London, England · jazz · dub

Joe Armon-Jones

2 festivals played ↓

Keys player at the centre of London's jazz scene — dub weight and hip-hop swing under long, unhurried solos.

Joe Armon-Jones was born in Oxfordshire in February 1993 to musician parents, his mother a singer and his father a jazz pianist, and he was educated at Eton College before moving into the jazz scene proper. He attended workshops run by Tomorrow's Warriors under bassist Gary Crosby, where he met the musicians who would become Ezra Collective, and he later graduated from Trinity Laban with a Bachelor of Music in 2016, in the same class as Nubya Garcia and Moses Boyd. Alongside his work with Ezra Collective he also plays in Nubya Garcia's band.

Under his own name, Armon-Jones released his debut album Starting Today in May 2018, followed by Turn to Clear View in September 2019, which Time magazine named one of its top ten albums of that year. Both records set Rhodes and synthesiser lines over rhythms pulled from dub, reggae, hip-hop and broken beat, and he has worked with producer Maxwell Owin on this material.

His playing leans toward long, patient improvisation built on heavy bass-and-drum foundations rather than dense, fast soloing, and his records frequently bring in guest vocalists and MCs to sit over those grooves.

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