Travelling to Dorset from Liverpool for the We Out Here festival had filled me with a great deal of excitement, for it was WOH that sparked my now fully-fledged interest in New British Jazz with their 2018 compilation album on Giles Peterson’s Brownswood Records. Having been a lifelong lover of jazz in its many forms, this album awakened me to the community that has been working hard in London for some years now, nurturing new talent and collaborating with each other via the Future Warriors project to keep jazz evolving and opening the genre up to new and younger audiences. The recent announcement of Ezra Collective as nominees for the Mercury Prize has given added cause for celebration this weekend, a position fellow WOH colleague Nubya Garcia found herself in 2021. This year’s festival i...