Although there’s no audience, Moses Boyd’s Barbican live stream has all the trappings of a major event – the opening gig in a spring series at this London venue. Swathes of white fabric billow from ceiling to floor; illuminated bars, a little like rave glow sticks, sprout up across the stage. Dry ice is pumping.
Arrayed on platforms are six players, a horseshoe shape that places drummer, producer and jazz envelope-pusher Boyd at the centre. If you were a teenage drummer and someone told you that at 29, you’d be lit by search beams, playing eight-minute solos on a riser in a concert hall with people hanging on to your every syncopation, you’d probably think you’d won the drummer pools.
And so Boyd has, in a way, having gone from session talent to major cross-pollinating force in a matter of a few short years. Over seven tracks the Londoner and his band play tonight, all taken from his first proper solo album, Dark Matter, Boyd leads the band from the drum riser. In contrast with his previous mixtape Displaced Diaspora (a more collegial affair from 2018, credited to Moses Boyd’s Exodus) and his freer, Mobo-winning jazz work with Binker Golding, Boyd wrote and co-produced all of Dark Matter himself.
One of last year’s best, it’s a restless, probing jazz record that doesn’t stint on the tenor sax solos, but draws deep from British-Caribbean sound system culture, from grime and garage. Perhaps not as overtly political as the work of fellow jazz travellers Sons of Kemet (Your Queen Is a Reptile, 2018), Dark Matter came together in the wake of the Windrush scandal and the Grenfell Tower fire. But Boyd’s focus is also wide, pondering the unknown stuff holding the universe together. He wouldn’t be averse to playing in space. “Shout out Elon, if you’re watching,” he jokes in the post-gig interview.
Earthly matters are very much the focus, though – as on What Now?, which feels precisely like the consolatory aftermath of a crisis. Some subtle hovering from the keys and Artie Zaitz’s careful guitar establish the track’s ambient tendency; it gradually meanders into a guitar workout, quite distinct from the album version.
The rest of tonight’s expansive set unfolds as a series of conversations between Boyd and the band, who come together and draw apart with exquisitely drilled timing. Improvisation remains key. Instrumentalists – some who featured on the album, others who did not – extemporise, then return to the track’s identifying motifs in a way that never feels rote or forced; this is Dark Matter, expanded. The album’s vocalists are absent; there’s just the vocal sample central to Only You, a borderline dubstep track in which the band stand down and Boyd showcases his talent for combining body-moving rhythms with technical flair.
In contrast to the short 2020 tour that Boyd managed to play before the first lockdown, his ensemble boasts an extra pair of horns. Joining regular tenor sax player Quinn Oulton are alto saxophonist Donovan Haffner and trombonist Nathaniel Cross, brother to the renowned tuba player Theon and the album’s horn arranger and – as Boyd puts it – its “Quincy Jones”. Boyd and the Cross brothers came up through Tomorrow’s Warriors, the development organisation that nurtured young London talent and has formed the bedrock of this internationally renowned and eclectic scene.
It goes without saying that diasporic dancefloor jazz is best experienced in a hot, dark club, but the advantages of this high-spec presentation lie in the all-seeing eye of the camera, ogling everyone’s technique and capturing all of Boyd’s time-bending virtuosic skitters.
Athough Boyd is the focal point, the ensemble dynamics of jazz ensure every player has multiple opportunities to flex – none more so than keys player Renato Paris, the star of a remixed 2 Far Gone. It begins with a conversation between Paris’s right hand, voicing tension, and his left, providing counsel. Eventually, Boyd and guitarist Zaitz pitch in and the track flows towards a confluence that finds at least three band members grinning, egging each other on. The re-entry of the horns into the mix is glorious.
On YOYO tonight, Boyd very cleverly makes his drumkit evocative of Trinidadian steel pans. But it’s the trifecta of brass that provides this music’s clearest links with the Caribbean. Throughout, they supply bittersweetness, a kind of hard-earned grace. At either end of the set list – on the garage-y opener Stranger Than Fiction and the absolute banger that closes the show, BTB – the horns bring the party, blaring in celebratory rhythm.
