SOUND PROJECTIONS
AN ONLINE QUARTERLY MUSIC MAGAZINE
EDITOR: KOFI NATAMBU
SUMMER, 2021
VOLUME TEN NUMBER TWO
MARVIN GAYE
Featuring the Musics and Aesthetic Visions of:
JUNIUS PAUL
(July 10-16)
JAMES BRANDON LEWIS
(July 17-23)
MAZZ SWIFT
(July 24-30)
WARREN WOLF
(July 31-August 6)
VICTOR GOULD
(August 7-13)
SEAN JONES
(August 14-20)
JESSIE MONTGOMERY
(August 21-27)
KAMASI WASHINGTON
(August 28-September 3)
TERRACE MARTIN
(September 4-10)
FLORENCE PRICE
(September 11-17)
HUGH MASEKELA
(September 18-24)
ALFA MIST
(September 25-October 1)
https://www.allmusic.com/artist/alfa-mist-mn0003679307/biography
Alfa Mist
(b. 1992)
Artist Biography by James Wilkinson
An East London-raised pianist, producer, and rapper of Ugandan descent, Alfa Mist incorporates hip-hop and soul into his cerebral take on contemporary jazz. He first garnered attention with his 2015 debut, Nocturne, released on his own Sekito label. Mist further expanded his approach, exploring fusion and orchestral textures with rap and recorded conversations on 2017's Antiphon and 2019's Structuralism. He then signed with Anti- for 2021's equally genre-bending Bring Backs.
Like many teenagers from Newham, Alfa Mist was initially turned on to music by grime and hip-hop. However, once he learned that many of the samples used by his favorite artists originated from jazz, he investigated that genre further. Despite being from a family of non-musicians, he began to teach himself piano at the age of 17, developing a jazz-based dexterity on the instrument and gravitating toward a textured, Rhodes-inspired sound. On his own Sekito imprint, he issued his first album in 2015. The soulful Nocturne contained the kind of laid-back beats that would continue to permeate his music while shaping it around collaborators Tom Misch, Racheal Ofori, and Emmavie, to name a few.
By the time of 2017's Antiphon, Alfa Mist's vision was codified. The album's expansive, largely instrumental pieces featured audio vérité conversations with his brothers on topics such as values and respect, and was much more indicative of his chosen path. 2018 brought two co-billed singles with South London jazz drummer Yussef Dayes, and Alfa Mist rounded out the year with two alternate versions of an Antiphon track billed as 7th October: Epilogue.
In 2019, he returned with Structuralism, an ambitious effort that found him incorporating a string quartet into his sound, introducing a film-like quality. His sister could also be heard on the featured conversational snippets. In early 2020, he released the solo piano EP On My Ones, as well as the collaborative Epoch EP with Emmavie. That September, Alfa Mist's profile went up a notch when his interpretation of Eddie Henderson's 1975 track "Galaxy" was released as part of the Blue Note Re:imagined project.
Also in 2020, Mist was featured in a short film directed by Harry Barber called Confliction, an evocative behind-the-scenes documentary showing him working on a piece with the London Contemporary Orchestra. By 2021, he'd signed with Anti-, which released two singles, "Run Outs" and "Organic Rust," ahead of his Bring Backs LP.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfa_Mist
Alfa Mist
ALFA MIST
Alfa Mist is a British musician, producer, song-writer and MC based in Newham, London.[2][3][4][5] He released his first solo EP Nocturne in 2015.[4] He also runs a music label called Sekito.[4] His music mixes hip-hop and club tropes with jazz improvisation.[6] He collaborated with several musicians, including Jordan Rakei, Yussef Dayes and Tom Misch.[6]
In 2021 he released an album titled Bring Backs on the American independent music label Anti-.[3][4] He also performed at the 2021 We Out Here Festival
Early life
Alfa Mist was born in the United Kingdom and grew up in Newham, London.[2] He went to Langdon Academy and Newham Sixth Form College.[1] He originally wanted to become a professional footballer, but his mother wanted him to complete two years at college first. Alfa took three A-levels plus a BTEC in music composition.[1] He began creating music at the age of 15.[1] As a teenage hip-hop producer, his interest in sampling led him to discovering jazz and eventually teaching himself how to play piano, after watching his music tutor perform John Legend’s Ordinary People.[4][5][1]
Discography
Albums
External links
- Alfa Mist discography at Discogs
- Alfa Mist on SoundCloud
- Alfa Mist on Bandcamp
- Alfa Mist on Facebook
Alfa Mist is a British musician.
When Alfa Mist was a teenager, he was dabbling in hip-hop and grime. By the time he got to college, he was teaching himself the piano and getting deeply into jazz.
“A huge part of hip-hop is sampling, so I just used to dig around and learned about so many different genres,” he explains. “I discovered jazz and started to listen to that.”
As well as falling head over heels for the visionary work of Miles Davis, he became obsessed with the atmospheric film scores of German composer Hans Zimmer. Alfa Mist’s own work is similarly soundtrack-worthy, creating a soulful vibe packed with heady emotion. “I’m pretty dark as a person I guess, so everything ends up sounding melancholy and reflective,” says Mist. “I want to make people feel something.”
Growing up and still living in Newham, there’s a real sense of place in Mist’s moody music. “There’s something very distinctively London about the stuff I’m making now,” he says. “It’s to do with where I grew up. It’s not like LA; all sunny, crazy and happy.” Last year’s conceptual ‘Nocturne’ EP – which featured a run of guests, including Tom Misch, Barney Artist and Jordan Rakei – was a case in point. Made largely at night, it was concerned with the things people think about just before they fall asleep. “Problems you have, things you’re grateful for or unsure about – I tried to bring them all out,” he says. Read more on Last.fm.
- Aaron Parks
- Ahmad Jamal
- Alfa Mist, Kaya Thomas-Dyke
- Ambrose Akinmusire
- Anouar Brahem
https://www.anti.com/press/alfa-mist-bio-2021/
Alfa Mist Bio (2021)
Prioritising feeling over perfectionism. This is the credo that drives the restless creativity of multi-instrumentalist, rapper and producer Alfa Mist.
First teaching himself to produce beats as a schoolkid in East Ham, London, Alfa then went on to discover jazz through the sampling of hip-hop of producers like Hi-tek, Madlib and J Dilla. Delving deeper, he taught himself the piano by ear as a means to dissect these formative records’ harmonic intricacies, gradually forming his own production style of head-nodding rhythms combined with the immediacy of jazz improvisation, all tied together with a pervasive sense of melody.
“There’s no access to jazz where I’m from,” Alfa says. “There’s no way I would have come to it without finding those hip-hop records and wanting to understand them.”
What followed was a period in the early 2010s spent putting some of his first fully-fledged tunes on Soundcloud and connecting with a community of like-minded musicians, including long-term collaborators Jordan Rakei, Tom Misch and Barney Artist.
Along with musicians Kaya Thomas-Dyke, Emmavie and Dornik Leigh, who Alfa met at university, he soon built up his own network of collaborators surrounding the burgeoning London jazz scene of the mid-2010s. “London is so important to me,” Alfa says, Everyone here is hustling and it is so inbuilt to the point where I don't even feel like I'm hustling anymore. I'm trying to get where I'm going but it's not frantic.”
This sense of kinetic pace mixed with a self-assured stillness is deeply felt in Alfa’s music. 2015’s Nocturne was his first solo full-length project, a collaborative endeavour showcasing his own capacity for crisp beat-making, as well as an aptitude for shapeshifting production styles to accommodate features from the likes of Misch, Rakei, Emmavie and Thomas-Dyke. “That record was about true collaboration, working equally towards a shared purpose,” Alfa says.”.
Self-released on his Sekito label – as all of his records as a bandleader have been to date – Alfa soon established a prolific work ethic with the debut of a new project, 2nd Exit, in 2016 with musician Lester Duval. Their self-titled record, and 2019’s Tangent EP, feature Alfa more prominently as an MC, showcasing his lyrical talent as well as his production prowess. “Rapping is a tool in the box rather than a pursuit,” he says. “It’s like an instrumental choice on the song. I don't rap over everything because not everything needs it.” When he does, though, as on “If You Wouldn’t Mind”, his baritone flow playfully meanders through vignettes of glimpsed characters and musings on relationships.
2017 saw the release of Alfa’s breakthrough record, Antiphon. Taking his compositions to a band, rather than largely self-producing as on Nocturne, he established a thematic precedent with the eight-track record, interspersing conversations with his two older brothers on the value of family amongst his luscious acoustic arrangements. The album stream on YouTube has since amassed over 7 million plays and boasts millions more on Spotify, highlighting how Alfa’s blend of improvised mood music can connect far beyond an assumed jazz crowd.
Continuing the focus on family, 2019’s Structuralism featured sampled
conversations with Alfa’s older sister on how we formulate our
identities amongst each other. Alfa wove in the essence of the liminal
immigrant experience through compositions such as “Jjajja’s Screen” –
referencing the inability he had to communicate with his non-English
speaking grandmother when she lived with the family – as well as
artfully reflecting the overcast optimism of city life on the Jordan
Rakei feature “Door.”
Collaborative side projects have also
continued to bloom. 2020 saw the wider re-release of Alfa’s pensive 2014
soul project with singer Emmavie, Epoch, while the same year also
heralded a new pairing with drummer Richard Spaven as 44th Move – their
self-titled EP delving into the fertile space between the dance floor
and headphone-based introspection. In a beautifully unguarded moment,
Alpha also released his debut solo piano EP in 2020, On My Ones. “I
wanted to strip it back and give the piano the light,” he says. “This EP
is sharing my love for my first instrument.”
Ultimately, this insatiable creative process merely serves to reflect Alfa in all his complexity. I want these different aspects to exist in the world because they're all me,” he says. “When people listen to them, they'll get the scope of exactly who I am.”
