JAZZ
Rebirth of the cool
Last year, when Ezra Collective won the Mercury Prize for their album Where I’m Meant to Be, it felt like the first time since the award’s inception that a win for the ‘token jazz’ nominee was not just likely but inevitable. The forward momentum of British jazz music had finally reached the point where its bearing on mainstream culture could no longer be ignored.
It’s not that prior nominees with jazz leanings were at the Mercurys on TV in 1996, but it’s hard to imagine a group like Ezra Collective drawing huge crowds at Glastonbury a decade ago, or indeed a jazz-centric festival like We Out Here becoming one of the hottest tickets of the summer.
