Ezra Collective tell Guardian Live why musicians must act like community pillars, not wait for government

Ezra Collective were the headliners at Sussex’s Love Supreme festival last weekend, and their Guardian Live conversation landed on one blunt idea: you cannot rely on the government when you are trying to build culture that survives pain.

Speaking at the event, Femi Koleoso and James Mollison, the British jazz figureheads behind the band’s distinctive sound, connected their artistry to civic responsibility. Koleoso framed the dancefloor as a shared ecosystem, saying “dancefloors are dancefloors, whether it’s people with instruments or people with turntables, there’s a synergy between all those spaces”. It is a poetic line, but it also reads like a governance principle: if you want something to keep working when times get rough, you build bridges between groups, not dependence on a single gatekeeper.

That is where the conversation widened. Mollison pointed to east London’s now-shuttered Passing Clouds, while Koleoso remembered north London’s University of Dub night at the Scala, plus Sunday sessions at the Haggerston pub where a jazz jam and a disco night ran at the same time. “I was so conflicted on which room to go to!” Koleoso said, and that conflict is oddly revealing. It captures what culture managers, venues, and arts organizations deal with constantly: limited rooms, competing audiences, finite attention. Their answer is not to pick one community and abandon the other. It is to acknowledge that people overlap, that scenes interlock, and that the best nights happen when you design for that reality.

The band also tied that overlap to the lessons they learned from Tony Allen. While the Guardian excerpt does not spell out specific details from those lessons, it does make clear that Allen’s influence is part of the band’s origin story and ongoing craft. For executives watching the creative economy, this matters because it is a reminder that artistic capability is built through mentorship, not just algorithms or branding. In business terms, talent development is the durable asset. Policy can provide oxygen, but it does not compose the music.

They also spoke about “mayhem in Lagos”, and again, the excerpt does not hand you a tidy anecdote with numbers and outcomes. But the presence of Lagos in the discussion signals something bigger than vibe. Global scenes shape local expectations, especially when artists travel, collaborate, or carry rhythmic ideas back home. When you have cross-border cultural flows, the industry often becomes more resilient because creators can borrow strengths from different systems. Still, the risk remains. If institutions in one place weaken, artists can end up paying the cost with their own time and energy, because their work cannot pause while bureaucracy catches up.

The most direct framing came when the band discussed why musicians should be “pillars of the community.” Read literally, that is a role statement. It implies responsibility for more than personal success, and it shifts the musician from performer to community builder. For decision-makers, that reframes the debate about who should do what during cultural stress. If the government is slow, uneven, or simply not structured to sustain night-to-night scenes, then local actors become the continuity layer. That does not mean policy is irrelevant. It means it cannot be the sole stability plan.

And the stakes are not theoretical. In the same conversation, the band signaled that they have known “moments of devastating pain”. Even though the excerpt does not list the events that produced that phrase, the point lands: the industry is not just creative. It is human. When pain hits, you need networks that are already in place, relationships that can translate art into support, and venues or scenes that keep showing up for people. That is why the band’s dancefloor metaphor matters. A dancefloor is a social contract. It only works if strangers feel connected enough to become a crowd.

If you are a festival operator, label leader, venue CEO, or board member shaping budgets for arts organizations, Ezra Collective are making an argument you can operationalize. The government can help, but it is not the rhythm section. The community is. Scenes that survive are typically the ones that already behave like ecosystems: artists collaborate across formats, audiences overlap, and mentorship is treated as infrastructure. In other words, you cannot wait for a press release to get people dancing. You design for resilience before the next shock.

Tomorrow’s funding decisions, partnership deals, and venue strategies will be judged not just by grants received, but by community capacity built. Ezra Collective’s Guardian Live conversation suggests that capacity is where musicians should invest their leverage. Not by substituting public policy, but by refusing to outsource the hard work of belonging and continuity.