His latest endeavour, 2021’s Bring Backs, sees Alpha taking on new challenges. The record marks his first release for the label Anti and is also the most detailed exploration of his upbringing in musical form. The album’s nine tracks of groove-based intricacies, lyrical solipsism and meandering fragmentations are tied together by a remarkable poem written by Hilary Thomas expressing the sensuous realities of building community in a new country.
The album’s title also refers to an aspect of a card game Alfa would play as a child where the winner would only be decided after making it through an extra round without being brought back into the game. It is a feeling Alfa finds reflects his own experiences of success. “I live in this perpetual ‘bring back’ state where I can never really be sure that I’m doing as well as I am,” he says. “When you grow up where I did, you live in a sense of instability – you can be on doing ok for a while but that can change, you know that's always a possibility.”
It might be a state of mind that could change, but until it does it only serves to motivate Alfa’s constantly searching musical mind, one that will no doubt continue to surprise and astonish.
https://www.anti.com/artists/alfa-mist/
Alfa Mist
London based producer, pianist, bandleader and MC Alfa Mist today announces his fourth full-length solo record Bring Backs, out April 23rd via ANTI-. The album announcement is accompanied by brand-new single ‘Run Outs’, a skittering jazz exploration centred on Alfa’s Rhodes piano lines.
“Run Outs is a street game I remember playing when I was younger” says Alfa; “I used to think of making beats and playing with a band as separate worlds until I realised I was always trying to achieve the same thing. Making the music I want to make. With the song “Run Outs” I'm bringing together the vibe of my earliest beats with where I'm at today."
Bring Backs marks Alfa’s first release for the label ANTI- and is also the most detailed exploration of his upbringing in musical form. The album’s nine tracks of groove-based intricacies, lyrical solipsism and meandering fragmentations are tied together by a remarkable poem written by Hilary Thomas expressing the sensuous realities of building community in a new country. Entirely written and produced by Alfa, the album was recorded in London with a core band of longtime collaborators including Jamie Leeming (guitar), Kaya Thomas-Dyke (bass and vocals), Jamie Houghton (drums) and Johnny Woodham (trumpet).
Over the past 5 years Alfa has steadily established himself as one of the most dynamic and consistent talents to emerge from London’s widely celebrated jazz reformation. Building on long standing affiliations with the likes of breakout star Jordan Rakei, Alfa has always carved his own lane, following a distinctly outsider’s approach and free from the trappings of a traditional musical training.
Having arrived at jazz in search of samples for his teenage hip-hop productions, Alfa eventually taught himself piano by ear and quickly developed a unique style, with hip-hop rhythms driving throughout the improvisational forms, all bound by a pervasive sense of melody. His first three solo albums ‘Nocturne’ (2015), ‘Antiphon’ (2017) and ‘Structuralism’ (2019) were all released on his own label Sekito, and were interspersed with countless collaborations and side projects, highlighting a prolific work ethic and true versatility across piano, rapping and production that has established Alfa at the centre of an amorphous cohort of talented musicians to emerge from London.
Loud And Quiet
Interview
Alfa Mist is taking an unconventional route to modern jazz greatness
The multi-talented London musician on the winding path that led him to excellent new album Bring Backs
Growing up in Newham, Alfa Mist used to play a card game called ‘London Blackjack’. A shedding-game with more in common with Uno than its more famous namesake, Alfa would play it at home with his brothers and sister, at school – where it was a point of playground pride – and across the capital with his cousins.
The premise of the game was simple enough. Each player starts with seven cards, and the first to shed them all claims victory, with various power cards hindering the process – an eight, for example, means that the next player has to miss a go; you can’t end your turn on a Queen. However, there was always one rule that got in Alfa’s way – bring backs.
It’s a rule that’s stuck in the jazz pianist and hip-hop producer’s mind; so much so he’s named his new album after it. “Whoever gets rid of their cards first and wins has to wait for one more round because they could be brought back into the game if someone has the right card,” Alfa explains, a hint of the frustration he’s felt thanks to that rule creeping into his otherwise calm, almost stoic demeanour. “Basically, once you feel like you’ve won you have to wait a round to see if they can bring you back.”
In Alfa’s hands, bring backs has become more than a rule in a childhood card game; it’s a shorthand for the various challenges he’s faced in life – from growing up the child of a Ugandan immigrant in one of London’s poorest boroughs, to trying to make it as a jazz musician without any formal training – and the uncertain footing it’s left him in early adulthood. “That concept is interesting to me because I feel like that when people tell you you’re successful and you’ve done well… because of my upbringing, I don’t…” He cuts himself off. “The complacency thing doesn’t exist for me,” he rephrases. “It’s almost like you snap back. Like, ‘Nope, I haven’t won yet.’ I’m just here doing my thing, and I could be brought back at any minute.”
In a quirk of fate, Alfa came up with the concept for Bring Backs parallel to the spread of Covid-19, totally unaware that his feelings of uncertainty, frustrated repetition and suspicion of anything that promised hope were going to become that much more universal. “Lockdown has taught us, you’re not really safe, are you? Who knows what’s gonna happen,” he reflects. “I didn’t think of that at the time. At first, I thought it was a child-of-an-immigrant thing, where it’s like ‘This what life does to us.’ Like, you’ve seen poverty growing up, so no one can tell you what you have now can’t slip out of your hands. But, last year, everything slipped out of everyone’s hands, so it applies to even more people. It’s one of those unfortunate – but fortunate for me – coincides.”
Perhaps adding to his underlying sense of precarity is the fact that his musical journey has been a less traditional one than many of his peers in what has come to be known as the New London Jazz scene. Whereas the likes of Nubya Garcia and the members of Ezra Collective cut their teeth at extra-curricular programmes like Tomorrow’s Warriors before studying at conservatoires, Alfa took a more winding path. “I listened to a lot of jazz growing up, [but] it’s like I was listening from outside the house, looking through the window,” he explains. “To be let into the camp or whatever, there’s some boxes you have to tick… some things you have to master. I never really embedded myself into the school of thought that comes with it.”
Having originally set his sights on a career as a football player – he was briefly signed to Torquay’s Under-16s team – he got his musical start making beats in his bedroom. Young Alfa was equally inspired by the grime scene that surrounded him in Newham and American hip-hop producers like 9th Wonder, J Dilla and Madlib – the latter of whom in particular strengthened his interest in jazz with his 2003 album Shades of Blue, a record of beats pieced together from legendary jazz label Blue Note‘s archives.
One day, when he was 17, Alfa decided it wasn’t enough to simply know how to source and deploy a good jazz loop; he had to be able to play them himself. A BTEC student at a college where music lessons were only free for those studying A-Levels, Alfa was forced to teach himself; no small feat when attempting to tackle the theory-heavy world of jazz. Similarly, his first taste of success wasn’t on stage at Ronnie Scott’s but rather via YouTube. In 2017, his self-released second album Antiphon was ushered into the recommended videos of millions by the video streaming giant’s ever-mysterious algorithm. “It’s crazy how that happened. I was just watching it. It wasn’t even on my channel. It was a bootleg. It came onto my homepage as well,” he laughs slightly exasperatedly, though he clarifies he’s spoken to the original uploader and they’re “all good” now.
On his new album, Alfa explores further why he feels in a “perpetual state of bring backs.” As on previous records – Antiphon was based around a free-flowing conversation about “relationships and perception” with his brothers and its follow-up Structuralism, an equally broad conversation about “self-reflection” with his sister – he found his inspiration at home, focusing on his mother’s journey from Uganda to the UK and the struggles it entailed, as well as his own journey as the son of an immigrant. “My journey is that I have to progress what my mother has done. She had to work every job under the sun when she got here – whether it’s on the train tracks or cleaning jobs or whatever. So I have to progress because we haven’t got generations of wealth like a lot of people born here,” he explains.
To explore those journeys, Alfa uses a number of musical tools. As on his previous offerings, his light-fingered keys take centre stage, leading a band of close collaborators – including Kaya Thomas-Dyke, who featured on both Antiphon and Structuralism – through groove-heavy, distinctly London-sounding jams. Opening track ‘Teki’ is a head-nodder with plenty of steely guitar, while ‘Coasting’ shimmers with layers of horns and shuffling percussion. Alfa even enlisted a cellist for a number of tracks to further enrich his warm boom-bop.
However, more than on any of his other projects, its the vocal elements of Bring Backs that drive the album. Kaya Thomas-Dyke swaps bass for vocal duties on the sublime ‘People’ – a shaggy, sparkling track that wouldn’t sound out of place on a Solange record. Meanwhile, Alfa himself comes through with a pair of rap verses on ‘Mind The Gap’ and ‘Organic Rust’ – joined on the former by North London MC Lex Amor. Yet, the main voice we hear on Bring Backs belongs to neither Alfa nor Kaya but rather to the poet Hilary Thomas. Throughout the record, Thomas recites a piece, written explicitly for the album, that explores her own mother’s immigrant story – in her case, from Jamaica rather than Uganda. Detailing how her mother “kept my cup full of tea, while hers half, plenty empty,” Thomas takes care to honour the challenges faced by those seeking a better life in the UK, but also strives to offer hope. She hails “Generation after generation making new tracks,” and as her poem concludes, it becomes less a lament of the hardships immigrant mothers – particularly those in the Black diaspora – have had to endure and more a call of solidarity and triumph, promising that “change is inevitable”. Though true to the album’s cyclical themes, Alfa chops it up so that the end of the poem as it is written appears at the very beginning of the album.
Likewise, while Alfa may be cautious about the future, he’s not guarded or cynical about it. Bring Backs is his highest-profile release to date as well his first for a record label – Anti-. It also arrives on the heels of his contribution to Blue Note Re:imagined, a compilation that saw some of the UK’s finest talents take on tracks from the label’s catalogue; a stamp if ever there was one that Alfa Mist is a Real Jazz Musician now.
