Picture a small boy in North London, too young for a proper drum kit, hammering on pots and pans with wooden spoons in his father’s church. The rhythm is already there, instinctive, joyful, completely unself-conscious. Nobody in that room is thinking about jazz, Mercury Prizes or Brit Awards. They are just watching a child who was clearly born to play.
That boy is Femi Koleoso. And that early rhythm, born in a Pentecostal church in Enfield, has travelled further than anyone in that room could have imagined.
At the 2026 MOBO Awards in Manchester, Ezra Collective, the band Femi co-founded and leads as drummer and bandleader, won ‘Best Jazz Act’ for the third time. It is the latest addition to a trophy cabinet that already includes a Mercury Prize, a Brit Award for Group of the Year, and a spot on Barack Obama’s personal list of favourite tracks.
The Nigerian-British son of a pastor from Enfield is now the leader of the most decorated jazz group in British music history.
From His Father’s Church to Tomorrow’s Warriors
Femi Koleoso was born in North London to Nigerian parents. His father is the pastor of Jubilee Church in Enfield. In the Koleoso household, music and faith were never separate things, they were the same thing, expressed in different ways.
He learned rhythm as a toddler on pots and pans with wooden spoons. He first played drums publicly during church services held inside a local cinema. His drum teacher Michelle recognised something in him early, and years later, after Ezra Collective won the Mercury Prize, she sent him a note telling him she had always known he would achieve great things.
The path from those church sessions led Femi to Tomorrow’s Warriors, a jazz youth programme in London that has become one of the most important pipelines for Black British jazz talent. There, he met the musicians who would become Ezra Collective, including his brother TJ Koleoso on bass. They named the band after the Biblical prophet Ezra, who devoted himself to studying the great works that came before him. That spirit, honouring what was built while pushing forward, has defined every step of what followed.
Femi has been honest about the fact that jazz initially felt out of reach. ‘I saw jazz as an elite art form that I didn’t have access to,’ he has said. Tomorrow’s Warriors changed that. It gave him and his bandmates a room where the music belonged to them. Everything that has happened since is a direct result of someone investing time in young people who needed that room.
Read: Major Highlights of the 2026 MOBO Awards
The Records They Keep Breaking
Ezra Collective have spent the past decade accumulating firsts that the music industry simply did not see coming.
In 2023, they became the first jazz act in 31 years to win the Mercury Prize, for their album Where I’m Meant to Be, a record that blends Afro-Cuban rhythms, hip-hop, dub, funk, and spiritual jazz into something that manages to feel like a celebration and a revelation at exactly the same time. Critics praised it as an album that jazz fans and non-jazz fans could fall for equally — without it ever losing its roots.
In 2025, they became the first jazz band in the Brit Awards’ history to win ‘Group of the Year’. Their 2024 single ‘God Gave Me Feet for Dancing’ made Barack Obama’s annual list of his 25 favourite tracks. They have performed at Glastonbury twice. Their third album, Dance, No One’s Watching, reached number seven in the UK charts.
And at the 2026 MOBO Awards, held for the first time in Manchester during the ceremony’s 30th anniversary, they claimed ‘Best Jazz Act’ again, their third MOBO win in the category. Beyond the band, Femi drums for Gorillaz on tour and plays in Jorja Smith’s live band. He is, by any reasonable measure, one of the most in-demand musicians in British music right now.
What Femi Koleoso Actually Stands For
The trophies tell one part of the story. Femi’s values tell the rest and they are worth paying attention to.
He has spoken consistently and passionately about stripping elitism away from jazz. The genre was, in his words, heavily institutionalised in a way that made people feel unqualified to enjoy it. He grew up being told it was not for people like him. He has spent his entire career proving that wrong, taking the music to pub stages in South-East London and Glastonbury festival slots with the same level of intention and energy.
On the side, he volunteers with Jubilee Youth Club, the community programme connected to his father’s church in Enfield. He mentors young musicians and talks openly about what community really means. He credits that skill directly to growing up in his father’s multicultural church, where the job of the preacher was to engage everyone in the room, regardless of background.
Femi has also been vocal about what it means to grow up Black and British with Nigerian roots, watching a music scene that was shaped by African heritage gradually get the recognition it always deserved. The MOBO Awards were created precisely for that purpose. That Ezra Collective now stands among the most decorated acts in British music history is exactly the kind of outcome those awards were built to make possible.
Read: DC3 Just Became One of the Youngest MOBO Award Winners in History
The Boy From Enfield Is Just Getting Started
Femi Koleoso started playing rhythm on pots and pans in a church in North London. Today, he leads a jazz group that has won the Mercury Prize, the Brit Award for Group of the Year, and three MOBOs and whose music made Barack Obama’s personal playlist.
The MOBO Awards have spent 30 years celebrating what Black music can achieve when it is given a proper stage. Femi Koleoso and Ezra Collective are one of the clearest answers to why that stage was always worth building.
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