‘I didn’t have enough life lived’: Moses Boyd on his most personal album yet

Detailed summary

With his impassioned second album, the drummer spearheading London’s collective jazz renaissance is helping restore the city’s faith in community, humanity and the future

It’s raining outside St Barnabas in Dalston, where Moses Boyd is due to play a few songs from his new sophomore album, Songs for Sinners, for friends and family later this evening.

Because the interior of the church — with its bare brick-and concrete walls and brightly painted crucifix — has a distinctly hollow chill, we’ve retreated to his wife’s black Polo hatchback for our interview. We run the heater to keep warm, while watching out for traffic wardens. “I think I’m OK here,” says Boyd, a boyish 35, looking out at his parking spot. “But you never know.”

A few mementos dangle from the rearview mirror, including a feather and two tiny souvenir boxing gloves — one for St Lucia, and one from Jamaica, where his mother’s family is from. He has already taken his drum kit, with “Moses Boyd” emblazoned across the front bass drumhead, into the church for soundcheck. He expects a band of friends and fellow musicians, including alt-gospel chanteuse Shantéh and bass guitarist Ezekiel Ajie, to arrive within the hour.

With a dimpled grin, Boyd tells me he’s set up a sound installation to play on a loop as people walk in: pre-recorded sounds of his own family singing, harmonising and cracking up around a table at his south-east London home. This “kitchen choir” is a central feature of Songs for Sinners. Their voices are rawer but no less impassioned than those of the professional jazz and gospel singers who also grace the record. Here, woven with Niji Adeleye’s vital contributions on organ and synth, these vocal layers jostle and vibe alongside jazz forms, dance grooves, glitchy electronics and Caribbean rhythms.

It’s a project that questions faith but also restores it — in community, humanity, a future. Long celebrated as a virtuosic drummer and producer, Boyd is the man whose 2016 single Rye Lane Shuffle, a propulsive slice of London Afrojazz, is widely considered a blueprint for the London jazz renaissance — a legacy cemented when his 2020 album Dark Matter was shortlisted for…

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