As we wrap up, he strikes a defiant but optimistic tone, hoping the path he’s charted through a notoriously fickle industry – and an even more notoriously elitist sub-section of it – offers some hope to those with similar upbringings to his. “I believe people should have options. I didn’t have many options when I was younger,” he says. “There were like four: football, rap, be good at school, or the roads,” he summarises bluntly. But, he says, “the way I’ve done things here means you didn’t have to start playing when you were six, and you didn’t have to get into that conservatoire by age whatever [to become a successful musician]. I see it as putting another option on the table.”
https://gal-dem.com/alfa-mist-interview-structuralism-antiphon-family/
‘I didn’t even know what a conservatoire was’: jazz pianist and producer Alfa Mist interviewed
by Tara Joshi
2 May 2019
Photography by Kay Ibrahim
When we talk about the Newham music scene, chances are your mind
leaps to grime. But in recent years, pianist and producer Alfa Mist has
emerged as a sublime talent from the East London borough.
With both his Nocturne EP and his debut album Antiphon, Alfa’s
jazzy piano and hip-hop beats were really just spaces for him to make
the music he wanted. What he was not expecting was people to really care
that much – but thanks to one of those YouTube algorithms that no-one
really understands, the amazing Antiphon was soon huge (at the time of writing, it has almost six million views on the video platform).
The album featured cuts of his brothers in conversation, talking
everything from relationships to mental health over rich, immersive
beats. Now his second album is here, and sonically he’s raised the game –
Structuralism is soaring and ambitious in scope (he’s done the
arrangements for a string quartet), and this time features words from
his sister, discussing communication within the black community (“She’s
basically on it because she listened to my brothers on Antiphon and was like, ‘Why am I not on this?!’”).
gal-dem: Can you tell us about how you got started – were you a musical kid?
Alfa Mist: I don’t have any musicians in my family – I didn’t really
start playing an instrument until I was 17. I used to make beats back in
secondary school days – I’m from Newham, so I was making grime because
that was what was around. That was the culture. I was making hip-hop as
well, and those beats were sampled – and then when I started listening
to the stuff that was being sampled, I realised that stuff was good and
very different from what I had been trying to make. There was this whole
world of music I was sampling – classical music, Indian classical – and
jazz was the most sort of important thing. Listening to J Dilla and
Pete Rock, they were jazz. Anyway, I decided to learn piano when I was
17 because I wanted to really get the music I was listening to, so I
thought let me try and learn it. I didn’t do A-level music or anything,
so I taught myself.
What are your feelings on the ‘London jazz scene’ label? I feel like it’s becoming a bit of a buzzword, but it does feel like music that falls under that umbrella is getting way more popular.
If I’m in Europe and people are asking about the London jazz scene,
it’s weird because I’m not part of that. I didn’t go to Trinity – I
didn’t even know what a conservatoire was when I was at uni. I came out
and was like, ‘there’s a place you can just study music? Why didn’t
anyone tell me?!’. I’m so removed from it, but my music puts me there.
So I never really know what to say, because I can only speak to what I
do. But one big thing that’s changed is how everyone can put stuff out
online, without a middle man deciding what gets played – there have been
lots of ‘jazz’ projects going out, and there’s not a limit anymore.
Lots of people who stumbled on Antiphon weren’t jazz fans, I
just got crazy views thanks to YouTube’s algorithm – like everyone who’s
part of the scene seems cool, but that label isn’t how I got heard.
“I didn’t even know what a conservatoire was when I was at uni. I came out and was like, ‘there’s a place you can just study music? Why didn’t anyone tell me?!’”
If you don’t consider yourself part of that scene, who do you tend to work with?
I like working with people who are close to me – everyone who plays
in my band has been on a project with me. I collaborate with my guys –
Jordan Rakei, Tom Misch, Barney Artist. It’s good to do things with
family, basically.
I read that you self-describe as introverted, which I guess explains working with people you’re close to.
I’m not really too social or emotional in person, so I try to get that out in my music as much as I can. I’m still trying to make introversion work. It’s productive when I’m making stuff, but not when I’m trying to show it to people. I think people think I’m being stand-offish, when actually I’m just not extroverted.There’s that really great line your sister says at the opening of the album, about how you shouldn’t judge people because we’re all unfinished – and how everyone is constantly unravelling.
I thought it was really interesting. We decide things on the spot
when we meet people, but it’s a nice thing to aspire to – to take the
time to understand where people are coming from.
Is it ever kind of scary putting that stuff out there – these very in-depth conversations with your siblings?
It’s never really that scary – because when we’re recording that,
you’re just talking to your family, name drops all over the place,
everyone just being honest. And I pick out themes and ideas from that – I
don’t think it exposes them in ways they wouldn’t want, but it puts out
certain opinions that have been prevalent in my life. Essentially it’s a
podcast mixed with music.
I can only speak to my personal experiences of mental health and how, in South Asian communities, there’s still a lot of stigma, so we don’t really talk about it, especially with our elders – is that at all true for your experience of being a young black British man?
I think there’s a level of being black where there’s an expectation
of strength or being tough-skinned. And especially me, where I’m born in
Newham but my mum was born in Uganda – you’re in someone else’s
environment so you have to have your guard up in some way. When you
think about it, our parents’ lives have been mad! My mum had this whole
journey where she had to be strong, she’s been through unimaginable
things – and I’m on my own journey, but through my mum’s perspective
certain things may not seem like a big deal. You’ll get told to just
cheer up, or be strong. Then also on a religious level, mental health is
so quickly replaced with demons. So I guess in my work I’m trying to
explore all that – because we haven’t been able to communicate when
we’re feeling certain ways.
“When I go to Uganda they can smell the British on me, and people don’t rate me as one of them, but then I’m here and I’m not one of these guys either”
Can you give me an example of that on Structuralism?
There’s a track called ‘Jjajja’s Screen’ – ‘jjajja’ is grandparent
[in the language Luganda, spoken in the kingdom of Buganda], and the
screen refers to how she couldn’t speak English and we couldn’t
communicate at all. I didn’t have a relationship with her, because we
couldn’t understand each other. Like the grandparents’ place in a
household is meant to be warm, but I couldn’t relate to that because I
could never have that relationship. But I guess you don’t know what
you’ve missed if you’ve never had it. The whole diaspora thing is
something I want to explore in my music – when I go to Uganda they can
smell the British on me, and people don’t rate me as one of them, but
then I’m here and I’m not one of these guys either.
I think there are so many of us now in that weird third space.
It’s like, you’re everything but you’re nothing. I guess it’s an
ongoing search, for all people of colour in Europe. And I wanted to
explore that space on this album.
You’ve touched on your relationship with Uganda – is there any way that you think those roots manifest in your music?
I haven’t engrossed myself in the music scene or culture over there – but when I was growing up, I think that stuff has sunk in, but I wouldn’t want to claim it. It’s maybe in the mood of my music, but there are no direct rhythms or anything. But being Ugandan adds to who I am, I’m not distancing myself from that. And in my music, I’m trying to be as much myself as I can be.
Structuralism is out now on Sekito. You can listen on BandCamp.
https://www.nitelifeonline.com/words/intreview-alfa-mist-antiphon/
Alfa Mist: ‘I wanted to put out a project that is properly and truly myself’
British music culture is experiencing a marked increase in the interesting infusion of jazz and hip hop. The measure of which can be aligned to the influence of London-born producer, pianist, multi instrumentalist and rapper, Alfa Mist.
Unlike your typical classically trained jazz pianist, Alfa came into music through making grime and hip hop, but was inspired by the jazz samples he was using, and began teaching himself piano at the age of 17.
‘I got into other types of music through digging for samples, but I stayed in jazz because there was something about it. I couldn’t understand what was going on, but I enjoyed what was happening.’
I got into other types of music through digging for samples, but I stayed in jazz because there was something about it
Our first introduction to Alfa Mist was his 2015 project Nocturne. He produced the 11-track EP collaborating with close friends and leading protagonists in the new wave jazz-hip hop narrative, featuring names like Tom Misch, Jordan Rakei and Barney Artist. Four years on and a glimpse at the development and display of such musicians – alongside more recent collaborations with the likes of drummer Yussef Dayes – all in all, brings to light the calibre of talent within Alfa Mist’s circle of influence.
Close friends and leading protagonists in the new wave jazz-hip hop narrative, featuring names like Tom Misch, Jordan Rakei and Barney Artist
Though a stand-out project in its own right, his follow up two years later was the first real taste of what this truly talented artist could do. 2017’s Antiphon presents a largely instrumental album and a more distinctly Alfa sound. Rather than a collection of songs, Antiphon takes you on a journey and this time Alfa Mist is the only one in the driving seat. That said, collaboration is innate to Alfa Mist and some familiar faces return, including Kaya Thomas-Dyke, who contributes vocals, bass and album artwork, and Jordan Rakei who flies almost under the radar with background harmonies on a couple of tracks.
Antiphon presents a largely instrumental album and a more distinctly Alfa sound
‘Nocturne was me making music I thought fit the artists that were on it, but in my style. I finished that project and thought, before I carry on producing for others, I wanted to put out a project that is properly and truly myself. I wanted to get something out there that was all me, then I could move on and produce again, but I didn’t expect the massive response Antiphon would get.’
I wanted to put out a project that is properly and truly myself
Recorded in only three days and now nearing six million views on Youtube, Antiphon speaks for itself. Rarely is music raw enough that a musician is able to speak through their instrument. A characteristic in tune with greats of the field such as Miles Davis – an inspiration for Alfa – and hip hop acts like 9th Wonder, Little Brother and Hi-Tek. Only time will tell, but through his Yamaha Montage, I’d stake a suggestion that Alfa is no exception to this specialised category.
Snippets of speech included on his tracks complement the intricate musicality and brooding complexity resonating from Alfa’s keys. As with his distinct playing style, recordings of conversations with siblings are becoming a trait. On Antiphon his brothers are heard discussing family values, respect, selfishness and more.
As with his distinct playing style, recordings of conversations with siblings are becoming a trait
‘Speaking to them helps me understand and process things because we all grew up in the same way. They are the closest thing to me trying to understand myself. Their opinions are the closest.’
