an homage to Fela Kuti that was clearly the highlight of the concert for the assembled).

Focusing on the rhythm section, drums and bass, contemporary hip hop’s influence, think Kendrick Lamar, is substantial. Here, the connection to jazz fusion of the 70s and 80s, Herbie Hancock or Joe Zawinul’s Weather Report, is almost non-existent. Even though they are fundamentally a jazz fusion group, they sound more like a composite of afrobeat and hip hop than the next generation of fusion. I say this neutrally.

The band is after producing a particular music-going experience, one where movement and rhythm is at its very core. Today, the paying public is clearly looking for a more holistic experience when they approach jazz. This is why Ezra Collective can fill the 1,500 capacity Astra Kulturhaus while the brilliant Immanuel Wilkins Quartet performs in venues like the wonderful yet comparatively tiny Zig Zag, capacity some 200.

Final note on the band’s sound. I would say it comes together better as a marketable product than it does as a musical concept, much like the American (revivalist) jam band Goose, who I saw this summer in New Haven, Connecticut.

It seems, albeit from my somewhat limited concert going experience, that groups who claim a long list of influences are in vogue today. Perhaps a symbol of “stuck culture”, the recipe for commercial viability, let alone success, might very well be to unambiguously select a few successful genres from the recent past, blend them, and deliver a concert-going experience high on excitement and movement that is also referential enough to attract fans from the existing genres.

To sum it up: the innovation is more in the construction of a better customer experience than it is a step forward musically. The Immanuel Wilkins’ of the world, who, to me, are pushing the genre forward by crafting a fundamentally new and improved sound, are thus confined to smaller venues where the physical excitement quotient is more limited. But of course, it might just also be my taste talking here.

Credit: Julius Hoffman

I also must cover the political aspect of Ezra Collective’s performance, especially as it reminded me of frequent collaborator and fellow South Londoner Nubya Garcia, who performed in November 2021 at Gretchen.

Around halfway through, the Collective’s leader Femi Koleoso took the mic. He started by psyching up the crowd before quickly turning into a different direction. Koleoso proclaimed proudly that his band’s fundamentally cheery music is “not happy music” but rather is born out of darkness, a darkness that impregnates the whole world with its diabolical intent. After riffing for a few minutes on the darkness’ greatness and insurmountability, the crowd was starting to waver in enthusiasm. As a final flourish, the Collective’s leader constructed a juxtaposition, where joy exists as a counterweight to this ubiquitous darkness that pervades our world. The message was clear: there is no joy without darkness.

I won’t get into my view on the appropriateness of using the stage as a pulpit. I trust the reader will figure it out anyways. I rather discuss the view of the world Koleoso and his Collective aligns itself with.

The idea that there must be darkness for there to be joy should be easily rejected. Joy can very well exist and blossom on its own; it is not zero-sum. A joyful approach to life is one that centers on an expansive state of mind where optimism and a belief in a better future end up self-reinforcing themselves until they become true. Whether there is darkness, who’s experiencing it, and which groups ‘deserve’ it more or less don’t factor in here. Rather, such exercises tend to be zero-sum and usually don’t end up being helpful when it comes to taking action.

Giorgia Meloni had a solid observation in a recent speech she gave in New York. She revealed a central paradox of contemporary Western culture: we look down on ourselves while simultaneously feeling superior to other cultures.

The activism of Ezra Collective largely echoes this unfortunate paradox. Any joy we might have must first be qualified by acknowledging the darkness around it (looking down on ourselves). And then, we create a sense of superiority by congratulating ourselves for our own awareness of this ‘truth’.

With music, I am definitely in agreement that the contrast between sad and happy (usually sad lyrics and happy music) often makes for a thrilling result. Just look at Pet Sounds, this Michael Jackson song, or Blind.

But I am not sold that this is an effective method for creating an abundant joy that can benefit everyone. It seems rather to beget an unproductive navel-gazing that crushes the spirit, both collective and individual. Hopefully, I am wrong.

It was surprising that the band didn’t play an encore. It seemed clear to me that it was a political choice. No free labor. I am not sure what to think of that.

Thank you to my dear friends Julius, Letizia, Marco, Moritz, Niklas, and Pauli for a wonderful evening.