Dub against Dystopia | Interview with Joe Armon-Jones

Joe Armon-Jones is thinking about the end of music. On his latest, third album as bandleader, the 32-year-old pianist is imagining a world of silence.

“The album is called All The Quiet because it’s about a world thousands of years in the future when music has been pushed out of existence,” he says. “It hasn’t been taken care of and the building on the cover of the record is its final resting place that’s about to be attacked. We’re inside playing, listening and preparing.”

The premise might seem like a sci-fi fantasy but for Armon-Jones it’s a reflection of the world we’re currently living in.

“We’re treating music like we do the environment – it’s something we don’t realise needs care and attention, so instead we consume it like it’s a throwaway commodity,” he says. “But if you took music away, it would ruin people’s lives. We need to nurture those who make music and give young people the chance to see it as a real career rather than listening to government adverts telling them to retrain out of the arts into something vocational.”

Sporting his signature mop of unruly ginger hair and speaking over video call from his South London home, Armon-Jones is living proof of the power of a musical education.

Growing up in Oxfordshire to musical parents – his father is a jazz pianist and his mother is a singer – it wasn’t until he joined the London-based grassroots jazz program Tomorrow’s Warriors as a teenager that he realised his own potential career in the industry.

“Tomorrow’s Warriors was huge for me – it showed me there was a scene I could be part of and it gave me some of my first experiences of gigs and getting paid to play shows,” he says. “No one was being dragged to Tomorrow’s Warriors sessions each week by their parents, they went because they wanted to. It wasn’t strict and that’s how they got so many kids together to play. They’re doing the jobs that schools should be doing – helping kids find out whether they’re passionate about music or not and showing them the path forwards.”

It was at the weekly Tomorrow’s Warriors rehearsal sessions at London’s Southbank Centre that Armon-Jones first met and became friends with saxophonist James Mollison, drummer Femi Koleoso and bassist TJ Koleoso – players that would ultimately join him to form the group Ezra Collective. Releasing their first, Afrobeat-inspired jazz fusion album, You Can’t Steal My Joy, in 2019, it is over the past two years that the band have had a meteoric rise. In 2023, they became the first jazz act in history to win the prestigious Mercury Music Prize for their second album Where I’m Meant to Be and in 2024 sold out their biggest show to date at the 12,000-capacity Wembley Arena.

“It’s been a mad culmination of a lot of hard work,” Armon-Jones says. “Winning awards can unlock certain people who won’t otherwise listen to your music but it’s also a game that people play. Wembley, on the other hand, was amazing – it was a huge day and playing a room of that size is a bit of a challenge because you can’t connect to the crowd as easily as you might in a small jazz club, you can just hear them scream!”

More recently, the band won their first Brit Award for Group of the Year and in their speech reiterated Armon-Jones’ message of supporting youth music and training in the UK.

“This moment is because of the great youth clubs and teachers and schools that support young people playing music,” bandleader Femi Koleoso said onstage to roars of approval. “The solution to so many problems facing UK society is to give young people a trumpet or a saxophone because then you can give them a goal and a passion.”

“All of our music is part of a mission to get people listening and feeling the joy of it,” Armon-Jones continues. “There isn’t enough funding for children’s music and people are consuming it differently, thinking it should all be available at their fingertips on Spotify rather than paying properly for it.

"That all works to change the way you value the music, since when you pay for something you enjoy it more. I love buying records and the excitement of carrying them home. No one can take that away from you, whereas a company like Spotify can delete tracks from libraries at any time.”

It’s a sentiment that makes the dystopian future of Armon-Jones’ latest, double album All The Quiet feel all the more prescient. Spread across two 10-track albums, the project plays like a culmination of Armon-Jones’ past decade spent in Ezra Collective and at the forefront of the new London jazz scene being part of bands led by the likes of saxophonist Nubya Garcia and Shabaka Hutchings. Drawing on Afrobeat influences, as well as soul, R&B, dub, reggae and the lightning-fast licks of pioneering jazz pianists such as Oscar Peterson, All The Quiet is ultimately a remarkably loud tribute to the lasting impact of improvisational music.

Tracks like Part I opener ‘Lifetones’ see Armon-Jones’ fractal licks twinkling over dubby horn fanfares, while ‘Journey South’ and ‘One Way Traffic’ tap into a joyous sense of R&B melody and ‘Snakes’ sinuously shifts through ever-changing drum beats courtesy of Natcyet Wakili’s intuitive feel behind the kit. The records pulse with an energetic feel that radiates the warmth of a live room recording, yet Armon-Jones in fact spent the past four years painstakingly mixing the band’s live tracks through a dub-influenced mixing desk at his home studio.

“I try not to prescribe too many things before we get into the live room with the band because my favourite moments come from improvising and the unknown is the best part of the process,” he says. “We recorded four years ago and then I sat with this music for a long time, experimenting with different ways to mix once I taught myself how to use a desk in 2021.

"It really opened my eyes that mixing can be a form of improvisation in itself, that you can explore arrangement options of echo, reverb and filters, making decisions right in the moment with the same thrill as playing a solo where you don’t know if it’ll work or not but the reward comes from taking the risk.”

The result ranges from the subtle, like the echoing reverb placed on mid-tempo groover ‘Nothing Noble’ to the arrestingly experimental, like the eerily pitch-bent and reversed sounds of ‘Show Me’ or the unsettling slowed horns of ‘505 Standby’. “It all pays tribute to my love of dub,” Armon-Jones explains. “I never listened to it when I was younger, since I was much more into jazz pianists like Oscar Peterson, but someone took me to see a soundsystem clash at Scala in 2011 and it blew my mind. I never knew you could physically feel the vibrations of the music move you like that and I have always wanted to combine it with the experience of live jazz ever since. Mixing in a way like [pioneering dub producer] King Tubby, I’m making those vibrations happen through these jazz instruments.”

Ultimately, All The Quiet might imagine a terrifying future where music has been left to rot in abandonment, but in playing the sprawling twenty-track double album itself, Armon-Jones makes a joyful noise, coming full circle to pay tribute to his dub heroes, as well as tapping into his jazz training from groups like Tomorrow’s Warriors and Ezra Collective.

It’s vibrant, vital and full of instinctive energy, all giving testament to the fact that thankfully, the music is still very much alive and well – we just need to sit back and listen.

Joe Armon-Jones plays the Jazz Arena at Cheltenham Jazz Festival on 3 May

This article originally appeared in the May 2025 issue of Jazzwise – Subscribe Today