This device of real, recorded speech supports the cinematic effect also prevalent in Alfa Mist’s sound, adding a layer of reflection to an already immersive listening experience.
‘I just want to raise certain topics with my projects, rather than provide any sort of answers – topics that aren’t necessarily discussed or even just brought up, whether you think one way about it or not. I’m not saying one way or the other, I’m just kind of saying, “Hey! Let’s talk about this, let’s bring it up”. I’m not qualified to give any sort of answers, I just make music. That’s what I like doing. That’s how I get what I think across.’
British music culture is experiencing a marked increase in the interesting infusion of jazz and hip hop. The measure of which can be aligned to the influence of London-born producer, pianist, multi instrumentalist and rapper, Alfa Mist.
Unlike your typical classically trained jazz pianist, Alfa came into music through making grime and hip hop, but was inspired by the jazz samples he was using, and began teaching himself piano at the age of 17.
‘I got into other types of music through digging for samples, but I stayed in jazz because there was something about it. I couldn’t understand what was going on, but I enjoyed what was happening.’
I got into other types of music through digging for samples, but I stayed in jazz because there was something about it
Our first introduction to Alfa Mist was his 2015 project Nocturne. He produced the 11-track EP collaborating with close friends and leading protagonists in the new wave jazz-hip hop narrative, featuring names like Tom Misch, Jordan Rakei and Barney Artist. Four years on and a glimpse at the development and display of such musicians – alongside more recent collaborations with the likes of drummer Yussef Dayes – all in all, brings to light the calibre of talent within Alfa Mist’s circle of influence.
Close friends and leading protagonists in the new wave jazz-hip hop narrative, featuring names like Tom Misch, Jordan Rakei and Barney Artist
Though a stand-out project in its own right, his follow up two years later was the first real taste of what this truly talented artist could do. 2017’s Antiphon presents a largely instrumental album and a more distinctly Alfa sound. Rather than a collection of songs, Antiphon takes you on a journey and this time Alfa Mist is the only one in the driving seat. That said, collaboration is innate to Alfa Mist and some familiar faces return, including Kaya Thomas-Dyke, who contributes vocals, bass and album artwork, and Jordan Rakei who flies almost under the radar with background harmonies on a couple of tracks.
Antiphon presents a largely instrumental album and a more distinctly Alfa sound
‘Nocturne was me making music I thought fit the artists that were on it, but in my style. I finished that project and thought, before I carry on producing for others, I wanted to put out a project that is properly and truly myself. I wanted to get something out there that was all me, then I could move on and produce again, but I didn’t expect the massive response Antiphon would get.’
I wanted to put out a project that is properly and truly myself
Recorded in only three days and now nearing six million views on Youtube, Antiphon speaks for itself. Rarely is music raw enough that a musician is able to speak through their instrument. A characteristic in tune with greats of the field such as Miles Davis – an inspiration for Alfa – and hip hop acts like 9th Wonder, Little Brother and Hi-Tek. Only time will tell, but through his Yamaha Montage, I’d stake a suggestion that Alfa is no exception to this specialised category.
Snippets of speech included on his tracks complement the intricate musicality and brooding complexity resonating from Alfa’s keys. As with his distinct playing style, recordings of conversations with siblings are becoming a trait. On Antiphon his brothers are heard discussing family values, respect, selfishness and more.
As with his distinct playing style, recordings of conversations with siblings are becoming a trait
‘Speaking to them helps me understand and process things because we all grew up in the same way. They are the closest thing to me trying to understand myself. Their opinions are the closest.’
This device of real, recorded speech supports the cinematic effect also prevalent in Alfa Mist’s sound, adding a layer of reflection to an already immersive listening experience.
‘I just want to raise certain topics with my projects, rather than provide any sort of answers – topics that aren’t necessarily discussed or even just brought up, whether you think one way about it or not. I’m not saying one way or the other, I’m just kind of saying, “Hey! Let’s talk about this, let’s bring it up”. I’m not qualified to give any sort of answers, I just make music. That’s what I like doing. That’s how I get what I think across.’
Alfa Mist’s new album Structuralism dropped last month on his own Sekito label. The eight-track record’s key theme of communication is upheld throughout with sentimental significance.
‘On Structuralism I have a conversation with my sister. She’s talking throughout the new album about people not being able to communicate as well as we think we can, because we normally just talk to get our points across – we don’t really talk to understand.’
We normally just talk to get our points across – we don’t really talk to understand
Structuralism as a notion implies people are shaped by their environment. Alfa Mist’s own upbringing placed more emphasis on stoicism rather than displaying emotion: ‘I grew up in a way where I need to relearn how to communicate, because my environment didn’t really allow me the space to.’
A poignant point on the record that accommodates this sentiment is the album’s fifth track, Jjajja’s Screen.
‘Jjajja means Grandma in Ugandan. And the screen is basically me not having a proper relationship with my Grandma because she can’t speak English and I can’t speak Ugandan, so we could never really have a proper conversation. I just thought that was interesting. It’s quite an interesting metaphor for life, I think.’
In this engaged catharsis, Alfa Mist blesses us once again with another work of art not only confined to the jazz-hip hop genre, but in his passion for film music, which rings true in the effect of a string quartet on the album.
‘It’s about the mood as well with my stuff, it’s sort of melancholic. Working with strings gives it a more cinematic feel.’
His sister says at the beginning of the album’s opening track 01 44, ‘For me, now what I’m realising is that I’m done trying to treat people as if they are finished beings, because we are all unfinished. Basically, we are all unravelling.’
This translates through the mood, style, structure and function of the piece. The brilliance of the band seamlessly pulls together, as with the whole of Structuralism, in the traditional jazz approach with improvisation. Tranquil, mellow and at times chaotic. Classical, groovy and filmic. It belongs here and there, and by not being completely contained, it becomes complete to itself. A piece of art, which correlates straight through to the artist.
‘I’m a part of a black diaspora and we are sort of in a place where I don’t really belong anywhere. I’m sort of everything and I’m sort of nothing at the same time.’
He has been described as ‘a shining light of the London jazz scene’, but it is in the darkness that he uncovers that illuminates Alfa Mist as a truly contemporary musician and band leader.
Bristol will be welcoming Alfa Mist back this month for his Structuralism tour, coming to Trinity on 15 May.
‘I’m excited to go back to Bristol. Bristol is sick! The last show I did there was ridiculously good, man. It felt like a London show. Bristol is huge for me.’
15 May – Alfa Mist, Trinity
soundcloud.com/alfamist
@AlfaMist
UK’s Hip-hop Influenced Avant-garde Jazz Artist Alfa Mist Lands New Grooves & Poetry Via ‘Bring Backs’ (ALBUM REVIEW)
Readers of these pages caught a few words about the hip-hop-influenced progressive UK jazz artist Alfa Mist when we covered his contribution to last Fall’s double-disc Blue Note Re-imagined. Now we get a full menu with his fresh nine tracks on the full-length, Bring Backs, his debut for the U.S. label, Anti.
First teaching himself to produce beats as a schoolkid in East Ham, London, Alfa then discovered jazz through the sampling of hip-hop of producers like Hi-tek, Madlib, and J Dilla. Delving deeper, he taught himself the piano by ear to understand the harmonic complexities of these records. What followed was a period in the early 2010s spent putting some of his first developed tunes on Soundcloud and connecting with a community of like-minded musicians, including long-term collaborators Jordan Rakei, Tom Misch, and Barney Artist.
The album’s nine tracks of intricate grooves and lyrical rather existential reflections are tied together by a poem written by Hilary Thomas expressing the sensuous realities of building community in a new country. The album’s title also refers to an aspect of a card game Alfa would play as a child where the winner would only be decided after making it through an extra round without being brought back into the game. It is a feeling Alfa finds reflects his own experiences of success.
#colors #alfamist #organicrust
Alfa Mist - Organic Rust | A COLORS SHOW
East London-based musician and MC @Alfa Mist brings his ethereal sounds to COLORS with "Organic Rust", a spellbinding performance lifted from his forthcoming new album ‘Bring Backs’
Instrumentation and configuration vary, opening with a septet including trumpet and bass clarinet, and later we have one song with just a lone cello. In most cases Alfa plays electric piano and synths, adding his vocals in some places although Hilary Thomas does on “Teki.” “People” is just guitar, bass, and cello as Kaya Thomas-Dyke sings and the leader sits out. This snippet of lyrics gives a sampling of these so-called lyrical reflections- “Nobody listens anymore, what are we talking for? /We’ve been here before, do we want more?/But if the morning waits for the sun/Well when it’s all said and done will we all become one?”
”Mind the Gap” features the spoken words of Lex Amor along with Alfa backed by a quintet without Alfa’s keys. Again the rather abstract lyrics revolve around this chorus – “Take MY time,/So they only see me in the right state of mind…We all rise and decline/I don’t want to live a life they designed…Take MY time, So they only see me in the right state of mind…We all rise and decline.” “Run Out’ has the septet again in a more rousing mode with reedist Sam Rapley on tenor sax. “Last Card (Bumper Cars) reprises the septet with Rapley on bass clarinet while Alfa and Hilary Thomas supply the vocal clips. It should be noted that sometimes a septet features a percussionist and at other times a cello. In almost all cases Alpha envelops other instruments in dense layers, as continues with “Coasting” and the spirited interplay between Johnny Woodham’s electric trumpet and Alfa’s synth leads.
Alfa Mist - "Teki"
Taken from the album 'Bring Backs', out now on Anti-
Written & produced by Alfa Mist
“Attune” features the same cast of musicians with a vocal clip from Thomas – “’Soon come’ and “Walk Good” impart Warm Words./and into small hours, Pride rise high, like crane bird fly.” It’s another strong trumpet declaration from Woodham with no synth this time, and Alfa on the Rhodes instead with Rapley on a brief bass clarinet solo and Jamie Leeming adding scintillating guitar. “Once a Year” is the cello interlude and the album closes with “Organic Rust,” in a conventional quartet comprising different players (as it was recorded separately from the others) with Alfa on spoken word and Rhodes, going out with these words – “I’m trusting, young and dumb like I had a buzz/When it all gives way and I’ve had enough/I got a few words for the man above/When I’m Organic Rust.”
