Chapter 7 (10th Anniversary Edition) revisits Ezra Collective’s formative 2016 debut EP, reframing it as a pivotal early chapter in the story of a band that would go on to win the Mercury Prize and a BRIT Award. Originally a five-track set—Enter the Jungle, Chasing the Square, Chapter 7 (feat. Ty), I Have a God (feat. Zara McFarlane), and Colonial Mentality—the project captured a young London group discovering its voice: spiritually curious, rhythmically fearless, and rooted in community. Built around Femi Koleoso’s drums, TJ Koleoso’s bass, Joe Armon‑Jones’s keys, Dylan Jones’s trumpet, and James Mollison’s tenor sax, the music fuses UK jazz with Afrobeat, broken beat, hip‑hop, and church‑derived groove, treating jazz as a living expression of where you come from and who you stand with rather than a fixed style.The 10th Anniversary Edition, released on Partisan Records and pressed on transparent orange or standard black vinyl, remasters the original studio tracks and expands them with new “incarnations” that underline how the material has evolved on stage. Alongside the core five pieces, the reissue adds Chapter 7 (Live at NPR’s Tiny Desk) and I Have a God (feat. Zara McFarlane) (Live at the Royal Albert Hall), plus other live cuts in some configurations, situating the EP as a “living manifesto” rather than a static artifact. In this framing, Chapter 7 becomes a blueprint: seven movements built for sweat‑slicked basements and late‑night communion that show rhythm as ritual, youth culture as sanctuary, and jazz as an open invitation to move, shout, and imagine new futures together.
