Moses Boyd session

Moses Boyd seems like an honest young man, but we’re not sure we believe him when he tells us of his early dabbles with the drums that, “The spirit was willing, but the flesh wasn’t coordinated”. Going by this week’s See. Hear. Now. session, the guy clearly has an preternatural sense of rhythm. He was blatantly born with drumsticks in his fists.

Yet Boyd, a Mobo jazz-award winner from South East London who’s worked with Four Tet, Floating Points, Soweto Kinch and Little Simz, insists he didn’t know what the hell he was doing when he first got the chance to sit down at a kit at the age of 13. He simply had an awesome teacher – a sticksman named Bobby Dodsworth with a comprehensive knowledge of the jazz greats – and an insatiable taste for practice. Soon he was spending all his school breaks in the music room, studying the likes of Tony Williams and Steve Gadd.

These days, Boyd holds a degree in jazz drums and leads two of his own outfits, The Exodus and Solo Exodus, which have grime and electronica as well as jazz influences. He’s also explored West African percussion and blues music, particularly via a duo with saxophonist Binker Golding. The pile of jazz awards is steadily mounting.

Here you can hear Moses and long-term collaborators Theon Cross (tuba), Artie Zaitz (guitar) and Golding perform the electronic-tilted After Tomorrow, and Axiom, a track inspired by Wayne Shorter, with his freewheeling attitude to “rules and shapes”. Boyd has skills far beyond his years, but watch him play and sometimes you can still glimpse the schoolboy in the act of falling in love.

Get to know Moses Boyd a little better and check out exclusive performances of After Tomorrow (from 02m 17s) and Axiom (11m 47s).