Jazz or Category Error: The 20-Year Evolution of UK Jazz

When

19 Nov 2025

Where

Barbican Centre, London

Who

Lulu Manning

Xhosa Cole

Claire Victoria Roberts

Connor McAuley

Jason Yarde

Camilla George

SHABAKA

Rosie Turton

Alice Zawadzki

Shirley Tetteh

Dan Casimir

Corrie Dick

Renato Paris

What

“The Evolution of UK Jazz—20 Years On” at the Barbican Hall, was billed as an evening of “pioneering jazz” celebrating two decades of Serious’ Take Five programme and a highlight of this year's London Jazz Festival, with a world-premiere collaboration between Camilla George and SHABAKA and an opening set by Poesis.

Why

It is by no coincidence that over roughly the same period, the UK scene has come to international prominence through groups such as Sons of Kemet, The Comet Is Coming, Ezra Collective, and solo voices like Nubya Garcia, so that “London jazz” now names a distinct moment in global jazz history rather than a local curiosity. SHABAKA sits close to the centre of this moment: a multi-instrumentalist who first emerged through those bands, became a reference point for a younger generation, and has recently shifted away from the saxophone toward flutes, ambient textures and cross-genre collaborations. I went primarily to hear how his current practice would sound inside this carefully framed anniversary event: whether it would confirm the claim that UK jazz remains a site of genuine risk and interaction, or whether, at this point in its success, it has begun to circle around a recognisable image of itself—something to which SHABAKA’s recent work might belong just as much as it exceeds it.

Live Notes

As this tension is by no means unique to the UK scene but touches on the very question of what still counts as jazz, the event’s framing inevitably drew me toward a broader issue. Standing in November 2025, what—if anything—unifies the increasingly disparate claims to jazz authenticity? It cannot be defined simply by improvisation, harmonic complexity, rhythmic sophistication, or virtuosity. Jazz history is full of moments in which one or more of these elements recede, while the music remains unmistakably jazz. The more pressing question is what happens when these elements are thinned out, displaced, or only gestured toward.

Poesis © Emile Holba

The opening act, Poesis—Lulu Manning, Xhosa Cole, Claire Victoria Roberts, and Connor McAuley—announced a concern with interconnection, borders, and thresholds. Nominally unified as representatives of the four nations of the UK, the ensemble never quite translated that proclaimed unity into musical coherence. The four musicians functioned as isolated nuclei, rarely responding to one another’s phrasing or energy. Precomposed structures, tightly controlling form and harmonic texture, left very little space for improvisation or spontaneous interaction.

Against this backdrop, Connor McAuley’s drumming became the principal axis of interest—perhaps reflecting something intrinsic to percussion, where micro-variation and improvisation are almost impossible to suppress. Around him, however, a different logic dominated. The set unfolded as a somewhat naïve meditation on unity, articulated through resampled speeches, interview fragments, and field recordings calling for community, diversity, and political change. A tape delay unit, prominently displayed at the front of the stage, served less as a fully integrated musical tool than as a visual signifier—a gesture toward analogue authenticity that the performance as a whole failed to earn. At this point, a troubling possibility suggested itself: had contemporary UK jazz, at the very least in some of its iterations, narrowed into a performance of demographic representation and declared values, while the specifically musical labour of interaction and risk receded into the background?

Take Five: The Ensemble Arrives

After the interval, that apprehension was quickly dispelled. An eclectic ensemble of past Take Five alumni assembled under the musical direction of Jason Yarde: SHABAKA (alto flute, bass clarinet, shakuhachi and other instruments), Camilla George (alto saxophone), Rosie Turton (trombone), Alice Zawadzki (violin), Shirley Tetteh (electric guitar), Dan Casimir (bass), Corrie Dick (drums), and Renato Paris (keys/vocals). From the first notes, the contrast in energy, authority, and mutual attention was unmistakable.

Take Five 20 Years © Emile Holba

SHABAKA has become, by now, the most significant emergence in UK jazz in recent decades. Having laid aside the alto saxophone—and with it the heavy electro-funk, dance-floor drive, and Afro-Caribbean grooves of Sons of Kemet—he has moved into a practice defined by layered, intercontinental textures, drawing on instruments and scalar systems from multiple traditions. His collaborations with figures such as Esperanza Spalding, Lianne La Havas, Miguel Atwood-Ferguson, and André 3000 have only sharpened this singular voice.

Even so, the band seemed initially to be shaking off a residue from the previous set. Samples and field recordings again dominated SHABAKA’s opening pieces. At moments, there was an almost comic disjunction: SHABAKA rotated through a succession of instruments, sometimes changing every eight to sixteen bars, while the ear was drawn less to live gesture than to prerecorded sounds. Guitar textures—picks behind the fretboard, bottleneck slides—issued from the sound system while the guitarist herself remained largely motionless on stage. Technology here animated sonic events that the visible body on stage, while fully capable of doing so, did not inhabit.

The decisive shift arrived with Camilla George’s portion of the programme. A first piece, claiming jazz roots with a swing groove, morphed almost imperceptibly into Brazilian-inflected Afrofuturism, and with it the music seemed to exhale. Precomposed forms gave way to something more flexible and porous, a genuinely breathing corpus of contemporary jazz.

George’s playing was revelatory. Her vocabulary of contemporary “outside” lines and multiphonics never lost its sense of historical placement. Her solos moved fluidly between the modal architectures and cascading sequences associated with John Coltrane, the compressed bebop grammar that undergirds so much of that language, and the unhurried, melodic ease reminiscent of Sonny Rollins or Hank Mobley. The influence of Kamasi Washington was evident, particularly in the way grooves were allowed to expand and saturate the room, but here that influence functioned as an enabling condition rather than a constraint. It was what the ensemble needed in order to be let off the leash.

SHABAKA performing © Emile Holba

As the music opened up, SHABAKA too seemed to settle into his strongest voice, relying primarily on the bass clarinet. In this register he crowned himself, in real time and without pretension, as a legitimate heir to Eric Dolphy: angular yet lyrical, structurally inventive yet deeply rooted in timbre and breath.

Shirley Tetteh, granted only a single extended solo, nonetheless deserves particular credit. In that moment, and in her consistently tasteful comping and textural contributions throughout, she shaped the ensemble’s harmonic atmosphere with remarkable economy. She was superbly supported by Casimir, Dick, and Paris, who together formed the band’s true backbone: a rhythm section able to sustain grooves without rigidity, to follow sudden shifts of direction, and to make space where needed without ever draining momentum.

The Question Answered

The concert concluded with an original composition by Jason Yarde, offered explicitly as a celebration rather than a lament for jazz musicians who had died in 2025. It was evidently the least rehearsed piece on the programme, and that fact became a strength rather than a weakness. The musicians relied on continuous eye contact, small conducting gestures, and every available form of nonverbal negotiation to keep the structure intact. One could see the music being collectively thought, decided, and adjusted in the moment.

It was here that the evening’s initial question received its most compelling answer. Jazz in 2025 is not secured by any single trait—not improvisation in isolation, nor sheer virtuosity, nor sonic signifiers of analogue authenticity, nor even the most carefully curated gestures toward community and inclusion. Rather, jazz persists wherever these elements are held in a fragile but real combination that allows for something irreducible to emerge: musicians genuinely responding to one another in real time.

In those moments, jazz is neither pretension nor a demographic checkbox. It becomes an active commitment to community and diversity, not merely lip service: a willingness to listen, to risk, to adjust, and to create together. When that commitment is present, the question of what “counts” as jazz begins to look like a category error. The music, as on this night, answers for itself: “this is jazz.”