The lounge TV was tuned in to Later … with Jools Holland. On the bill were some names I recognised (Róisin Murphy, Nitin Sawhney, Suggs) and some I didn’t (Tom Walker, Yussef Dayes, English Teacher). When Jools announced the fourth act, the camera focused on the saxophone player in a 5- or 6-piece band. Taking their cue from the captions, the Crotchety grey cells tentatively suggested that this was a band called Yussef Dayes. Or, perhaps, Yussef was the name of the saxophonist and band leader. They played a modern kind of jazz – upbeat, funky, expressive, and very much to my taste.

All the musicians were highly talented. As I watched and listened, though, my attention kept being drawn to the drummer. And that’s rare within these walls. Was it just his joie de vivre that stood out, or was he deliberately upstaging his bandmates? It was hard to tell. But, when the piece finished, Jools thanked the flamboyant drum skin thumper for the band’s performance. For it was he who was Yussef Dayes and it was his band.

Yussef and his bandmates had played the title track from his first solo album, Black Classical Music. He explained why he chose that title in a recent interview with Ciaran Thapar for the Observer newspaper:

“Miles Davis called jazz Black people’s classical music. Rahsaan Roland Kirk called his music Black classical music. Nina Simone was calling her music Black classical music. It got me thinking, … There are so many nuances that can’t be defined by one thing. I’ve had classical piano lessons. I’ve been to west Africa and seen instruments that predate the cello and violin, drums that were there before timpani. There are other histories that made me realise this is bigger than just a jazz record.”

Yussef Dayes in The Observer, 2023-10-08

Firing up the research engine revealed a couple of parallels between my life and Dayes’. We were both brought up in the London borough of Lewisham. Yussef’s father built the family house on One Tree Hill in a part of the borough known as Honor Oak Park, a place I only knew as a railway station two stops up from Sydenham on the way to central London. Yussef must have known my side of the suburb, though, because one of the tracks on Black Classical Music is called Crystal Palace Park, which is where I would climb trees and swing on ropes as a teenager. It was also where our dad would take my brother and I to motor racing meetings – we could hear the cars from our flat at the other end of Lawrie Park Avenue.

Happy days! (Or should that be ‘Dayes’?)