Gig of the year: Ezra Collective, at the Royal Albert Hall, reviewed

The American music website Pitchfork is the journal of record for alternative America. It has became this generation’s Rolling Stone, for both good and ill. Long before it was bought by Condé Nast, however, it was famous for a disastrous jazz review in which the site’s founder chose to employ what he appeared to believe was the vernacular of a jazz ‘cat’ of the early 1960s.

All is forgiven, though. Here was the London outpost of the Pitchfork Festival, opening with jazz stars Ezra Collective, the quintet who earlier this autumn won the Mercury Prize for their second album, Where I’m Meant To Be. Ezra Collective are very easy to like. Their music is a fast-acting suffusion of gaiety and joy, utilising the strongest-known ingredients for the rapid delivery of pleasure: Afro-Cuban jazz and salsa, Afrobeat (the west African 1970s style, not to be confused with Afrobeats), accompanied by reggae, soul and hip hop.

Ezra Collective are rather more upbeat than you might imagine from the tenor of some of their press, which suggests you’re about to get Ken Loach set to music.