Alfa Mist

An East London pianist, producer, and rapper whose Ugandan heritage informs his work, Alfa Mist fuses hip-hop and soul with a cerebral strain of contemporary jazz. Attention first arrived via his 2015 debut Nocturne, issued on the independent Sekito imprint he founded. He broadened his palette on the 2017 album Antiphon and the 2019 album Structuralism, weaving fusion and orchestral colors together with rap verses and captured dialogue; both projects preceded his move to Anti-, which released the similarly wide-ranging Bring Backs in 2021 and Variables in 2023.

Grime and hip-hop first sparked his interest, as they did for many other teenagers in Newham. Discovering that his favorite tracks drew samples from jazz prompted deeper exploration of the idiom. Though raised in a household without musicians, he began teaching himself piano at age seventeen, honing a jazz-rooted technique while favoring a dense, Rhodes-flavored tone. On his own Sekito label he unveiled Nocturne in 2015, a soul-steeped collection of unhurried beats that already featured guests including Tom Misch, Racheal Ofori, and Emmavie.

Antiphon, arriving in 2017, crystallized his aesthetic. Its spacious, mostly instrumental compositions incorporated candid recorded exchanges with his brothers concerning values and respect, signaling the direction he would follow. The following year yielded a pair of joint singles with South London jazz drummer Yussef Dayes, while two reinterpretations of an Antiphon piece appeared under the title 7th October: Epilogue.

Structuralism emerged in 2019 as an ambitious statement that integrated a string quartet, lending the music a cinematic dimension; additional spoken passages featured his sister. Early in 2020 he issued the solo-piano EP On My Ones and the joint Epoch EP with Emmavie. That September his reading of Eddie Henderson’s 1975 composition “Galaxy” appeared on the Blue Note Re:imagined compilation. Also in 2020, filmmaker Harry Barber’s short documentary Confliction captured Alfa Mist in rehearsal with the London Contemporary Orchestra.

After signing with Anti- in 2021, he previewed the April album Bring Backs with the singles “Run Outs” and “Organic Rust”; the EP Two for Mistake followed in November. Variables arrived in 2023, spotlighting South African folksinger Bongeziwe Mabandla on “Apho” and Kaya Thomas-Dyke on “Aged Eyes.”