Yussef Kamaal

Yussef Kamaal operate as a London-rooted jazz-funk duo built around the partnership of drummer Yussef Dayes and keyboardist-producer Kamaal Williams, also known as Henry Wu. Their chosen name deliberately echoes the Egyptian painter Kamal Yussef, who helped establish the pioneering, cross-disciplinary Groupe de L'Art Contemporain in Cairo during the 1940s. The pair’s music fuses the rhythmic drive of 1970s jazz-funk with contemporary London elements of bass, beats, and hip-hop.

Both musicians hail from South London. Dayes serves as the drummer in the Afrobeat outfit United Vibrations, while Williams has long been recognized as a producer, keyboardist, and drummer who released multiple 12" singles under his own name. The two first encountered each other in 2007 amid separate projects and maintained occasional contact through shared performances. During rehearsals for a one-time Boiler Room appearance featuring Williams’s solo work, they chose to form a band. The resulting concert, built entirely on groove- and rhythm-driven improvisation, generated considerable attention and prompted further bookings. Without any predetermined compositions or charts, their music emerged spontaneously, frequently sparked by a lone drum pattern. Williams has characterized the approach as “...all about drums and keys....”

After delivering a twenty-minute performance at Gilles Peterson’s awards event, the duo attracted the attention of his Brownswood imprint and secured a recording deal. Engineer Malcolm Catto of the Heliocentrics oversaw sessions in which six additional musicians, among them saxophonist Shabaka Hutchings, joined them to realize the material. The outcome was the album Black Focus, released in November 2016.