Over a late breakfast in a Lewisham cafe, south-east London born drummer Moses Boyd tells me about the process of selecting the music for his Baker’s Dozen: ‘”It was funny even coming up with this list, I was in a green room backstage at a gig with a couple other musicians and I sat there – ‘this one, this one, this one’. The sax player was like, ‘How do you know? That would take me the whole day!’” He talks with the same passion and consideration he plays with, detailing how each of the tracks informed his second full length album Dark Matter, with excited asides and playful renditions of their rhythms and grooves. His deep knowledge of the records is matched only by a deep searching, doing the impossible work of trying to find the spiritual tether that ties all his influences together, “It’s interesting because you’ve got all these tunes but you always go back to the same things,” he says. As uncomfortable as Jeff Buckley’s ‘Yard Of Blonde Girls’ may seem in the company of Count Ossie & The Mystic Revelation of Rastafari, they all exist in the same unexplainable space that roots Boyd to the exploration of spirit and balance in his own music: “You develop a relationship and they never really leave you, those first formative records.”
Moses Boyd’s Dark Matter is out now. He tours through the spring, find dates here; click the image of Moses below to begin reading his Baker’s Dozen selections
