![]() A jazz album winning may well prove an aberration, and things may go back to business as usual next year, but if their victory means that Where I’m Meant To Be finds a wider audience than it has thus far then the 2023 Mercury prize has done a good thing, and made itself seem worthwhile in the process. There are times when you wonder aloud at what the point of the Mercury prize is: when it feels like a meaningless addendum to mainstream success, when it appears to be simply telling people something they already knew. It’s approachable and celebratory without in any way seeming lightweight or drifting too far from the band’s roots: an album that people who don’t normally consider themselves jazz fans might fall for, but still resolutely a jazz album. It’s an album where the influence of spiritual jazz coexists with Afrobeat it successfully captures the band’s live energy, its kinetic power never dipping despite its 70-minute running time. It stirs together Afro-Cuban rhythms and post-bop with rap – both Sampa the Great and 2022 Mercury nominee Kojey Radical are among the guests – dub, funk and dance music and transforms Sun Ra’s Love In Outer Space into slick jazz-inflected soul with a vocal by the singer Nao, another former Mercury nominee. You can also see why Where I’m Meant To Be won. gfx file as follows with VMware (tested on VMware Workstation 10): config VendorVMware defaultdeviceCyberBladeXP. ![]() It’s been mocked as a patronising pat on the head, but you seldom hear the artists themselves grumbling: mainstream exposure for jazz and folk is scanty at best and sales figures are seldom huge, making the publicity surrounding the prize and any resulting bump in sales more important than you suspect it is for, say, Arctic Monkeys. I found that you dont have to find the date of the driver on your system. Virtually every year, a solitary artist from those fields gets nominated and invariably goes away empty-handed. The joke about the Mercury prize’s tokenism when it comes to jazz and folk music has been running for almost as long as the prize itself. Their acceptance speech began with a thank you to God: “If a jazz band winning the Mercury prize doesn’t make you believe in God, nothing will.” You could hear it in the audience’s reaction – the cheer was underpinned by a sort of delighted gasp – and you could certainly see it in the band’s: they literally collapsed in a heap on the floor by their table. ![]() A slight sense of disbelief attended the announcement that Ezra Collective’s Where I’m Meant to Be had been awarded the 2023 Mercury prize.
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