The Yussef Dayes Experience: London’s Jazz Roots Meet a Global Rhythm.

I first stumbled upon Yussef Dayes in 2018, somewhere deep in a YouTube rabbit hole – the kind of late-night scroll where the algorithm feels almost divine. Back then, 'Play Next' was a portal, and somewhere within it I found ‘Love Is the Message’, a live recording from Abbey Road Studios written and produced by Yussef Dayes and Alfa Mist. It was my first glimpse into his world – a sound that felt both free and grounded, where rhythm seemed to move through air rather than simply mark it.

Usually, a drummer is the anchor, the pulse that holds everything in place. But Yussef doesn’t just keep time; he bends it. His drums move like melody, each hit alive with its own cadence and emotion. His playing carries the fluidity of Sabar drummers and the intricacy of ghost notes and high-hat patterns that flutter like breath.

The deeper I went into his sound, the clearer it became that Dayes was at the center of something larger, a key architect of London’s new jazz movement. His collaborations with artists like Jordan Rakei, Alfa Mist, Poppy Ajudha, and Kamal Williams mapped out a sound that blurred jazz, soul, and hip-hop into something unmistakably London.

After years of listening, I finally saw him live one late autumn night at London’s Royal Albert Hall. The air hummed with anticipation as a sold-out crowd awaited his performance of his debut solo album Black Classical Music. The lights dimmed, and a single bass line slipped through the hush – Rocco Palladino tracing Jaco Pastorius’ ‘Portrait of Tracy’ with meditative precision. Then Dayes joined in, coaxing rhythm from the air, smooth and unhurried. Venna’s saxophone rose through the space, and the entire 5,000-strong auditorium leaned forward, caught between stillness and sound.

That’s what it feels like to listen to Yussef Dayes and his band, or as he calls them, his “co-pilots.” Even covering a jazz standard, his touch is instantly recognizable: loose but deliberate, sliding effortlessly between pockets of sound.

That instinct runs deep. Dayes grew up in South London, surrounded by rhythm. In a treehouse-turned-practice space, he spent hours drumming with his brothers, while his father filled the house with records that spanned continents, Billy Cobham, Herbie Hancock, The Wailers, Peter Tosh, and, somewhere in the mix, Tracy Chapman. Each record was a new landscape: the layered funk of Hancock’s Headhunters, the syncopation of reggae, the deep pulse of soul. All of it seeped into him, forming a musical vocabulary that could never belong to one tradition alone.

By his teens, that energy was spilling out into London’s live scene. With his brothers, Yussef began hosting jazz nights at Passing Clouds in Hackney. Out of that came United Vibrations, a family band blending West African polyrhythms, Jamaican grooves, and the spirit of London’s underground – purposely expanding from the standard, American canon. Then came What Kind of Music, the 2020 collaboration with Tom Misch. It was the record that blew the doors wide open for the new wave of UK jazz, a scene unafraid of electronics, hip-hop, neosoul, creating a distinct groove that would mark it on the global jazz scene.

Three years later he released Black Classical Music, his debut as a solo artist and bandleader. Across 19 tracks, Yussef pulled together every thread in his musical tapestry – post-bop, fusion, reggae, highlife, Afrobeat, hip-hop. The title was a form of reclamation. As he explains in previous interviews, black music, in all its forms, has always been classical – ancient. On that record, you hear an artist giving his lineage its full symphonic space.

As if returning to the jam sessions that sparked his career, his next album The Yussef Dayes Experience (2024) revives the long-lost art of a live-recorded album. The beauty of live-recorded records lies in their capture of raw, spontaneous energy in ways studio versions rarely match. The way a band locks into a pocket, the slippery line between set chord progressions and improvisation. As he says “improvise, catch a vibe, and let the music and energy flow.” It’s in these places that the magic is found.

Then there’s nature, ever-present in his world since the beginning. His live performances often unfold against open skies from a sunset on the Malibu cliffs to the vastness of Mount Fuji in Japan. Through his organic sounds you can feel that he’s spent his life surrounded by trees, learning how rhythm exists in the wild – unmeasured, uncounted, but always in time. For the first time in the MENA region, that energy travels to Bahrain. On October 23, Yussef Dayes will bring his ever-evolving universe to the open-air Al Dana Amphitheatre performing in the desert garden, presented by SceneNoise alongside Glass Beams, DU$T, and The D.M.T Experience.