How the Brits Won Jazz Café Festival, 2025: Field Report

It's fun to differentiate the London park festivals between the crowds' variegating taste (and sense) of fashion, but I have to admit I think that Jazz Café was by far the most diverse and comfy. Banished were the neon brat squadrons of Lido, the Jort steppers of Wide Awake, or the white-tanks of Boiler Room; I oriented myself based on how far I was from the dude in the pink crochet hat, lost in a mirrored pool of wrap-around sunnies and baggy denim-blue. With these bouncing landmarks, it might be the only festival I could recommend a solo mission to. Everybody was dressed for dancing, and everybody geared to do it, if push came to shove, alone.

Following the success of their inaugural fest last year, the legendary music venue was set to stage a Sunday of sublime tase, headlined by the ever ambidextrous Masego. I grabbed a beer and made my way to Lex Amor in the 'Plant Room', a makeshift greenhouse with holes in the roof, cast in a haze of humidifier and bud smoke. Lex has been a site fave on The Big Ship for years and, with a little digging, you can hear 'Mood' badly mixed into the earliest Pirate Radio broadcast, so I was excited to see how her aspirational mellowness translated live. The crowd was sociable, but the wrong kind of sociable, and Lex spent a good chunk of her set trying to rally or otherwise laughing off what was essentially a badly behaved classroom of stoned pupils reuniting between rollups, facetimes, and a net of hugs and screams. By the end, though, aided by some heavy lifting done by a couple of front-row die-hards and the swaggering magnetism of her verve, everyone wanted to be in on whatever this good thing was - so nonchalant it came out the other end as a radical freedom.

I headed over to the main stage and briefly caught a bit of Don West, an Aussie crooner who remains unratified on his actual singing abilities, but surely does very well for himself, regardless. And knows it too, swaying his isosceles-point hips to a '2 Years in but Still Not Ready for Anything Serious' type-beat. Hey, its fooled enough dancers for a reason. I was there, really, to fulfil my insatiable hunger for “boomboomboom” x ∞ and see Westside Gunn perform his UK debut, backed up by Griselda compatriot, Benny the Butcher. What followed, however, was the unfortunate rendezvous of an unstoppable force - the very-late (40 minutes late) headliner - with the immovable object of Great British Patience (sub-zero). No amount of Skrrrrr’s and YO!’s could win over a crowd that seemed more lyric-stumped than furious, and the odd jeer and thrown-beer eventually precipitated into dispersion when Gunn promised redemption by returning to the UK soon.

Really, I should never have left the Plant Room, where IZCO and the Brighter Days Family were bringing the party. IZCO's weaponizing of Jungle to engineer breezy doorways between so many genres is accessible, surprising, propulsive, and just a damn good time. It felt like there were at least ten Brighter Days members on the stage at any one time, each taking turns on the mic or the decks and never once stopping the dance. The effect was that of looking in on a house party full of talented, attractive people who are attractive due to the dew of joy and wanting in, come rain or shine. Oh, how it rained. Big, wet, drops of the kind that leaves the ground greener - sky-opening stuff. The Plant Room's open-air portions sectioned throughout let it down in great swaths of charcoal-scratchings, physically cordoning the crowd closer to the stage and into the dry. With music so good, these flaws soon became features, and happy festival-goers rain-danced through the wet, first donning macs and umbrellas, then just shirts and jeans, soaking through and whipping their wet hair. I saw medics raving at the side-lines as the crowd let off tendrils of steam, a kind of noumena that can only be extricated by The Good Drums. Grammar of providence might be a stretch for an unassuming Sunday in Burgess Park in a small greenhouse whilst most of the crowd awaited a shockingly late rapper from New York but, I promise you, by the end of the Brighter Days set the clouds had completely cleared, and the sun was coming down through the ceiling in streams.