I saw Yussef Dayes play to a room that was too small for him and I have been thinking about it ever since. The drumming was — I want to use a word stronger than impressive and more precise than extraordinary — it was commanding in the sense of a force that takes possession of a space. There was no moment where the kit was decorative or supporting or filling in the background. The drums were the argument, and everything else was evidence for the argument, and the argument was that rhythm is not time-keeping. Rhythm is meaning.
The moment in British jazz over the last decade has produced several extraordinary musicians, and Dayes is central to it in a way that is both about his own prodigious talent and about his collaborative intelligence — his ability to create contexts in which other musicians are drawn to play beyond their usual capabilities. The Yussef Kamaal project brought him to wider attention. The solo work that followed has been establishing his individual voice in ways that are even more interesting to follow.
Black Classical Music — the album that arrived earlier this year — is an ambitious title that the music earns. It's jazz and it's not jazz; it's electronic music and it's not; it's soul and it's funk and it's something without an adequate name. It moves between these things with a fluency that suggests someone who doesn't experience them as different things. For Dayes, there seems to be one music with many dialects.
The Live Show as Primary Text
Dayes is one of those artists for whom the recorded music is a document of something that primarily happens in performance. I want to be careful not to diminish the records — they're excellent, and Black Classical Music in particular is thoughtfully constructed — but the live experience, by multiple credible accounts and by the footage I've seen, is something different in kind. The improvisation, the way the music extends and changes direction in real time, the conversation between Dayes and his collaborators — these things are available in the recordings only in compressed form.
This is not unique to jazz, where the live performance has always been the primary text. But it's a reminder that recorded music, as a medium, domesticates certain kinds of musical intelligence. The music that happens between the notes, in the decisions made in real time, in the risk and the recovery and the discovery — this is harder to document than the notes themselves.
On the New British Jazz Moment
A word about context, because context matters. The wave of British jazz that emerged in the early 2010s and has been building since — Yussef Dayes, Moses Boyd, Nubya Garcia, Shabaka Hutchings, Ezra Collective and their orbits — did not emerge from nowhere. It emerged from specific institutions, from Tomorrow's Warriors and the Jazz Refreshers' late-night sessions, from Dalston Jazz Bar and similar spaces, from communities of musicians who were in dialogue with each other and with diasporic musical traditions that British mainstream culture had undervalued. Dayes is a product of this ecosystem and its most visible current standard-bearer.
What the scene is doing — what Dayes is doing with his live shows and his records — is establishing that jazz is not a finished form, is not a museum piece, is not defined by what happened in New York in the 1950s and 60s. It's a practice that continues, that develops, that absorbs and transforms everything that happens to reach it. That's what living music does. Yussef Dayes is living music.
I keep coming back to the video of that small-room show. I keep finding new things to listen for in the drumming. It's one of those performances that rewards close attention indefinitely.
The best argument for Yussef Dayes is Yussef Dayes. Play the records. Watch the live footage. Let the drumming do what it does. The argument makes itself, more efficiently than any words, with a clarity that language can only gesture toward. The music is the point. I've been pointing at it for as long as I've known about it. I'll keep pointing.
The vocabulary keeps expanding. Each record adds new words to the language he's building. Each live show adds new dimensions to the language the records captured. Following Yussef Dayes is the experience of watching a musical language develop in real time, which is one of the most exciting things available to a listener. I intend to keep following for as long as the language keeps developing. Which I suspect is a very long time.
