51. Dance Like No One’s Watching!

Or, How to Listen to Ezra Collective's Fifth LP

The first time I heard Ezra Collective was during a live play. The band was headlining a music festival that summer. The groove was unmistakable: that booming Afrobeat bassline, that tentative silence of a microsecond before a triumphant brass session blared its forceful presence. Imagine my shock when I found out it was a quintet (not some 11-man band) doing all that madness.

In many ways, Ezra Collective reminds me of Fela’s first band, Koola Lobitos, which was tasked with executing Fela’s vibrant vision of playing a hybrid of highlife and jazz. Armed with the prodigious talent of Toni Allen, a seeker very much like Fela, Koola Lobitos breezed through the '60s without a significant hit (or breakthrough) but with a disciplined sound that was, in many ways, an ambitious interpretation of highlife through the jazz.

Ezra Collective identifies as a jazz band. Any keen listener should take this description with a pinch of salt. Wholesome marketing aside, Ezra Collective is really an Afrobeat band. Unlike Koola Lobitos, they are reinterpreting jazz through Afrobeat. This herculean task involves an emotional journey reminiscent of the origins of these genres. Listening to Ezra Collective is eavesdropping on a jam session of Black Diaspora music genres. 

And now to the title of their latest album. Dance, No One’s Watching, might be their most powerful yet. Part instructive and part observational, it fully decommissions that thing people like us know too well–the outsider’s gaze. The notion of music and its forge, the dancehall, as a safe place is not entirely new. For Africans and their polyrhythmic predilections, music and dance are as intertwined as suffering and resilience. The facility to articulate sorrow in song is what gives these Black music genres their bite, their edge, their relevance. 

album cover courtesy album promotional material

Think of the blues' biographical candour. Think of Jazz’s flamboyant improvisation. Reggae’s robust plot about the everyman and his inevitable denouement marked by emancipation gives the genre its essence. This higher calling revolutionised Fela’s highlife jazz into Afrobeat in the first instance. That success was extensively recorded in the Africa 70 era of Fela’s music.

Although Fela became more invested in his message than in the music from the late 1970s, the much-vaunted Berlin 78 Jazz Festival headliner showcased fiery music with excessive political overtones, and his German audience's response–mild disappointment–was clearly documented.

The scathing criticism of the Egypt 80 band was the mismatch between political messaging and dance grooves. If one were to look at Fela’s life, perhaps dance was a feckless endeavour to champion. Thankfully, his biological sons’ works have been to adjust the skew. In this vein, Ezra Collective’s Afrobeat is closer to Fela’s sons than to Fela–and, indeed, closer to Femi Anikulapo-Kuti than to his younger brother, Seun, whose music still creaks from his father’s overpowering legacy. In any case, these chappies are Made’s contemporaries. Led by drummer Femi Koleoso, Ezra Collective compromises of his bassist brother TJ Koleoso, keyboardist Joe Armon-Jones and saxophonist James Mollison. For an immigrant like myself, this music transports me back to Lagos, Freedom Park, starless nights at the Amphitheatre, a different band, a different era.

It is the 2010s all over again. I am a medical officer working in a boutique hospital at night, studying for psychiatry exams during the day, and taking Friday to feast on great music to watch limber bodies respond to that music. Hence, my exception to the title, Dance, No One’s Watching. 

I humbly offer my revision: Dance Like No One’s Watching!