It’s only right to give credit to the supporting musicians, many of whom we have named, but here is the full list: Jamie Leeming (guitar), Kaya Thomas-Dyke (bass guitar), Junior Alli Balogun (percussion), Jamie Houghton (durms), Johnny Woodham (trumpet), Sam Rapley (tenor sax, bass clarinet), Alfa Sekitoleko (Electric piano/Synth), Peggy Nolan (cello), Rocco Palladino (bass), and Richard Spaven(drums). Although this is the ANTI debut for Alfa, he has delivered three full-length albums and three EPs just since 2015 across the genres of rap, soul, hip-hop, and contemporary avant-garde jazz like this one. Ultimately, his multi-faceted approach proves intriguing.
https://www.wbgo.org/podcast/the-checkout/2021-04-16/the-melancholy-ecstasy-of-alfa-mist
The Melancholy Ecstasy of Alfa Mist
by Simon Rentner
A younger crop of musicians from the UK doesn’t really know or care what style of music they play. For Alfa Mist and his peers, it’s most important to have a sound.
A rising keyboardist, rapper and producer, Alfa Mist describes his music as moody or melancholic, with shades of Bill Evans. But instead of an acoustic piano, he uses a Fender Rhodes as the primary color, usually laying into a relaxed groove.
His rapping and beat-making fall in line with this ethos: introspective, laid back and understated. Mist admits to not having a particularly outgoing personality, but says he finds homeostasis in a state of contemplation, where he’s working through one idea after another.
The latest of those resulted in his new album, Bring Backs, which takes a lesson from a British card game. In it, even after you win a match, it teaches you not to get too comfortable, because with a certain “attack card,” you might be brought back into battle again. So take every victory in stride, because the rally surely won’t last forever.
Alfa Mist applies this perspective to his recent success, which he partly attributes to lucky algorithms. (It's not a bad deal when a jazz album gets mapped on hip hop playlists.) So he just stays true to his process — aligning himself with other jazz-flexible musicians with pop instincts, like Tom Misch, Jordan Rakei and Barney Artist.
On this episode of The Checkout, we learn how they found each other back in 2014 — a year that would forge their friendship and spawn inventive collaborations.
Come back right here to watch Alfa Mist celebrate his new recording live with a 12-piece band from Metropolis Studios.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
#alfamist #bringbacks #antirecords
Alfa Mist 'Bring Backs' Live at Metropolis
Premiered April 22, 2021Alfa Mist: Bring Backs (Anti-)
A review of the London-based producer, pianist, and MC's latest album
London-based producer, pianist, and MC Alfa Mist has generated a growing stateside buzz, with his earlier releases Nocturne (2015), Antiphon (2017), and Structuralism (2019) positing ’70s funk-jazz tempered by hip-hop as undying source and sustenance.
Recalling Lonnie Liston Smith’s Astral Traveling and various Strata-East titles, Bring Backs arises from a subterranean space of plaintive spoken word, lilting Rhodes keyboard, and elastic funk jams informed by heavily effected trumpet and guitar solos. Recorded in London with Jamie Leeming (guitar), Kaya Thomas-Dyke (bass and vocals), Jamie Houghton (drums), and Johnny Woodham (trumpet), the album functions practically as a suite, one composition rolling into the next, as ominous bliss travels within and without.
Opener “Teki” is a full-on jam comprising chorused guitar, smooth horn lines, and a steaming rhythm bed that establishes the album’s direction. “People” quickly changes the vibe, as finger-plucked acoustic guitar supports a Thomas-Dyke vocal that addresses global apathy. A chunky hip-hop beat insinuates nocturnal stasis on “Mind the Gap.” Watery trumpet lines and a bouncy pocket determine “Last Card (Bumper Cars).” Side two (if you’re listening to vinyl) kicks off with “Coasting,” which seemingly resumes the groove from the end of side one, Mist’s cherubim-like Rhodes tracing a serpentine melody that’s joined by a wah-wah trumpet and eventual drum breaks before abruptly ending mid-tune. The Chick Corea-ish intro of “Attune” leads to a coma-like stillness, before the dark string-quartet sounds of “Once a Year” segue into “Organic Rust,” a J Dilla-inspired beat buffeting a rap lament and weirdly effected instrumentation in this bleaked-out, contemporary vision.
Learn more about Bring Backs on Amazon!
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Ken Micallef was once a jazz drummer; then he found religion and began writing about jazz rather than performing it. (He continues to air-drum jazz rhythms in front of his hi-fi rig and various NYC bodegas.) His reportage has appeared in Time Out, Modern Drummer, DownBeat, Stereophile, and Electronic Musician. Ken is the administrator of Facebook’s popular Jazz Vinyl Lovers group, and he reviews vintage jazz recordings on YouTube as Ken Micallef Jazz Vinyl Lover.
Alfa Mist on restricting the recording process & embracing imperfections on his latest album
Words by Rhian Daly
There is value in stories that are commonplace. That’s an idea that Alfa Mist explores on his latest album ‘Bring Backs’, celebrating the typical experiences of immigrants and the children they raise in a new country. On the record, the London jazz pianist and hip-hop producer pull from his own family’s history, in which his mother emigrated to the UK from Uganda. Instead of treating her journey as an outlier, though, he dives into aspects of it that many people in his home city and beyond will find familiar.
“I grew up with people [who had stories like that] all around me,” Mist says in the weeks following ‘Bring Back's release. “I don’t really see it as this unique and rare journey, but I still wanted to touch on it because I still feel like even journeys that aren’t so rare and unique need to be spoken about. Not everything is the extreme – glitz and glamour, or famine. Life isn’t as extreme as that.”
Alfa Mist 'Bring Backs' Live at Metropolis
The album – his first for the renowned label Anti-, home to the likes of Fleet Foxes, M Ward, and Danny Elfman – splits his subject into two halves. First, there’s Mist’s own perspective as the child of immigrants; not having to start a new life in an unfamiliar place but keenly aware of the sacrifices that have been made for him to be in the position he is in.
Secondly, there’s the story of the generation that came before – who left their homes behind and began again elsewhere. That thread is told through a poem by Hilary Thomas, the poet reciting verses about her own mother’s journey from Jamaica at various points across the record. “The land of her birth gave her the tools to navigate the world,” she says proudly on ‘Last Card (Bumper Cars)’.
“When I read back [the poem], there were so many similarities [between our parents’ stories],” Mist explains. “I just left it to her to write what she thought and how she remembered her parents.”
Although I predominantly make instrumental music, I do understand why people gravitate to things with vocals a lot more.
Although
Thomas’ poem and the London composer’s own words illuminate some of the
songs on ‘Bring Backs’, much of the record takes instrumental form – be
that for whole songs, or large chunks of them. Lyrics only come into
play at the points where Mist felt the melodies and rhythms couldn’t
fully communicate what he was trying to say. “Music can only say so
much,” he reasons. “There were some songs where you listen to them and
take what you want from them.” The possibility of interpretation on
those tracks was something he was drawn to, but other pieces he had a
more specific vision for.
“Certain songs, I just want to tell you what the song’s about,” he explains. “In making intentions clear, there’s nothing more powerful than words. Although I predominantly make instrumental music, I do understand why people gravitate to things with vocals a lot more – there’s something about words that will make things click inside your brain easier.”
Mist says a song will show when it needs that additional vocal layer in whether he feels space in what he’s created. “I won’t have any gaps or emptiness – there’s music where it can sound quite sparse, but it’s doing the job that it needs to do, but there are certain songs where I feel like it needs something else to be complete. I tend to start from quite minimal stuff and keep adding to it until it’s complete.”
I try and put all of my feelings into the music. If you sat down and talked to me, you wouldn’t get the same thing.
Growing up in east London, the producer was surrounded by the sounds of grime and hip-hop as he started his own voyage into music but discovered jazz – among other things – while learning how to make samples. Lured in by the warm feeling the likes of American pianist Ahmad Jamal, jazz icon Herbie Hancock and the more modern works of Robert Glasper evoked, he was faced with one challenge – how to replicate the sound they were making. “That’s what made me want to start learning the piano so I could learn how to do things like that and create my own combinations,” Mist recalls.
As well as something new to master, jazz also presented the young musician with a helpful, new outlet – a way to express himself. “I was trying to [recreate the warmth] of the music because, in real life, I’m not really this warm person. But I try and put all of my feelings into the music. If you sat down and talked to me, you wouldn’t get the same thing because I can’t articulate myself properly.”
Alfa Mist | Coasting
One listens to ‘Bring Backs’ – and, indeed, Mist’s back catalogue of gorgeous creations – will flood your body with emotions. Sometimes these are serene, sometimes a little darker, or, sometimes, an amalgamation of the two. On the instrumental ‘Coasting’, we’re hit with the latter – taken on a tranquil journey that soon finds itself hitting a rocky patch, the brass melody becoming more urgent and agitated. “Just because you’re coasting doesn’t mean a storm can’t hit you,” he says sagely. “The idea of coasting normally is ‘we’re just sitting back and coasting’ but, for me, it means going forward, regardless of what hits you. It’s a perseverance thing.”
Similarly, underneath Thomas’ spoken word on ‘Last Card (Bumper Cars)’, instruments interweave forlornly before, suddenly, things shift and a strutting new mood takes over. The final minute-and-a-half of music is both an exercise in restraint and inspired by the US producer, DJ, and rapper Madlib. “A lot of producers used to do beat tapes where you have one or two-minute beats, but it would have 30 of them in a tape,” Mist explains. “I wanted ‘Bumper Cars’ to be like that.”
