Joe Armon-Jones

...Joe Armon-Jones is a central force in London, England's vibrant jazz, R&B, EDM, and hip-hop scenes. A founding member of the award-winning groove quintet Ezra Collective, he leads an active solo career and plays piano and other keyboards in the bands of saxophonist Nubya Garcia and tuba player Theon Cross. Since 2016, he's also worked and/or recorded and toured with a dazzling array of musical personas and as a solo artist. His light touch and lyrical approach to the piano were informed by the traditional facility of Ahmad Jamal and Oscar Peterson, while his funky groove-centric technique and kaleidoscopic aesthetic reveal the influence of Patrice Rushen, J Dilla, and Herbie Hancock. He is as comfortable supporting singers as he is instrumental soloists, as evidenced by his 2017 EP Idiom -- which featured both Maxwell Owin and Oscar Jerome -- and his 2018 debut long-player, Starting Today, with Asheber, Ego Ella May, and Jerome. In 2023, he and Owin reteamed for the genre-melting Archetype and in 2024, Armon-Jones issued the Wrong Side of Town EP with lyricist/vocalist Hak Baker and a crack studio band. All the Quiet, was a double album project released in separate parts; the first appeared in March, the second in June of 2025. Armon-Jones comes from a musical family. He was born in Oxfordshire in 1994. His parents had their own working band, with his mother as vocalist and father as pianist. He started going to gigs before he could walk and began playing piano at five or six. With music all over the house, he absorbed the intensely technical approach of Peterson and the lyricism of Jamal. The first singer he was obsessed with was Nina Simone. He learned to improvise at 12 and was taken by the music of Rick Wakeman and Emerson Lake & Palmer at 13, which led him, in a roundabout way, to the jazz-funk fusion of Weather Report and Herbie Hancock, and the knottier compositions of Chick Corea and Return to Forever. In his later teens he encountered hip-hop and the music of J Dilla and Rushen, who put fusion and jazz funk into context; Dilla became his favorite musician for quite some time. While still in his early teens, he decided to pursue a musical vocation. Armon-Jones' first recording session as a pianist was with Jasmine Powers on her self-issued 12" Stories & Rhymes, cut while he was attending Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance. He graduated with honors in 2016 after earning a Bachelor of Arts degree in music with a focus on jazz piano. Though he'd already been active on the South London scene for a couple of years, his career took off in 2016. He joined the Ezra Collective and helped to shape the signature meld of modern jazz-funk, dub, Afrobeat, and hip-hop that appeared on the EP Chapter 7. The same year, he worked with guitarist Oscar Jerome on his debut 12". In 2017, nourished by the influence of Jazz Re:freshed, he worked alongside bassist Daniel Casimir on his debut EP Escapee, and as pianist on saxophonist Nubya Garcia's globally acclaimed long-player Nubya's 5ive. Ezra Collective was already an essential part of the live scene in South London, and they cut and released Juan Pablo: The Philosopher in 2018 on Enter the Jungle. Armon-Jones and Owin collaborated on Idiom, their debut EP on YAM; it was released to universal critical acclaim. The following year, Armon-Jones signed with Gilles Peterson's Brownswood label and issued his debut long-player, Starting Today, with Jerome on guitar, Moses Boyd on drums, and guest spots by Asheber, Ego Ella May, and Big Shaker on vocals. In addition to playing electrifying live sets with Ezra Collective and on his own, Armon-Jones managed to play on half-a-dozen recordings including Makaya McCraven's Where We Come From: Chicago X London Mixtape, the Moses Boyd Exodus' Displaced Diaspora, and Garcia's When We Are EP. The game-changing We Out Here double-disc anthology also appeared. In 2019, Ezra Collective released the full-length You Can't Steal My Joy, and based on its critical and popular success, the band toured Europe, the U.S. (including a widely acclaimed gig at SXSW in Austin, Texas), and Japan. Armon-Jones issued the Icy Roads EP, worked on SEED Ensemble's Driftglass and Blinker Golding's Abstractions of Reality Past and Incredible Feathers (with Casimir), and guested with Owin on Pinty's City Limits EP. In September, after winning Session of the Year at Gilles Peterson's Worldwide Awards and being nominated for the second year in a row as U.K. Act of the Year at the Jazz FM Awards, Armon-Jones released his second Brownswood album, Turn to Clear View, which was co-produced by Owin with a studio band that included Boyd, Jerome, Dylan Jones, and Garcia, among others. The set included guest vocal spots by Georgia Anne Muldrow, Asheber, Jhest, and Obongjayar. In 2024, he and Owin reteamed to release the long-player Archetype, that impressed critics with its jarring, kitchen sink approach to genre blurring. The following year, Armon-Jones issued the Wrong Side of Town EP, a reggae and dub collaboration with singer/songwriter Hak Baker and a star-studded studio group that included saxophonists Nubya Garcia and James Mollison, bassist Luke Wynter, and drummer Morgan Simpson. During the remainder of 2024 (that saw the release of a reggae version of "Wrong Side of Town") Armon-Jones was deeply enamored with the soundworlds of dub reggae. He'd begun experimenting with dub and production on the previous EP, but dug deeper on July's "Ceasefire" (feat. Ranking Joe) and December 2024's "Sorrow" (feat. Liam Bailey). The musician again experimented with extending dub's sonic universe into his own collage-like slipstream approach to jazz, funk, R&B, hip-hop, and indie pop. To that end, he issued the two-part double-album All the Quiet in 2025. It was the first full length project to be recorded at the recently opened Aquarii Studio. Begun during the pandemic, its sound and textures evolved over the ensuing five years to embrace each of Armon-Jones' growing collection of musical and sonic obsessions -- they changed shape along the way as he integrated them into his own distinctive approach. All the Quiet, Pt. 1 appeared in March 2025. Its first single, "Kingfisher," featured longtime collaborator Asheber. The rest included participation from New York-born, South London-based rapper and musician Goya Gumbani ("Eye Swear"), as well as contributions from Garcia, Oscar Jerome, and others. All the Quiet, Pt. 2 appeared in June and included vocal appearances by Yazmin Lacey, Asheber, Hak Baker, Greentea Peng, and Wu-Lu, with most of the same players included on the first half. ~ Thom Jurek