Nu-jazz / future jazz

Jazz as raw material

The first wave, in the late 1990s, came largely from European producers and labels who treated jazz as raw material: sampling it, sequencing it, and laying it over broken beats and deep house grooves. Think of the Compost and Jazzanova orbit, where live horns met programmed rhythm and nobody worried about which side was driving.

A new generation

The current wave flips the balance. A generation of conservatory-trained players, especially in London and Manchester, grew up on grime, broken beat, and electronic club music as much as on Coltrane, and they play jazz that breathes that air. Yussef Kamaal’s “Black Focus” became a touchstone: live, swung, dubwise, and unmistakably the product of the dancefloor. GoGo Penguin built acoustic trios that sound like electronica transcribed for piano, bass, and drums, while Mammal Hands and the wider Gondwana roster lean meditative and modal.

Follow the players

The connective tissue is Gilles Peterson, whose Brownswood label and broadcasting have championed this music for decades and whose compilations are a reliable map of who is next. For downtempo listeners, nu-jazz is the door into live music: the grooves are familiar, the tempos sit in the same comfortable range, but the playing is loose and human in a way programming cannot fake. Start with the records below, then follow the players across each other’s sessions, because in this scene almost everyone plays on almost everyone else’s records.