Jazz music has always made a case for revolution, and we're falling back in love again

The word ‘Glastonbury’ tends to inspire more than a flinch from readers. The heady stench of soil, alcohol and sweat is enough to turn most people off. For some, the issue is political: last summer, Spectator columnist Rod Liddle wrote that dropping a bomb on Worthy Farm would solve most of Britain’s problems. He was joking, supposedly.

Yet this particular story, as so many about live music do, begins here in Somerset, three days into the 2025 festival, on a warm and fuzzy Saturday night. The crowds surrounding The Other Stage are euphoric, amid the sort of atmosphere that contradicts the idea that young people today are boring, depressed or incapable of having fun. Everyone is here: teenagers, old punks, lone wanderers and hip parents. And they’re all here for jazz.

Performing at Glastonbury’s second largest venue is Ezra Collective, a name that may be familiar to readers who follow the paces of contemporary music, although many older jazzheads in the field seem never to have heard of the band until today. Even they know, however, that it is not one to miss: they’ve looked it up on Google after seeing it on the line-up, seen the word ‘jazz’, together with a slew of critical praise, and decided to witness what all the fuss is about.

Ezra Collective is made up of five players: Femi Koleoso on drums, his brother TJ on bass, Joe Armon-Jones on keys, Ife Ogunjobi on trumpet and tenor saxophonist James Mollison. They formed in 2012 at Tomorrow’s Warriors, a jazz youth programme founded in 1991 by Janine Irons and Gary Crosby, who, in 2018, became the first ever jazz musician to be awarded a Queen’s Medal for Music.

Ezra Collective is no stranger to breaking new ground, either: in 2023, the group became the first jazz act to win the Mercury Prize, for the album Where I’m Meant To Be, as well as the first to ever win the Brit award for Group of the Year in 2025.

Jazz music has always made a case for revolution, its origins harking back to a time when African-American slaves had recently become emancipated. Blending their own musical traditions, such as ragtime and blues, with European harmonies and rhythms from the West Indies, the very roots of jazz sought to stretch across divides. If music is often said to be about bringing people together, perhaps no other genre fosters connection more convincingly than this one.

Jazz is also the gentleman’s genre of choice, seducing not only by its sound, but by its swagger — a cultivated cool that threads from Harlem’s smoke-laced clubs to the polished drawing rooms of Mayfair. Because it offers a rare combination of emotional improvisation and structural sophistication, it provides something of a mirror to the kind of man who reads James Baldwin by day and sips Bourbon to Coltrane by night.

As American music critic Ted Gioia once wrote, jazz is ‘the sound of surprise’: one that demands both attention and understanding. These are qualities the discerning male listener has historically prized. Jazz isn’t merely music, it’s a posture — one that signals depth, taste and sophistication.

The conduct of the crowd at Glastonbury doesn’t immediately scream ‘gentlemanly’ in the same way, although this is perhaps the magic of today’s jazz artists: they dabble less in the performative glamour of yesteryear’s practitioners and focus instead on the genre’s primal creative instincts. Ezra Collective’s concerts take a groove-first, lecture-later approach, unleashing the crowd and demanding that everyone take part. A true gentleman, although stoic, knows when to let loose. And, crucially, he can’t resist a dance.

Today’s jazz is a genre of multiple declensions. Some of it blends into funk; some leans more into soul. Jazz can also serve as a secondary flavour, there to infuse something more dominant, such as gospel. This is the case for Gabriels, a blues group that formed in Los Angeles, California, US, and is often cited by connoisseurs as one of the most exciting bands of the past five years. Alexis Petridis, The Guardian’s admired music critic, named its debut record Angels & Queens Part I as one of 2022’s albums of the year.

A pseudo-intellectual might argue that a jazz hybrid is not really jazz, but that’s a tough call to make, considering the genre’s origins. Fortunately, there seems to be little left of this old-school snobbery — and, fittingly, jazz is no longer confined to the hallowed halls of Ronnie Scott’s, W1, or the fictional jazz club from 1994’s The Fast Show, run by the hilariously pretentious Louis Balfour (played by John Thomson). Although intimate venues are still popular — and the preferred choice for many — what is significant about this particular jazz renaissance is the fact that it can pack out stadiums. An artist such as Raye, recognised as having single-handedly revived soul for the airwaves and whose style draws heavily on jazz, sold out the O2 Arena in 2024.

