Yussef Dayes chose a funny title if you still associate classical music with powdered wigs, stiff collars, marble halls and very expensive silence.
Or maybe he did not.
Maybe he is making classical music. Just not the version that got framed, protected and taught as the only one worth capital letters. This record points the word somewhere else: towards drums, family, Black musical lineage and the long, living roots of so much music that came after.
It is Yussef’s debut solo studio album, but it does not sound like a beginning. Because for a solo album, Black Classical Music is beautifully crowded. Dayes leads from the drums, builds the floor, sets the pulse and creates the bed that lets others move.
Tom Misch, Venna, Shabaka Hutchings, Chronixx, Masego and others appear across the record like people walking into the same room through different doors. Jazz, reggae, soul, Afro-Cuban rhythm, orchestral flourishes and spiritual heat all sit together without anyone stopping to explain why.
The record refuses jazz as a box, but honours it as lineage. It knows where it comes from without behaving like a museum piece. It has the looseness of something alive and the discipline of something deeply studied.
You do not need awards to feel that, but it is nice when the paperwork catches up. Black Classical Music went on to win Best Album at the Ivor Novello Awards.
Put it on and wait for that little involuntary stank face. That moment where you remember music does not have to sit still to be classical.
Sometimes it just has to move like it knows where it came from.
Listen where you listen:
