Joe Armon-Jones is worried about the future of music. The London-based keyboardist, composer and producer – known as a member of Mercury winners Ezra Collective, as well as a regular collaborator of Nubya Garcia and a solo artist – spends a lot of time considering the creation, impact and importance of music, and he has some concerns.
“I think a lot about how much credence is given to music as something that people need – something as important as oxygen and food in people's lives,” he says, when we visit him in his Aquarii Studios. “It's very difficult to imagine what life is like without music.”
Armon-Jones’s attitude isn’t the same old ‘music isn’t as good as it was in my day’ rhetoric prevalent among a certain type of middle-aged keyboard warrior. More accurately, Armon-Jones is literally worried about whether music has a future – or whether the art form is heading for extinction.
This is the broad theme behind his recent two-part solo album, All The Quiet, an ambitious jazz-dub concept album featuring contributions from the likes of Greentea Peng, Wu-Lu, Yazmin Lacey, Hak Baker and Nubya Garcia.
“It might be a topic that's been done to death, but the value of music has dropped considerably since I was born,” he explains. “It's dropped from being something you have to pay for, to something that people expect to access for free. While it’s a great thing that there's a low bar for people getting into music and into production, it's not great that less people are trying to perfect their art.”
As a result, he tells us, fewer people are dedicating themselves to mastering a particular musical vocation. There are fewer dedicated producers, fewer engineers, fewer committed players.
“I feel like music has lost a little bit of its…” he trails off. “It's difficult to say this without sounding jaded, but I really care about music, and a lot of the people that I spend time around really care about music. This album is trying to stress its importance – the therapeutic effect that it has on me when I play it. And hopefully on other people when we play it to them.”
Thematically, this plays out through a science fiction narrative that runs through the two LPs. All The Quiet imagines a world in the year 3999 where music has become a lost art and creativity is suppressed. The few remaining musicians and instruments exist in a community known as The Citadel.
Part one, released in April, tracks the calm before the storm, while the recently released part two follows a final showdown as government forces attempt to squash a musical rebellion.
If that all sounds a little high-concept, rest assured that the albums work equally well if you don’t engage with its loftier themes and simply enjoy the musicality of the groove-driven jazz, funk and dub compositions. Armon-Jones is well aware of the challenges of making such an ambitious, epic release digestible for all kinds of listeners.
“In my head, it’s one album – it's all one project,” he explains “But I know how listening works, and I know how my own attention span works. Two sets of one hour, to me, makes sense in terms of listening, rather than trying to throw all this music at people at once and get them to try and hear it all at the same time.”
Despite the album conjuring images of a musical apocalypse, he doesn’t think we’re on such an irreversible path just yet.
“The takeaway, in my head, is that we need to protect music,” he says, “really look after it and not take it for granted. We need to put funding into it – fund music education, people being shown different forms of music, the radio playing a more varied set of music, not just the same songs again and again and again.”
From playing to producing
It’s perhaps unsurprising that Armon-Jones places so much value in music, given how much he was exposed to it from a young age. He grew up in a very musical family. His parents were both jazz musicians. The influence of being surrounded by music led to him playing and consuming a variety of styles in his formative years.
“From a very young age, I was hearing a lot of jazz music, a lot of funk,” he says. “I was lucky enough to have a piano in the house that my dad and mum played a lot. I just grew up around a lot of improvising. I guess it's in the genes.
“I got pretty quickly into jazz and I was learning classical because it seemed like the thing to do if you're learning an instrument,” he recalls. “Looking back, it's a strange way for things to be set up. I'm glad I learned classical technique and things like that, but I was always more drawn to jazz – more drawn to improvising and making things up myself, rather than playing sheet music that other people had written.”
He studied music at college, but the real turning point in Armon-Jones’s career came through his involvement with Tomorrow’s Warriors, the London-based artist development program that has played a significant role in invigorating the UK’s vibrant contemporary jazz scene.
It’s here that Armon-Jones first met fellow Ezra Collective members Femi Koleoso, TJ Koleoso, Ife Ogunjobi and James Mollison, as well as other regular collaborators including Nubya Garcia and Moses Boyd.
Despite the early start as a player, the producer side of Armon-Jones’ skillset developed much later. “The first eight to 10 years of me playing professionally, I wasn't really interested in that stuff,” he says. “I was more interested in the notes and the rhythm and that side of things, and less about how the sounds were treated.”
That changed when he found himself sharing a house with three producers, including another future collaborator, DJ and electronic musician Maxwell Owin.
“He taught me a lot of what I know about electronic music,” he explains. “Me and him were listening to a lot of Burial and stuff like that, you know, and trying to figure out the things that go in the background of those tracks.”
The two musicians would go on to work on a variety of projects together, including the 2023 collaborative album Archetype, which pairs Armon-Jones’s jazz influences with dark garage beats and elements of dubstep and grime.
Working with Owin gave Armon-Jones a crash course on in-the-box production. However, his current hardware-heavy setup and Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry-influenced style of dub mixing is something developed through experimentation and a process of trial and error.
“In terms of the actual hardware and physical gear – compressors and delays and things that are in the real world in front of me – I tried to learn that stuff myself, especially over lockdown,” he says. “That was when I got a proper mixing desk, got some very basic EQs and compressors. Then I tried to start learning how that stuff really works.
“I definitely didn't know what compression was back then, even though I talked about it. It took me a long time of playing with the dial and hearing the effect on the music to to really understand it. It helped to have real pieces of gear that I could do that with.”
Those initial studio experiments focused heavily on the fundamental elements of the dub sound – heavy basslines and deep kick drums. As Armon-Jones explains though, he quickly realised he needed to take a more holistic approach.
“When you start mixing, unless someone's there to tell you, you tend to just put all your energy and effort into what you think the music needs – which is bass and kick,” he tells us. “You spend all this time trying to get them perfect.
“It took me a very long time to realize that mixing is the complete sum of everything in the song. If you're ignoring parts of the song it doesn't work. You have to be listening to everything in context.”
First take, best take...
As a writer and composer, a large part of creating All The Quiet came down to Armon-Jones’s ability to trust his collaborators to improvise around his roughly sketched ideas.
“[The songs] started with seeds of ideas,” he explains. “I'll record voice notes. I’ll sit at a piano or a synth whenever I have a spare moment. I know it sounds weird, but I find I write the best tunes when I'm supposed to be doing something else, you know, at a sound check or when sound check’s finished, and everyone's going to dinner. It's like, I really want to go to dinner, but that's when the ideas come, annoyingly.”
“I really like the sound of people's first explorations of stuff, like a drummer's first time playing a tune – it's kind of this weird, no pressure moment.”
As a band leader and producer, Armon-Jones aims to create an atmosphere of low-pressure, in order to capture his collaborators' freshest, loosest takes on the material.
“I tend to try and explain [a basic structure] before we've done a take,” he tells us. “I'll play on the piano with the bass player and the drummer. Maybe show them the idea, show them the arrangement of what we're going to do with it, roughly, but not, you know, eight bars this, eight bars of that.
“Then we’ll play, like, half a minute of it, just to make sure everyone's got it and that it’s sounding good in the engineer’s room. Then we’ll go for it and normally use what we get first time.”
A lot of the tracks that make up All The Quiet 1 and 2 are derived from these initial, first time improvisations around an idea, which Armon-Jones claims often captures the musicians at their best.
“I really like the sound of people's first explorations of stuff,” he explains, “like a drummer's first time playing a tune. They're just enjoying it, basically not overthinking. Because it's the first time, it's kind of this weird, no pressure moment.”
Beyond just capturing the best takes of his original ideas, these low-pressure recording sessions often create the right environment to generate completely fresh, unplanned ideas, some of which ended up on the final record.
“Quite often, what will happen is we'll play the song that I've written, and at the end of that recording, we'll go into something else that is spur of the moment,” he says. “A good example of this is Lavender – that wasn't written at all, that was out of the back of something else that we played that was in a different key, different vibe. There's a special kind of moment that can happen after you've done a good take of something where everyone feels really confident and happy and comfortable.”
Because much of the record was created fairly spontaneously, a certain amount of editing was required in order to tidy tracks up into their final arrangements. Armon-Jones would cut certain sections to tighten up run times and help mkae tracks progress a little quicker.
Working in such a loose manner could prove to be tricky, from a technical point of view, but, as he explains, the secret to making it work is a rock solid rhythm section.
“We don't play the click track,” he explains, “so I tend to have to make sure I'm playing with drummers that play solidly, so that I can still edit if I need to get rid of something. I'm lucky enough to play with drummers who, even without a click track, you can take four bars and put it together and it doesn't sound like they've changed speed.”
In the video at the top of this page Armon-Jones explains more about the album's themes and creation, and why he values working with Greentea Peng and Wu-Lu. You can take a tour of his Aquarii Studios in the clip below.
Joe Armon-Jones All The Quiet Parts 1 & 2 are out now via Aquarii records.
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