The borders between London’s musical tribes have always been porous. For Yussef Kamaal, the sound of the capital – with its hum of jungle, grime and broken beat – has shaped a selftaught, UKtipped approach to playing jazz. In the states, the genre’s longrunning to-and-fro with hip hop – from Robert Glasper to Kamasi Washington – has reimagined it within US culture. On Black Focus, Yussef Kamaal frame jazz inside the basssaturated, pirate radio broadcasts of London.
Taking inspiration from the anything-goes spirit of ‘70s jazzfunk, on
albums by Herbie Hancock or the Mahavishnu Orchestra, it’s a loose template
with plenty of room to experiment. The pair, made up of Yussef Dayes and Kamaal
Williams (aka Henry Wu), have
had little in the way of formal training. Instead, their musical tastes – and
approach to playing – are indebted to Thelonious Monk’s piano as much as
the drum programming of Kaidi Tatham.
“It's all about the drums and the keys,” Williams says. “Not to take
anything from anyone else, but that's where it all originates from: the chords,
the rhythm of the chords and the drums.” Born out of a oneoff live session to
perform Williams’ solo material for Boiler
Room, it soon became a project in its own right. Coming together as Yussef
Kamaal, they played a series of live shows where little more than a chord
progression would be planned before taking to the stage.
Bringing that unspoken understanding to the recording sessions (engineered by
Malcolm Catto of The Heliocentrics), the unplanned, telepathically spawned
grooves retain the raw energy of their live shows. “It's not so much about
complete arrangement, it's more
about flow,” Dayes says. “A lot of the tracks are just made
spontaneously – Henry will be playing two chords, I'll fill in the groove and
we'll just leave the arrangement naturally.”
Both hail from South East London, crossing paths in 2007 as teenagers
playing their first
pub gigs around Peckham and Camberwell. Dayes drums for cosmicallyinclined,
afrobeat outfit United Vibrations, while Williams – on top of drumming and
playing keys in different incarnations over the years – has made waves with
his solo, synthdraped house 12"s
for muchfêted labels like 22a and Rhythm Section.
Moving in the same circles but never playing together previously, rhythm
underpins an innate musical understanding. As Williams explains, “The way we
approach it is all about the energy and the feeling. We just get in there and we
feel it out.” Drawing influence
from all corners of London’s shapeshifting musical makeup, the sound of
Black Focus is distilled – or focused – down to the core interlock between
drums and keys