So, is it jazz? Gershwin’s ‘Summertime’ is on Is This Jazz?, and George Benson’s ‘On Broadway’ too. But never have such classics felt so dark and coiled, so filled with delicious menace. “But they’re dead wrong, I know they are/’Cause I can play this here guitar”, sings former busker and Vooduu People leader/songwriter/singer/guitarist Ese Okorodudu in her take-no-prisoners voice, while bells shake, drums roll, massed voices soar and a cowbell is beaten, hard.

And play guitar this South Londoner most certainly can: twanging, wheeling and squeak-sliding through chord changes on such confident originals as ‘Vooduu Chameleon’, an instrumental in which wah-wah effects come accompanied by shakers, whistling, humming and found sounds, and guitars and backing vocalese gather dramatic force. On ‘Up In Smoke’, Ese sings of London, weed, vulnerability and electric soul over effects-laden rock and skittish Afrobeat.

The album’s superb production (by Carl Russ-Mohl and Ese herself) suits the global mash-up of players with origins everywhere from the UK to Guyana, Venezuela, Italy and DR Congo, their influences – Hendrix, Fela, Gil Scott-Heron – palpable.

Scott-Heron’s legacy is there in the ‘Intro’ to live album Jazz Is What We Say It Is! in which MCs Be Atwell and Lucifer set out the band’s stall by rhyming ‘jazziswhatwesayitis’ with ‘justice’, and more cheesily, “Allah, the Buddha and Jah, we love ya whoever you are”, as riffs fizz, dub effects whirl and a didgeridoo (go, Jay Phelps!) yelps in circles.

Ese and her Vooduu People have garnered a reputation as a stellar live act, and this live album, recorded at Pizza Express in Holborn (complete with anticipatory chatter and laughter), bottles their in-your-face magnetism while showcasing the members’ freewheeling creativity and knack for improvisation. Tunes from Is This Jazz? feature in wildly different incarnations, vying with new originals and three covers, including Gil’s ‘Home Is Where the Hatred Is’, an album highlight. Not all of it is jazz, regardless of what Ese & Co insist. But is it good? Oh yes, it is.