British Jazz Pioneers Ezra Collective On Community, Rituals & Connection

How one youth club at London’s Southbank Centre paved the way for one of Britain’s leading modern jazz bands  

Ezra Collective played Way Out West festival in Gothenburg in August 2026, weeks out from the release of Here Because Of Hope – their fourth studio album and, by their own account, the most personal record they’ve made. We got to sit and talk with bandleader Femi Koleoso and his brother, bassist TJ Koleoso, minutes before their performance at the sold-out Swedish festival.  

The Koleoso brothers met their bandmates, Joe Armon-Jones, James Mollison and Ife Ogunjobi, as teenagers at Tomorrow's Warriors, a free jazz programme that has been run out of London's Southbank Centre by Gary Crosby and Janine Irons since 1991. It's still a reference point for them, present in Femi's 2023 Mercury Prize speech (the first ever awarded to a jazz record) and again in 2025, when Ezra Collective became the first jazz act to win Group Of The Year at the Brits. Now it's present in Here Because Of Hope. Femi said of Gary’s influence: “He gave you such a beautiful power to be who you are and what you’re meant to be.”  

Come backstage with us as we learn how the new album got its name, why deep pain can produce joyful music and the ritual that the band never skip before they walk on stage.