Joe Armon-Jones

Keyboardist, composer, collaborator, and producer Joe Armon-Jones anchors London, England's thriving jazz, R&B, EDM, and hip-hop communities. As a founding member of the award-winning groove quintet Ezra Collective, he maintains a thriving solo path while handling piano and additional keyboards for saxophonist Nubya Garcia and tuba player Theon Cross. Beginning in 2016 he has also performed, recorded, and toured alongside a striking roster of other artists. His delicate phrasing and melodic piano style drew from the classical command of Ahmad Jamal and Oscar Peterson, whereas his rhythmic, groove-driven execution and shifting sonic palette reflect the impact of Patrice Rushen, J Dilla, and Herbie Hancock. Equally at ease backing vocalists or instrumentalists, he demonstrated this versatility on the 2017 EP Idiom, which included Maxwell Owin and Oscar Jerome, and on his first full-length album, 2018’s Starting Today, featuring Asheber, Ego Ella May, and Jerome. He and Owin rejoined forces in 2023 for the genre-blending Archetype, after which Armon-Jones released the 2024 Wrong Side of Town EP alongside lyricist/vocalist Hak Baker and an elite studio ensemble.

Armon-Jones grew up in a musical household. Born in Oxfordshire in 1994, his mother sang and his father played piano in their own active band. He attended performances before he could walk and began studying piano at five or six. Surrounded by recordings at home, he internalized the rigorous technique of Peterson and the expressive elegance of Jamal. Nina Simone became the first vocalist to captivate him. At 12 he began improvising, and at 13 the music of Rick Wakeman and Emerson Lake & Palmer steered him toward the jazz-funk fusion of Weather Report and Herbie Hancock, then the intricate writing of Chick Corea and Return to Forever. In his mid-teens he discovered hip-hop and the work of J Dilla and Rushen, which reframed fusion and jazz-funk for him; for a period Dilla stood as his foremost musical influence. Still in his early teens, he resolved to make music his profession.

His initial studio session as pianist occurred with Jasmine Powers on the independently released 12-inch Stories & Rhymes while he studied at Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance. He completed a Bachelor of Arts degree in music, concentrating on jazz piano, and graduated with honors in 2016. Although already participating in the South London scene for several years, his profile rose sharply in 2016 when he joined Ezra Collective and helped define the group’s characteristic fusion of modern jazz-funk, dub, Afrobeat, and hip-hop on the EP Chapter 7. That same year he contributed to guitarist Oscar Jerome’s debut 12-inch. In 2017, drawing from the Jazz Re:freshed environment, he assisted bassist Daniel Casimir on the EP Escapee and served as pianist on saxophonist Nubya Garcia’s widely praised album Nubya’s 5ive. Ezra Collective, already central to South London’s live circuit, recorded and issued Juan Pablo: The Philosopher in 2018 on Enter the Jungle. Armon-Jones and Owin issued their first joint EP, Idiom, on YAM to widespread critical praise. The next year he signed with Gilles Peterson’s Brownswood label and delivered his debut album, Starting Today, featuring Jerome on guitar, Moses Boyd on drums, and vocal contributions from Asheber, Ego Ella May, and Big Shaker. While maintaining an intense schedule of live performances with Ezra Collective and as a leader, Armon-Jones appeared on roughly half a dozen releases, among them Makaya McCraven’s Where We Come From: Chicago X London Mixtape, the Moses Boyd Exodus album Displaced Diaspora, and Garcia’s When We Are EP. The influential double-disc anthology We Out Here also surfaced.

In 2019 Ezra Collective issued the full-length You Can't Steal My Joy; buoyed by its critical and audience response, the band toured Europe, the United States—including a widely praised SXSW performance in Austin, Texas—and Japan. Armon-Jones released the Icy Roads EP, contributed to SEED Ensemble’s Driftglass and Blinker Golding’s Abstractions of Reality Past and Incredible Feathers (with Casimir), and appeared with Owin on Pinty’s City Limits EP. In September, after receiving Session of the Year at Gilles Peterson’s Worldwide Awards and earning a second consecutive nomination for U.K. Act of the Year at the Jazz FM Awards, Armon-Jones issued his second Brownswood album, Turn to Clear View, co-produced with Owin and featuring Boyd, Jerome, Dylan Jones, and Garcia among the musicians, plus vocal appearances by Georgia Anne Muldrow, Asheber, Jhest, and Obongjayar.

In 2023 he and Owin reunited for the long-player Archetype, whose eclectic, boundary-dissolving approach drew critical attention. The following year Armon-Jones delivered the Wrong Side of Town EP, a reggae-and-dub project with singer-songwriter Hak Baker supported by a high-caliber studio band that included saxophonists Nubya Garcia and James Mollison, bassist Luke Wynter, and drummer Morgan Simpson.