Keen-eared fans who tuned into his recent livestream concert from Metropolis Studios will have heard a much longer version. That take presented how the song was originally intended to be until its creator realised a full rendition was unnecessary for the album’s purposes. It’s a great example of the fluidity of music – how songs can be opened up more on stage or trimmed down when the time is right. “When I play live and depending on who I’m playing with, the songs sound completely different anyway,” Mist laughs.
The way ‘Bring Backs’ was made acknowledges that ever-changing format too and nods to what’s most important about a piece of music – the energy and spirit that it contains. The album was recorded to tape, with only two takes available per song without having to record over what he and his band (bassist and double bassist Kaya Thomas-Dyke, tenor saxophonist and bass clarinetist Samuel Rapley, drummer Jas Kayser, guitarist Jamie Leeming, percussionist Junior Alli-Balogun and trumpeter and flugel player Johnny Woodham) had already laid down.
“I’m a perfectionist and I will just sit on something for ages – nothing will ever be right to me,” Mist says with a sigh that suggests he can be his own worst enemy in the creating process. Restricting recording helped him to zoom out and look at the broader picture on each take, rather than nitpicking each individual layer. “We had to keep the take that got the most generally great feeling, even if there were imperfections. I think that makes music real anyway because it’s just the moment that happened. The only time you should re-record something is if it keeps you up at night, but there’s a happy medium between that.”
The only time you should re-record something is if it keeps you up at night, but there’s a happy medium between that.
Without any formal training, since the release of his debut album ‘Nocturne’ in 2015, Mist has made himself a respected figure in the jazz scene but there’s another world he’s still hoping to open doors to for himself. When he was first starting to make his own music, he harboured ambitions to create film soundtracks – again thanks to his experience with sampling. Although he notes that many classical musicians “have beef with” him for his love of Hans Zimmer, the renowned composer was his gateway into being interested in movie scores, eventually leading him to discover more creators in that field to be inspired by along the way.
As with jazz, Mist found his musical background and his limitations in not being able to read or write sheet music formed a barrier to diving headfirst into that world. “I got told in uni that I probably should have gone to this school to do that and you have to go through this path to get into film composition,” he says. “It just seemed really hard.” Instead of giving up, though, he formed a new plan – make his own music and get recognition on his own terms in the hopes that film studios would then come calling.
That, he says, is definitely still the goal and he has some specific visions of where his music would work best. “Any anime – Flying Lotus’ thing recently for Yasuke was really good,” he begins. “I play a lot of shoot ‘em up games, like Call Of Duty, a lot and they have really nice soundtracks. In terms of films, things shot in London, like Luther [would be good]. I’m really into crime dramas so I’d really love to get into that.”
Until he gets the nod to start working on a soundtrack project on that scale, Mist has other plans in the works to keep himself busy. He’s spent the time since completing ‘Bring Backs’ focusing on how to get other artists’ music out into the world. He already has his own label, Sekito, on which he released all his music prior to this latest album and now he wants to use it to pay forward the success he’s achieved. The first releases will likely come from the musicians who have played on his own material.
“The people that have played on my stuff are really good and if you speak to my band they’ll say that I’ve had an individual conversation with each of them,” he says. “I’ll say, ‘What are you doing? Put music out.’ The fact of the internet is anyone can make music and put it out there and somebody will listen to it. There is no perfect storm to release stuff, especially if you have the compositional itch where you’re like, ‘I want to make my own stuff one day’. I’m just like, ‘OK, let’s make this happen’.”
The answer to making that happen for Mist is helping his friends and collaborators where he can, paying for studio time or instruments, and using the attention he has on him to highlight other musicians who deserve the same success. “It’s me just shining the light – these people are amazing anyway so you get to have a listen to what they’re doing and what they think,” he shrugs.
Spitfire Audio Presents — Alfa Mist: Confliction
As for his own projects, he says he’s always working on “that full-length thing” and has some new music of his own already underway. Much like the stories he tells on ‘Bring Backs’, his aims as an artist are “nothing grand”. “We’ll just see how life goes,” he says in his usual relaxed tone. As his most recent album can attest to, that laidback attitude can – and has – produced special moments from the most ordinary beginnings.
https://www.clashmusic.com/features/were-all-striving-alfa-mists-ongoing-journey
"We're All Striving!" Alfa Mist's Ongoing Journey
Alfa Mist is a figure whose creativity comes from a certain place, and a certain time.
He's resolutely London in his outlook - the transfiguration of influences, the merging of sounds - but he's also tied specifically into developments within what he terms the city's music communities in the past few years.
Melding hip-hop and club tropes with jazz improvisation, his cavalcade of projects have been augmented by a thirst for collaboration that has seen him work with names such as Jordan Rakei and Tom Misch.
New album 'Bring Backs' though, is all about him. Perhaps his most personal project yet, it's an attempt to capture life in all its detail and normality, unpicking the mundane to find the magical.
Out now, it's a textured, nuanced experience, one whose deep-rooted mystery is matched to a directness, a willingness to communicate.
Clash spoke to the Newham creator over Zoom to find out more.
How do you feel right now? Nervous?
Not really nerves! I’m anxious to get it out, just to release it. Not to get the feedback from it. I want to let go of it, really. I’m anxious to let go!
What is your approach as a creator? Do you sink a lot of your emotional life into a project?
For me, I’m giving up what this project has been. I view each project as a concept, as a group of things I’m dealing with. And I immerse myself in this. With ‘Bring Backs’, if you look at the ideas surrounding it, I look at it both in and out of the project. Even afterwards, in mixing and mastering, I’ll still think about those concepts, almost from a philosophical point of view. Then I finally get to let it go, and let other people have their opinion on what I’ve poured into the music. It’s an exercise in allowing the questions you ask yourself to go towards other people. It’s a good feeling.
So, what concepts framed ‘Bring Backs’? And when do those themes become apparent?
It was a vague way of getting to this. For my last two projects – since 2017, basically – I sat down with my brothers, and had a conversation about relationships, and whether family members could be friends. That was the main concept of that. I sat down with my sister on the next project ‘Structuralism’ to discuss mental health, and how since you can never truly know how people are feeling you need to always be respectful to people. Basically, empathy.
I knew I wanted to talk about myself in some degree – I’d spoken about everyone around me, so I needed to zone in on the next project. It was quite vague, then – I didn’t really know what I wanted to say… because, to me, my life is quite boring! It’s quite mundane. It’s not interesting! Because it’s just me. You tell people stories about yourself and they’ll find it interesting, but because you’re the one who lives your life it’s all just normal to you. But I still thought: you know what? There’s stuff to explore here. Even mundane things should be spoken about. Not everything has to be rags to riches, glitz and glamour. Not everything should be extremes, basically.
Sometimes you wake up and have a bad day, but you get over it the next day. So, let’s talk about that! I decided to zone in on that.
‘Bring Backs’ is named after the card game, actually.
I haven’t played it!
It’s mostly played in the UK, I think. I didn’t really leave London when I was younger, and we all used to call it London Black Jack. You played it whether you were in East, West, South, or North. The rules differed, but it was the same game. You had to get rid of all your cards – the first person to do so wins the game! You can do the rule ‘bring backs’ which means that people can bring you back into the game. So, if you get rid of your cards, you haven’t actually won – you need to wait and see if the person next to you has an ‘attack card’ and can bring you back into the game. I just applied that to life.
Coming from where I come from, you can get things pretty easily but keeping things is the hard thing. There’s this whole fast life, fast things that people chase… but it’s hard to maintain that unless you’ve got a good foundation. I could be doing well in my life, and my family will see me doing a gig in Germany or whatever and they’ll be like: you’ve made it – transfer me that million pound to my account! And I’ll be like: I haven’t won in the way you think I’ve won. It’s this constant state of questioning your achievements, whether you’ve passed that threshold. It’s not a unique position, but I do think it’s an interesting one.
How do you define success then? Is it simply having that space to create art?
The freedom to do it is the success for me. That’s definitely what it is. And I had to grab that! I had to look like a bum for years because I chose not to work so I could focus on what I was doing, and then I had to close my ears to what people were saying around me about my decisions. But then, things pay off. And now I get to chill out, and create stuff in the way I want to create. When you mix a lot of work in as well… you’ve got to get lucky as well.
But it’s all about freedom. Even people who chase money for money’s sake, if you talk to them they want financial freedom. The feeling of being able to do what you want. We’re all striving so we don’t have this thumb on top of us, someone telling us everyday what to do.
You’ve worked hard to master that craft, but alongside that music in London has opened up in a spectacular way in the past five years.
I didn’t grow up around the music circuit in London… so I don’t know how it was before. I came from a beatmaking background, so I used to make beats. And when you’re making beats as a producer, you’re kind of an introvert – you’re honing your own thing. By the time I got a band together it was just tunnel vision. I didn’t understand how much things had changed. A lot of that, I guess, is to do with the internet and the amount of music that is available now. It’s not a funnel of: this is what you need to be listening to. Things ain’t controlled by radio as much any more. People can go and discover! People used to go to record stores to dig for samples, and now you go on YouTube. It’s been an interesting journey.
For me, I first heard jazz in the context of hip-hop. That will always be my underlying feel. I respect the tradition. I respect people that play full-on jazz. But you’ve got to be true to who you are, and that’s what I take from jazz. Even people who come from the tradition, the ones that stand above the others are the ones that truly sound like themselves.
It’s defining success, isn’t it? Some people want to master that tradition, others want their own voice.
It’s all about getting as close to the way you sound as you possibly can. That’s what success is for me. I want to sound like myself. There’s this purity you can hear with certain people, where it’s like: I can hear you sound like you, and I hear it wherever I go, and there’s no mistake in that. And that’s what I think the goal is. It’s the cheesiest thing, but it’s to be the best version of yourself… that’s what you should strive to be. It’s not possible for us to have grown up in the environment we grew up in, and not to have absorbed different genres.
So then, when we grow up, those different genres are just in us! Unless you want to focus on jazz and nothing else matters… but when you were seven years old jazz wasn’t what was playing in your mum’s car!
