Red Bull Music Festival London
“London has a profound impact on me as a creative. It‘s a very harmonious chaos”
Joe Armon-Jones & Nabihah Iqbal
Nabihah Iqbal
CLOTHING: JOE ARMON-JONES: T-SHIRT, FLAASH APPAREL
The tag team Just back from playing at Glastonbury, 26-year-old pianist Joe Armon-Jones seems a little dazed that jazz superstar Kamasi Washington had joined him on stage at his Sunday-night gig alongside Afrobeat band Kokoroko. “[LA trombonist] Ryan Porter rolled through, and Kamasi played on some of my tunes. It was pretty mad,” he says. “I was directing legends that I’ve looked up to for some time.” Armon-Jones is used to adapting quickly. He plays with different musicians almost every night, either as part of renowned London jazz crew Ezra Collective or in his own projects. But despite the nearconstant attachment of the word ‘jazz’ to anything he does, he’s reluctant to label his music. “I don’t sound like Miles Davis. It’s a mixture of improvisation, dub, hip hop, soul, funk – if I start giving it a stupid name like, ‘Oh, it’s trap-dub-jazz,’ then it’s like I’ve put a stamp on it. It would stop me from making whatever I want to make in the future. I don’t want to be thinking about genres when I make tunes.” The Oxfordshire-born musician moved to south London to study jazz, and he cites local DJ and producer Maxwell Owin as a key influence. “He opened my mind to dance music. As a jazz musician, it’s easy to be arrogant about other music styles because, say, there might not be as many notes. But when you go to make those styles, you realise how hard it is.” When 32-year-old Nabihah Iqbal says she has diverse taste in music, she means it. A childhood Michael Jackson fan, she spent her teens THE RED BULLETIN
dancing to ska-punk at Camden’s Underworld club, and cites her favourite recent gig as jazz legends Sun Ra Arkestra at Dalston’s Cafe OTO. On her fortnightly NTS radio show, she’ll play anything from the US punk-rock of Alkaline Trio to calypso. “There are no boundaries,” she says; something that has surprised those with narrow ideas about what music a British-Asian woman might listen to and play. “It’s why I’ve chosen to use my real name as an artist,” she says, explaining why she dropped her previous moniker, Throwing Shade. “This is who I am and what I do, and there’s nothing incongruous about it.” Iqbal’s own sound is dreamy and electronic, as heard on her 2017 album Weighing of the Heart. A multi-instrumentalist – playing guitar, piano, flute and sitar, thanks to a degree in ethnomusicology – she studied to be a human rights lawyer and sat the bar, but a sideline in DJing at friends’ parties led her to music. If music is her first love, London is a close second: “It’s where I was born and lived my whole life, so it has a profound impact on me as a person and a creative. It’s a very harmonious chaos.” She grew up near Regent’s Park and now lives behind Abbey Road Studios. “I’m channelling the energy. There are legendary studios in that area, so I’ve got good music feng shui. Noel and Liam Gallagher lived nearby when I was a kid – I used to see them on the street and freak out. Once, I walked into a lamppost because Noel, Paul Weller and Alan McGee – Oasis’ manager – were sat outside a café on St John’s Wood High Street. I was 10 years old.”
September 11: Round Robin EartH, Stoke Newington Road, N16 Created for the RBMF, this event pairs up solo artists from different backgrounds for unpredictable, one-of-akind performances. So, how does Round Robin work? NI: “There’s one person on stage, then the second person comes on and you play together for a bit. Then the first person leaves and a new person comes on. So there are always two people playing, but it’s random.” RED BULL: How do you feel about sharing the stage? NI: “Jamming with people on the spot can be a bit daunting, but it pushes you out of your comfort zone.” JAJ: “I like having other people to bounce off.” RB: What will you play? JAJ: “Just keys, man. I can’t play anything else.” NI: “Guitar. I’ll take some effects and maybe a loop pedal. I play lots of things a little bit.” RB: Can you prepare for an event like this? JAJ: “You can try to make a plan, but it’s a bit pointless, really. Whatever happens, you’ve just gotta go with it.”
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