Ezra Collective photographed for Rolling Stone UK. Photo: Ian Hippolyte / Rolling Stone UK
Ezra Collective photographed for Rolling Stone UK. Photo: Ian Hippolyte / Rolling Stone UK
For one week, five musicians from London set up in a studio at Miraval, in the south of France, and played. Femi Koleoso on drums, TJ Koleoso on bass, Joe Armon-Jones on keys, James Mollison on saxophone and Ife Ogunjobi on trumpet: the same five who first met through a youth music programme in London. Most of what that room captured became Here Because of Hope, the fourth Ezra Collective album, which entered the UK’s Official Albums Chart at number one in September.
It is a career high, after their previous album reached number seven, and it arrived for a record built around performance rather than polish. Now the ensemble is taking it on the road again, with a North American run that opens in San Francisco on 12 November. Here is how the album was recorded, what it is about, and why its chart success matters for jazz in Britain.
A Week of Takes in the South of France
When the album was announced in May, the band’s press release stated plainly that Here Because of Hope was recorded largely in a week-long session at Miraval in southern France. The finished record runs to 17 tracks and a little over 63 minutes, according to the band’s Bandcamp page, so most of an hour of music came out of those seven days.
A week is not long for an hour of music, and that is the point of working this way. Ezra Collective are a live band first. Their release notes describe how their shows became rooms where jazz could move like club music, where musicianship and release sat side by side and the audience was invited in rather than asked to watch quietly. Recording the five of them together, in one place, for a concentrated stretch, is about as close as a studio can get to that.
The announcement’s description of two tracks from the final movement makes the method audible: “Jubilee Feeling” and “Black Flag” capture the joy of five musicians finding the groove together in real time. That phrase, in real time, is the sound of this record.
The Question Behind the Record
The idea came long before the session. According to the announcement, the band had been obsessing over one question: why does so much Black music born out of pain sound so joyful? They traced the pattern from Fela Kuti’s afrobeat, written as a soundtrack to civil war, to calypso born out of the slave trade, to grime emerging from the poverty of East London. In each case the music said something that defied its origins.
Femi Koleoso explained in the release that the answer they arrived at was hope: the belief that pain will one day change and lead somewhere better, and the decision to write in anticipation of that place. Rolling Stone UK, which put the band on a digital cover, framed it neatly. Where much music simply sounds joyful, on this album the joy is a destination. The band are interested in the journey from one emotional state to another, and in how harmony, rhythm and melody can help a listener move through whatever they are carrying.
The magazine also describes the record as a particularly personal entry in their catalogue. The five members now have families, responsibilities, losses and disappointments behind them, and the album turns that adult perspective into its most deliberate concept yet.
Three Movements, Five Players and a Narrator
Here Because of Hope is built in three movements, each devoted to a geography and its sound: West Africa, the Caribbean and the United Kingdom. The actor Letitia Wright introduces each chapter with spoken word.
The West African movement opens, after Wright’s first words, with “Blow Your Trumpet”, which the announcement says cuts through and announces its presence, and “Sweet Echo”, a light shone on highlife, the golden age of Ghanaian guitar music. The single “Only Love” brings in the British-Gambian rapper Pa Salieu; Femi has said the band wanted a distinctly African sound that is underrepresented, reaching beyond the West African styles they already carry naturally.
The Caribbean movement is about passage across the Atlantic. “Well Organised” features the Jamaican singer Lila Iké and is built around an interpolation of Max Romeo’s “I Chase The Devil”, with its roots in sound system culture. “El Corazón” brings salsa into the band’s world through conga patterns, bursts of brass and the clave; TJ Koleoso has said he felt salsa is little understood in the UK and wanted to show it could mean more than novelty.
The final movement comes home to London. The pace slows on “All I Need” with Leona Lewis, and the record closes with “Most High” featuring the Cameroonian singer Libianca.
The first preview, “Only Love” with Pa Salieu, arrived on 28 May, the day the album was announced, and the album followed on 11 September through Partisan Records with “El Corazón” as its release-day focus track.
From Number Seven to Number One
The chart result is the clearest measure of how far this band has travelled. According to the Official Charts Company, Here Because of Hope reached number one on the Official Albums Chart dated 24 September, and also topped the Official Homegrown Chart, where it has spent seven weeks.
The release came with a wave of attention at home. According to the release-day announcement, The Guardian handed Femi Koleoso the reins of the Culture section of its Saturday magazine for an eight-page takeover exploring the people, places and ideas behind the band, while Rolling Stone UK called them one of Britain’s biggest bands.
Their previous album, Dance, No One’s Watching, reached number seven, according to Rolling Stone UK. It carried the band to Wembley Arena and was followed by a BRIT Award for Group of the Year in 2025. Before that, Where I’m Meant to Be became the first jazz album to win the Mercury Prize, in 2023. Each step has been bigger than the last, and a jazz quintet at the top of the main albums chart is a striking result.
The roots of all this are modest. The first five members met through Tomorrow’s Warriors, the youth organisation that gave young musicians a place to learn, practise and play together. Rolling Stone UK traces the band through youth clubs, churches and small venues to their debut EP, Chapter 7, in 2016.
Taking the Ensemble to North America
The live show is where this music was always heading. The release-day announcement confirmed a five-city North American headline run opening in San Francisco on 12 November, with stops at The Regent Theater in Los Angeles, the Concert Hall in Toronto, Webster Hall in New York and Théâtre Beanfield in Montréal. The same release notes that Elton John has called them the best live band in Britain.
Demand is already clear in Canada. The Montrealer lists the Montréal show for Thursday 19 November at 8pm and reports that it has sold out, with only verified resale tickets left.
For listeners who want to understand the band before seeing them, NPR’s advice, quoted in the release, is to hear the album in its entirety because it will take you to a lot of places. The sequence of movements is designed to be heard as a journey.
Why the Joy Is the Destination
What makes Here Because of Hope work as a recording is that its concept and its method agree. A record about moving from pain to joy was made by five people moving through music together in one studio, over one concentrated week. The guest voices widen the map, but the ensemble carries it.
For the AcousticMusic.News desk, the lesson of this album is simple: “Here Because of Hope proves that a band recording together, in one concentrated session, can still reach the top of the chart.” Jazz is having a public moment in more than one form this season, as we reported when Brad Mehldau closed the Edison Awards with Bach’s Goldberg theme. Ezra Collective’s version of that moment is louder, and built for a dance floor.
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