If we look at your own methods, ‘Teki’ feels enormously distinct.
For all of the music on this album, I make little beat versions first. I make these versions where I get these versions together, and I make versions of it for myself, and then I get better people in to play them. So, with ‘Teki’ I had a version of that. The original name for this song was ‘Enemy’ and ‘Teki’ is the Japanese translation. ‘Teki’ is a song about the battle with the self. I like a lot of nice harmony. I like harmonies that flow nice. But when it comes to soloing, I value chaos over technical correctness. So with ‘Teki’, it’s about that constant battle within the self. I told the guitarist: go a bit crazy in your solo and ignore how it sounds! That’s the concept. And the Japanese name was a nod to anime.
Have you played Japan yet?
I have! I played the Blue Note over there, two years ago. Back to back shows, two shows a night. Intense, but it was wicked! Amazing to be there.
‘Run Outs’ though seems to exist in a different spaces.
That was built from the beat. But ‘Run Outs’ was more about me accepting where I’ve come from. The thing about ‘Run Outs’ is that I used to make beats like that when I was 14, 15. I’m from Newham and grime was really on the come up when I was growing up. I used to make grime beats on Fruity Loops! I’ve come to see beat making, and what I do with the live band, as being one and the same, not as separate entities. ‘Run Outs’ is me trying to bring the two together. Plus, it’s a game from back in the day!
Are you still a committed gamer?
I am yeah. Not so much this year, but during lockdown and before, sure.
Games have such a potent world building element, does that way of working resonate with you creatively?
Yeah that’s how I work! I build songs and projects around colours, and concepts. Then you build it out. I approach rap in the same way. I’ll rap if the songs needs it – it’s not like I’m a rapper who needs to get his bars out in the universe! It’s about the requirements of the piece of music.
You’re a renowned collaborator, and this time round you’ve got Kaya Thomas-Dyke and Lex Amor. What made them the best people to bring in?
Kaya came in as she’s done the artwork all my full length projects since 2015, and she’s played bass with me for three projects now. Just an amazing artist and vocalist. You’ll hear more from here. I wrote this on bass – I didn’t want keys on it – and I wanted it to be folky. I actually listen to that music – I know I don’t seem like that type of person, but I do actually like that sort of stuff. So I needed Kaya in there.
And Leks is incredible – Lex is unique, she’s mastered the sound of Lex.
Bringing the project together at the end must be a creative act in itself – nine tracks, but a huge amount of ideas. How did that contouring roll out?
When I went in to record it, I had these nine songs. I whittled it down to nine from maybe 60 a long time ago – when they were still in beat form. When we had the nine, we went in for a week and recorded straight to tape. Then we did a few other sessions with string players, and the features were done remotely. The process wasn’t too long, and I make sure I have a good idea of what I’m doing before I go into the studio. That comes from the days of not having money to pay for a studio – you needed to know what you were doing!
The album is a real success, but did you find – in the spirit of the game Bring Backs – that once you’d finished it, another project called you back into the game?
Ha! Yeah. I’ve done quite a bit since. That’s just how it goes! I just follow what I want to do. In the past couple of years I’ve had these ideas, and that’s led to some music. I’ve been lucky – I haven’t had a lull where I didn’t feel like doing much. There’s always been something to do. Probably because I’m interested in a bunch of different things! I’ve been keeping myself busy.
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'Bring Backs' is out now.
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Alpha Mist-Jazz transcends London’s world of grime and hip-hop+Euro Tour
The sombre or misty jazz of Alfa Mist arose from his earlier efforts as a grime and hip-hop producer, who was raised in Newham, East London. Alfa Mist taught himself how to play the piano, and he was also previously a rapper. His sampling production work is what led him to discover the deeper world of jazz, world music and film soundtracks, and with his own music, he is blending his own singular melancholic jazz with alternative hip-hop and soul.
Alpha Mist released his second and mostly instrumental album “Antiphon” in 2018 following his first recording “Nocturne” (2015), which featured more vocalists. However, both recordings are steeped in a moody atmosphere, which Mist likens to his life in London.
“I’m pretty dark as a person I guess, so everything ends up sounding melancholy and reflective,” said Mist in a previous interview for NME. “I want to make people feel something.”
“There’s something very distinctively London about the stuff I’m making now,” he said referring to “Antiphon.” “It’s to do with where I grew up. It’s not like LA; all sunny, crazy and happy.”
Alfa Mist has cited Blue Note artists Robert Glasper, and Herbie Hancock as influences, but there is also a certain connection to the darker side of Stevie Wonder, which should not go unnoticed. Jamaican dub and the contemporary British jazz scene is undoubtedly also an influence, and particularly for his group of young players on recordings and tours.
Led by Alfa Mist on keyboards, his group includes Peter Adam Hill on drums, Kaya Thomas-Dyke on bass, and Jaimie Leeming on guitar, and Johnny Woodham on trumpet.
They’ve also released two new songs (on bandcamp) as an extended epilogue to “7th October” which is a standout track from “Antiphon.” The newest songs have a livelier drum & bass sound and the addition of trumpeter, Johnny Woodham, for a more uplifting or even funkier sound, overall.
Alfa Mist is on tour in Europe in April 2019
April 2, Tuesday – La Nef, Angouleme, France
April 3, Wednesday – New Morning, Paris, France
April 4, Thursday – Les Noces Felines, Reims, France
April 5, Friday – Ninkasi Kao, Lyon, France
April 6, Saturday – Le Brise Glace, Annecy, France
April 12, Friday – Next Step, Cully, Switzerland
April 16, Tuesday – Mladi Ladi Jazz Festival, Prague, Czech Republic
April 26, Friday – CBE, Cologne, Germany
April 28, Sunday – Alte Feuerwache, Mannheim, Germany
April 29, Monday – Gretchen, Berlin, Germany
April 30, Tuesday – UT-Connewitz, Leipzig, Germany
Artist website: Alpha Mist
Senior writer: Tony Ozuna
Photo credits: Kay Ibrahim & Alfa Mist FB page
Having stumbled upon the music of Alfa Mist a few years back via work with singer/producer Emmavie. I've been checking the uber talented artist's career even since, and with each release, there have been subtle changes in sound from the soulful mood of the Nocturne EP to the hip-hop bounce of his 2nd Exit project with Lester Duvall, but always underpinned by a jazz sensibility.
His latest work called Antiphon is in my humble opinion is his best work yet. Created around a conversation with his brothers the project finds Alfa blending forward-thinking jazz with alternative hip-hop and soul.
https://soundcloud.com/alfamist/keep-on
There's a whole wave of new modern jazz players in the UK at the moment, from Moses Boyd, Nubya Garcia, Project Karnak, Alfa Mist and more and if one thing connects them together, it's that the jazz their making pays a healthy respect to the past while being future facing and fresh.
We caught up with the East London producer to talk about his stunning new album, which artists we should be looking out for and a whole heap more. Get the lowdown on Alfa Mist below.
How did you first get into making music? Who were some of your early influences?
I started making grime and hiphop beats when I was in secondary school, so I was listening to artists from Kano to Little Brother. I always wondered why my beats could never even come close to the stuff 9th wonder, J Dilla and Hi-Tek were making, then I discovered sampling and through looking for things to sample I discovered a lot of other genres. I started listening to a lot of film sound tracks and Jazz and decided I need to learn how to play the piano.
What was your first big break as an artist?
I’m not sure that I have had a ‘big break’ yet, just a lot of slow and steady progress, which is all I can ask for really.
I read you created the Antiphon EP around a conversation with your brothers. Can you talk about the conversation and the process of making the record?
https://soundcloud.com/alfamist/breathe-feat-kaya-thomas-dykeYeah I sat down with my brothers and recorded a podcast and told them the two subjects we were going to discuss would be mental health and relationships. We spoke about what it means to be part of a family and whether or not a conscious effort needs to be made when it comes to checking in and meeting up. On one side its like, the love will remain the same we just need to understand that we all have lives and work that needs be done so there isn’t always time to meet up. On the other side it’s like, can you really be part of someone’s life if you go months without speaking at all? That was just a small part but it was stuff like that. It was very interesting to me I agreed with a lot so their opinions sounded like me debating with myself.
Although jazz clearly influences the EP, it doesn’t easily fit into one genre. How would you describe the sound on Antiphon?
Aswell as jazz there’s a lot of hiphop and soul influence in Antiphon as well. I think there’s this moody thread that ties it all together, I feel like that’s my sound, it’s got a lot to do with my surroundings, I reckon Antiphon would sound different if it rained less in London.
Is there anything musically that you’d like to do that’s very different from what you’ve been doing?
I’d like to compose music for film in the future, but in a weird way that’s not too far from what I’m doing already.
How did you meet up with the (We Are Live crew) Tom Misch, Barney Artist, and Jordan Rakei?
I went to the same primary school as Barney I’ve known him for years and years. I met Tom and Jordan through soundcloud, Tom thought I didn’t like his stuff at first but really I didn’t think two producers making a beat would work back then, so I was reluctant to collaborate since his beats were already good! like, what do you need me for then? haha but yeah we worked on stuff in the end and I learned that collaboration is important and the rest is history! Jordan sent me a message which I replied, but he apparently didn’t get it and thought I ignored him. So yeah not the greatest origin story but we got there in the end.
How did the 2nd Exit release come about and do you have any plans do a follow-up?
I’ve known Lester for a few years and we had a backlog of songs we’d start, say we’d finish and then just leave. One day we decided to remake them all and make some new ones and 2nd Exit was born. A follow up is in the works hopefully it’s just the beginning for that project!
You recently played at the highly regarded jazz re:freshed night in London, how’d it go?
It was amazing man, I’ve been going there for years so it was an honour to get to play there as myself.
Name three new artists, that we should be looking out for right now?
