Dance, No One's Watching — Ezra Collective (2024)
A record made in a crowded room, for rooms that are usually quiet.
By Rafi Mercer
The etiquette in most listening bars is stillness. You are asked, without ever quite being told, to keep your body out of the way so the sound can have the room. Shoulders down. Glass on the counter. Somebody else's needle doing the moving. It is a discipline, and like most disciplines it can curdle into piety if nobody is watching it carefully.
So a record called Dance, No One's Watching arrives with a small argument attached.
Ezra Collective's third album came out on 27 September 2024 on Partisan. Nineteen tracks. Fifty-seven minutes. Femi Koleoso on drums, his brother TJ on bass, Joe Armon-Jones on keys, James Mollison on saxophone, Ife Ogunjobi on trumpet — five who met as teenagers at Tomorrow's Warriors, the London jazz programme, in 2012.
The circumstances of the recording matter more than usual. They cut it at Abbey Road in the days immediately after Notting Hill Carnival, and days before they won the Mercury Prize for the album that preceded it. And they did not do it alone. Friends and family were invited into the studio, in a nod to the Beatles playing to the roof before the building took their name. Koleoso has said there were so many people in the room that playing in isolation would have been a disservice to the idea. You can hear the consequence between tracks. Voices. Movement. A room that has not been swept clean.
The structure is a night out, laid down in order. Four short interludes divide it: cloakroom link up, in the dance, our element, lights on. Arrival, immersion, mastery, the walk home. Koleoso described it to Apple Music as the sound of release, a world tour compressed into a single evening.
The geography is doing real work. "N29" is named for the night bus that carries people from Trafalgar Square back up to Enfield. "Ajala" was written after the band played Fela Kuti's New Afrika Shrine, and recorded in Lagos in October 2023. "Palm Wine" reaches for Sierra Leonean palm wine music and highlife. "Expensive" takes Fela's "Expensive Shit" and puts Armon-Jones' keys through it. There is a cameo from Ian Wright at the top of "Shaking Body," which tells you exactly which London this is.
And the horn writing has grown. Ogunjobi and Mollison are still the front line, but the sessions widened to pull in Nubya Garcia, Jay Phelps, Kaidi Akinnibi, Jermaine Amissah, Richie Seivwright on trombone, and a string section besides. The lines arrive in tight stabs rather than long solos — placed, not paraded. Yazmin Lacey sings on "God Gave Me Feet For Dancing," Olivia Dean on "No One's Watching Me," M.anifest and Moonchild Sanelly on "Streets Is Calling." Dean's vocal is the album's still centre: it slows the room without stopping it, which is a harder thing to do than either.
Not everything lands. Jazzwise heard a self-consciousness in places, a stylised quality creeping into some of the tracks, and that is a fair note. A record built to bottle a feeling occasionally shows you the bottle.
But the reason it belongs in a listening bar is the reason it seems not to. Stillness is not the point of these rooms; attention is. A record about a dancefloor, played to people who are sitting down, becomes a record about what a dancefloor is for — which is other people, in proximity, at the same time. That is the thing the room and the record are both after. One reaches it by moving. One by holding still.
It went to seven on the UK albums chart and two on the independent chart. Mojo placed it thirty-third among the albums of 2024. Barack Obama put "God Gave Me Feet for Dancing" on his songs of the year. On 15 November 2024 the band headlined Wembley Arena, the first British jazz act to do it, and at the BRITs the following February they became the first jazz band to win Group of the Year.
The fourth album, Here Because Of Hope, is out on 18 September 2026 — split into three movements tracing the movement of Black people from Africa to the Caribbean to London, with Pa Salieu, Lila Iké, Leona Lewis and Libianca.
Ten days from now. Put this one on before it arrives, in a quiet room, and see whether you stay in the chair.
Quick Questions
When was Dance, No One's Watching released?
27 September 2024, on Partisan Records. It followed Where I'm Meant To Be (2022), which won the Mercury Prize.
Why does the album have interludes?
The four short acts — cloakroom link up, in the dance, our element, lights on — sequence the record as one night out, from arrival to closing.
Does it work as a sit-down listen?
Yes, though it wasn't built for one. The Abbey Road room noise and the horn arrangements reward close attention as much as movement.
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More albums in the listening bar canon: Listening Bar Albums.
