Author Archives: Colette Marchand

Quick: picture a jazz band. I’ll bet you pictured a dim basement, a beret, and four men politely ignoring each other. Now throw that picture away, because Ezra Collective are the first jazz act ever to sell out Wembley Arena, and nobody in that building was being polite about anything. Ezra Collective are five Londoners — drummer and bandleader Femi Koleoso, his brother TJ on bass, Joe Armon-Jones on keys, Ife Ogunjobi on trumpet, and James Mollison on sax — who met as teenagers in Tomorrow’s Warriors, the youth jazz program that has quietly become the most important talent pipeline in British music.