It seems almost inevitable that jazz would experience a renaissance after the pandemic. As people ventured back out into the world — into pubs, clubs or what was left of either — they found joy and freedom in music that was less structured and more esoteric. People were craving whatever they couldn’t get from Spotify or TikTok: namely, volume.

‘Jazz is the kind of music that doesn’t really hide anywhere,’ explains aficionado Charlie Hills, a writer and photographer. When going out still felt like a dare, a sound that bordered on the excessive scratched an itch. ‘Jazz is also a genre that leaves no room for insincerity,’ he adds. It’s honest, unrestrained and relies on instinct as much as cultivable skill.

There’s also a nostalgic element: returning to jazz is a bit like returning to an analogue instrument, such as a film camera, or reading a hard copy of a book. For many, it’s a welcome escape from the algorithm and our more widely digitally addled lives.

For others, however, jazz is part and parcel with the algorithm. An essential voice of contemporary jazz is the Icelandic-Chinese singer Laufey, the Billie Holiday of Instagram, spinning smoky ballads for millions of streaming fans — who, judging by their age, would have been 11 during lockdown and are now experts in bossa nova chord progressions. Her 2023 album, Bewitched, has become one of Spotify’s most-streamed jazz records of the decade. In May 2024, she sold out the Royal Albert Hall.

Despite this democratisation of the genre, jazz can still inspire a club-like mentality, giving a significant boost to smaller venues and private members’ clubs — dozens of which have opened in London since the pandemic. The House of KOKO in Camden, NW1, was founded in 2022 off the back of its namesake concert hall: a famed live-music venue that had previously welcomed shows by Prince and Madonna. ‘We host a range of artists in Ellen’s, our jazz speakeasy in The House of KOKO,’ explains Nick Lewis, the club’s head of music. ‘It’s always fully booked, two shows a week’, the demographic a broad spectrum of people in their twenties all the way to those aged 50 or more.

‘Jazz is an ever evolving art form,’ Nick continues, ‘and at its best is a reflection of the now. We’re delighted to continue to champion and host most, if not all, of the leading jazz players who are part of the genre’s resurgence in Britain.’ These include Ezra Collective and Gabriels, together with other talents, such as Nubya Garcia, Theon Cross and Sheila Maurice-Grey (of the band Kokoroko).

Since the pandemic, many have tended to favour smaller venues, somewhere with more intimacy or the contemporary equivalent of a speakeasy. Jazz is a major part of this shift, just as it was 100 years ago when the 1920s roared to life amid prohibition and the fizz and wreckage of the First World War. ‘People really want to dance at the moment,’ Charlie says. As in the 1920s, the cultural mood is maximalist — the French name for the Roaring Twenties was les années folles: the crazy years — and if music is the principle verse of this new Jazz Age, it’s not the only one. In literature, the past few years have seen an appetite emerge for a new Great Gatsby-esque epic. In that camp are authors such as Andrew O’Hagan, whose 2024 novel Caledonian Road offers a panoramic exposé of London’s criminal underbelly and its wily intersections into society’s upper echelons; or Sally Rooney, whose explorations of love, class and modern courtship have been adapted for television.

This is alongside a vogue for biographies of men with more than Gatsby-esque levels of wealth: Walter Isaacson’s Elon Musk (2023), say, or Michael Wolff’s indefatigable exposés of the inner workings of the Murdoch media empire — the most recent instalment of which was The Fall, in the same year. In film, too, there’s been a noticeable return to the epic in recent years: think Christopher Nolan’s Oscar-winning Oppenheimer (2023) and Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist (2024).

Perhaps the most convincing epic of our time, however, is another piece of music — and its surrounding concert tour. A few hours after Ezra Collective left The Other Stage, it was Charli XCX’s turn to bring down the house, burning the neon-green flag she’d deployed as a backdrop in every one of her concerts since last September. Her culture-lassoing 2024 album Brat (a crafty ode to clubbing interspersed with revelatory takes on female friendship and imposter syndrome) and its Brat tour have inspired a global, era-defining movement among the youth, running somewhat parallel to the jazz renaissance, despite offering a starkly different sound: ultra-modern, electronic, almost alien.

What people admire in both jazz and the genre known as hyperpop, Charlie explains, is their mutual exhibition of ‘excess and technicality’. This is not music that is easy to produce; nor does it tend to be easy on the ears. It is deliberately noisy, thrilling and chaotic — and inspires the same feelings of joy, abandon and fellowship. The culture has spoken.