I need to mention Mansur Brown and also Kaya Thomas-Dyke, these people are ridiculously talented, both featured on Antiphon and I’m grateful. Also Kadhja Bonet is amazing.
https://soundcloud.com/alfamist/kyoki
What are your plans for next year?
Another project, and playing a lot more shows hopefully!
What is your idea of a perfect day?
Going to Asda, getting muffins and coffee, coming home, writing music then reading manga or playing PS4. Basically staying indoors where I can keep my poor communication skills to myself.
Big thanks to Alfa! Check out his Stereofox profile here.
https://www.waxpoetics.com/article/east-london-co
by Andy Thomas
August 31, 2021
Wax Poetics
“I
chose to play the piano for its utility, as it’s the one instrument
that covers the range of most things that you hear,” explains East
Londoner Alfa Mist of his evolution from beatmaker and rapper to
self-taught pianist and composer. “I also wanted to understand all this
music in these hip-hop records, and the piano was the best instrument to
do that. So it really was a practical thing to begin with.”
Although he came through during London’s young creative jazz renaissance, Alfa Mist has never been connected to any scene. With an introspective sound all his own, he is equally at home creating Rhodes-infused jazz and soulful hip-hop as elegiac solo piano pieces. This year, after a number of self-released albums, he was signed by Los Angeles’s Anti- label for his new LP, Bring Backs, where he takes a journey back to his beatmaking origins through the kaleidoscopic filter of jazz.
Born to a Ugandan mother in Newham, one of London’s poorest boroughs, Alfa Sekitoleko first heard his calling in the local grime music transmitted on pirate radio from kitchens and bedrooms in tower blocks around his East London neighborhood. “This music was post–U.K. garage, and it had a much more gritty and real sound, and that is why we loved it,” says Alfa. “I think, for young people, the more gritty and real the music, the more they are drawn in. Now you have drill music, and people have moved beyond grime, as they see it as a relic of the past. Drill is what grime was for us back then, and hip-hop was what the older people were into.”
Emerging from its East London stronghold in the early to mid-2000s, grime’s futuristic, jagged sound was created by young bedroom producers using the most rudimentary computer programs. “Where I came from, nobody was a musician or played an instrument or anything like that; everyone was just using things like Fruity Loops or whatever they had,” says Alfa. “No one was trained or had old music to draw on, which is why grime had such a unique sound. That made it something really new, and it was very much a U.K. sound with roots in the Caribbean.”
While he began making grime rhythms and rhymes inspired by local heroes like Kano, Alfa was soon becoming inquisitive as to where the hip-hop producers he had started to discover were finding their beats. “When I first heard hip-hop, I had no idea about sampling. I just thought they were getting people in to play that music,” says Alfa. “I really didn’t know they were chopping up other songs and putting beats and bass under them and stuff. I started to frequent loads of these forums and started to learn what they were doing with their sampling. Then I came across [Talib Kweli and Hi Tek’s group] Reflection Eternal and Madlib’s Shades of Blue, and I started to dig through the samples.”
This was a defining moment for the young producer that completely opened up his musical horizons. “That is what got me into the techniques of sampling and for digging for them. I [started] to learn about where the samples came from,” says Alfa. “Then, from more experimental producers like Madlib, I started to hear all this different music from across the world. So that introduced me to all this stuff I had no idea about—from Indian music to classical, film music, and, of course, jazz.”
It was to the jazz pianists the inquisitive young digger was drawn. “I started to really get into players like Bill Evans, Ahmad Jamal, Herbie Hancock, and a lot of those guys at first,” says Alfa. “Then people who were doing this currently, like Robert Glasper and Aaron Parks, there was a whole community of these piano players in America. I started to really delve into that world and to study how they were playing.”
Unlike contemporaries on the young London jazz scene who refined their playing at music schools like Trinity Laban or Guildhall and community music educator Tomorrow’s Warriors, Alfa Mist was completely self-taught. “Coming from where I’m from, I didn’t even know what a conservatoire was,” he says. “When I found out, I was like, ‘Wait, there’s a place you can go and just learn music?’ I knew nothing about that, nor did anyone I knew, and we had no clue about anything like Tomorrow’s Warriors.”
Without the guidance of a teacher or help of peers, Alfa was left to master the piano all on his own. “I just started [to] play around with this MIDI keyboard,” he recalls. “I would try and play along with these jazz records and, in particular, to push myself to play things that were difficult, technically. And then I would tackle another one. And this was all purely just by ear. Then, slowly but surely, I started to see patterns between things.”
So does Alfa think being self-taught helped or hindered his playing? “I think it’s definitely better to find your own voice and to do what you want to do, but if you want to teach yourself to be a great player, it’s a much longer road,” he replies. “But that isn’t really what I was trying to do; I always just wanted to find what I sound like. And that is by finding the fastest path for me and my sound rather than trying to become the best piano player in the world.”
Dissecting the harmonics of the records he was discovering and creating his own production style of hip-hop rhythms and melodic Rhodes-infused jazz, Alfa began to find that sound that he was looking for. It would come to fruition on his self-released debut EP from 2014, Epoch, featuring singer Emmavie. “Around that time, SoundCloud had become this great platform for musicians like me to put our recordings out there to share and for people to download and make comments,” says Alfa of this DIY community that operated well outside of the mainstream industry. “You didn’t have to talk to a label or anything like that, so it really was a community-type thing. I didn’t have a clue about labels, so the internet just unlocked everything and made it so I could upload a release and someone in Thailand or wherever could hear it. So it did a lot for people who had no access to the industry, and they could exist independently. And loads of producers who are still going today were born from [that] era.”
It was through the SoundCloud community that Alfa met Emmavie, as well as musicians like Tom Misch and Jordan Rakei, who along with Alfa and his school friend, the rapper Barney Artist, make up the Are We Live crew. This collective provided the backbone to his next EP, Nocturne, an eloquent concept album based around the human mind at nighttime. It began with a poem recited by writer Racheal Ofori and Barney Artist: “Eyes open but I see black / Yes, I’m an insomniac / Irony is the fact that it’s my dreams that leave me restless / So I lay here breathless.”
Moving from beatmaker to songwriter and composer, Alfa found himself naturally attracted to such personal stories. “It’s not something that I consciously set out to do; it’s just the only way I can write. So when I tell stories, it always comes from my own personal experiences, so either about me, things I can see, or that people around me can see,” he says. “And that all goes back to my early days rapping and dropping bars in the schoolyard. I was always into the more intricate rappers like Elzhi from Slum Village and Phonte from Little Brother. Then you had people like Joe Budden through his Mood Muzik series—that is when I started to hear people talk about not just things that are going on outside but also things that are in their minds. That was a really new perspective in rap for me and had a big influence and encouraged me to write what I was feeling.”
Despite being somewhat insular and not being attached to any particular scene, Alfa was starting to connect with some serious players. Musicians like guitarist Mansur Brown, bassist Kaya Thomas-Dyke, trumpeter Johnny Woodham, and drummer Jamie Houghton. They joined members of Are We Live on Alfa Mist’s 2017 breakthrough LP Antiphon, later rereleased on vinyl on his own Sekito label in 2021.
Furthering Alfa’s conceptual writing, the album was based around a conversation with his brothers discussing subjects around mental health and relationships. “That came from listening to LPs like Choices by trumpet player Terence Blanchard where he sat down with writer and activist Cornel West, whose spoken-word readings weave through the music,” says Alfa. “Sometimes, the music alone is not enough to tell people what you are actually talking about. I really like the idea of people forming their own opinions just from the mood of the music alone, but other times, you really need to get the thoughts out there. And Choices showed me that you can be quite explicit sometimes.”
I’m interested to know if Alfa thinks issues around mental health are becoming easier to talk about in his community. “Where I grew up, it’s not so much that it’s a taboo subject, but it’s definitely something that people don’t talk about,” he replies. “It’s a case of if you don’t go to work today, you don’t get paid, or you might lose everything. When you have poverty—mental health is secondary. So it’s like they don’t have the financial stability to talk about mental stability, if that makes sense. So life forces you to bury stuff, and as men in particular, it was always seen as a weakness. But now, I think that is getting a lot better, as every year we critique ourselves as a human race.”
The subsequent LP on Sekito, 2019’s Structuralism featured his sister reciting the stories as her brothers had on the previous LP. “After Antiphon, she was like, ‘Why wasn’t I on this?’” says Alpha. “On Structuralism, my sister’s reflections are more introspective. It still addresses mental health but more from the way we react and how we understand each other. We need to be kinder to each other and to reflect more on our actions.”
The LP also included the track “Jjajja’s Screen,” dedicated to Alfa’s grandmother. “I decided to start using Ugandan names on my records, and that track is about how me and my grandmother used to communicate when I was a kid, because she couldn’t speak any English and I spoke no Luganda,” he says. The album was imbued with an air of melancholy that shrouds Alfa’s music. “That is just what I’ve always felt, and that comes through in the music. I just can’t run away from it,” he says. “The stuff I really feel and the stuff that hits home has that kind of sound. Whether I am rapping or composing a string section, I think there is something that connects it all to me. And that, I think, is what us as musicians should be striving for—to be honest and real. Anything else you do you will be found out as a fraud.”
There followed a beautiful LP of solo piano pieces by the name of On My Ones, which saw Alfa Mist exchanging the Rhodes, which has become his signature instrument, for a grand piano. Then earlier this year, he was picked up by the Los Angeles Anti- label for his new LP, Bring Backs. Alfa Mist’s most cohesive recording yet, Bring Backs, accompanied by a poem from Hilary Thomas about building communities in a new country, finds Alfa reaching back to his beatmaking roots while retaining the melodic, spacey jazz that he has become a master of. “I think I’m always developing what my sound is and refining it and going back and improving things,” says Alfa. “I move very quickly. The day after something comes out, I’m going back and listening to how I could make it better. So I’m always trying to speak more clearly. You might know a bunch of words, but that is different to getting someone to understand what you mean. It’s about how you can add clarity to what you are trying to convey. And that is what I’m constantly driving towards.”
