Ezra Collective brought out London youth club Kinetika Bloco for their performance at BBC 6 Music Festival. Check it out below.
The moment took place during their headline performance on Thursday (March 27) night at the Manchester-based festival.
“6 Music made it beautifully specific that they wanted the gig to feel different, to have a specific theme, and they gave us the planning permission to choose it ourselves,” Femi Koleoso told the crowd. “And every single time we’ve got a decision to make as Ezra Collective, we always go for the thing that we feel is most honest.
“You have to tell the truth, and the truth is, if we are to celebrate one thing, it has to be a celebration of all the youth clubs and all the schools that are teaching young people to play music.”
The band then welcomed the London-based youth club – who all wore t-shirts emblazoned with the slogan ‘Youth Clubs Change Lives’ – to the stage for a lively reindiiton of ‘God Gave Me Feet For Dancing’, taken from their 2024 album ‘Dance, No One’s Watching‘.
Kinetika Bloco is a youth music charity featuring young brass and woodwind players, drummers, steel pan and dancers inspired by music from Caribbean, Brazil, Africa and New Orleans. Check out the moment below.
Ezra Collective have frequently been vocal in their support of youth clubs. In 2024, the band spoke to NME about the importance of supporting youth initiatives across the country, saying that they would focus their efforts on helping more centres open if they had “Paul McCartney money”.
A year prior to that, when the London quintet became the first jazz act to walk away with the prestigious Mercury Prize, they used their winners speech to thank the musical education instutitions around the UK that helped the members of the band, and thousands of others, begin a career in music.
“Ezra Collective represents something really special because we met in a youth club. This moment that we’re celebrating right here is testimony to good, special people putting time and effort into [helping] young people to play music,” Koleoso told the crowd at the 2023 ceremony.
He continued: “Right now, this is not just a result for Ezra Collective – this is not just a result for UK jazz – but this is a special moment for every single organisation across the country ploughing their efforts and time into young people playing music.
“Big up Tomorrow’s Warriors, big up Kinetika Bloco, big up the BRIT School, big up ELAM (East London Arts and Music), big up Jubilee Youth, big up AudioActive. Let me tell you something really serious: we’ve got something special in the UK. We’ve got something special by the way of young musicians, so let’s continue to support that. EZ to the world!”
‘Dance, No One’s Watching’ was given a four-star review from NME last year. “On their third album, the five-piece pivot their style of jazz into hard funk, dub, neo-soul, Afrobeat and highlife,” it read. “The tight stabs and strong horn here feature across the album, from the marching, joyous ‘Hear My Cry’ to the Fela Kuti vibes of ‘Expensive’. You know this record will sound even better live.”
