Stretching out over an hour and fifteen minutes, the debut album from UK jazz drummer Yussef Dayes presents a sprawling musical journey across its 19 tracks, weaving its way through frenetic bebop, afro futuristic funk, spiritual jazz, psychedelia, West African rhythms and much, much more. Featuring a long roll call of guests including Tom Misch and Shabaka Hutchings, Black Classical Music is a dizzying trip which could have quite easily slipped into self-indulgence, but the whole thing is held together and anchored by Dayes’ breathtakingly deft playing.

UK drummer Yussef Dayes has released live albums and collaborations like the superb Yussef Kamaal but Black Classical Music (2023) was his debut full, dedicated artist album and it’s an impressive effort. It’s big, ambitious, sweeping — 1 hour and 14 minutes long — and there’s not really a cohesive sound across the 19 tracks. Rather, you get a collection of gently simmering spiritual jazz, studio production future jazz, jazz drum & bass, and slick contemporary soul jazz, all filtered through London’s Afro-Caribbean musical tradition. 

It’s an album of such quality that a sublime orchestral piece, the teasing hint of a potential imagined late 50s noir-romance film soundtrack “Magnolia Symphony,” is given only 1.37 minutes, and the buoyant, gently stalking swing of “Afro Cubanism” doesn’t even reach 3 minutes before Dayes is moving on to a gorgeous guest appearance from UK jazz don Shabaka Hutchings on “Raisins Under The Sun.” Continually inventive, joyous, strong, mesmerising; a superb debut album. 

“Black classical music” was the term Rahsaan Roland Kirk preferred for the kind of jazz he made — a perspective that honored tradition, yet rejected genre-bound formalism in favor of breadth and acknowledged the influence of both the experimental avant-garde and the popular R&B vanguard. Yussef Dayes, the London drummer whose collaborations with Kamaal Williams (Yusef Kamaal’s 2016’s Black Focus) and Tom Misch (2020’s What Kinda Music) put him into the thick of the UK jazz forefront, emerges with his first full-length as a bandleader carrying a similar approach as Rahsaan. It’s just that he’s got another fifty years of history to draw from, including all the intervening movements that fractured jazz into sample-chopped and soul-subsumed fragments — and the ones that put them back together kintsugi-style, highlighting the fractures in vivid gold to make something even more distinct. And Black Classical Music is worth citing as a work living up to that title for its range alone, led as it is by a drummer whose stylistic comparisons to Billy Cobham or Idris Muhammad ring just as loud to people who know those names from reverse-engineering hip-hop breaks as they do from knowing them for their CTI or Prestige credits. The glimmering fusion of “Rust” brings Misch back to lace the proceedings with some Jaco-in-’76 bass, placid cosmic-echo keys and haunting overdubbed soul harmonies, a stirring complement to the way the muted intensity of Dayes’ rolls and fills feels more like an embrace than a barrage. Keyboardist Charlie Stacy’s synthesizer contributions go beyond the classic George Duke funk-fusion archetype (“Jukebox”) into more contemporary textures — the gliding waviness of “Turquoise Galaxy,” the wow and flutter of “Birds Of Paradise,” the ambient whir in “Chasing the Drum” — that evoke the nu-neo-soul electro-warmth of contemporary Cali-based R&B. And even when the forays into other genres feel stark enough to come across like detours — the Chronixx-featuring dancehall cut “Pon di Plaza,” Elijah Fox’s solo synthscape jazz-Eno piece “Crystal Palace Park,” the sophisticated-yet-direct Sade vibes of Jamilah Barry feature “Woman’s Touch” — they all fall into their own sense of place with intricate rhythmic timing, thrumming with a precision that’s as far as you can get from clinical.