Moses Boyd

Drummer Moses Boyd launched to the forefront of London’s forward-thinking jazz scene in the 2010s and early 2020s by harnessing a range of styles and rhythmic idioms, distilling elements of grime, neo-soul and Afrobeat into his own sweltering sound. Boyd was born in 1991 in South London, where he grew up in a family with Caribbean roots on a diverse diet of Miles Davis and Dizzee Rascal. First taking up the drums at age 13, he honed his craft while studying at the Trinity Laban Conservatoire, and by 2015 he had earned his first MOBO Award for his work with saxophonist Binker Golding as the free-jazz duo Binker and Moses. Around the same time, Boyd also assembled his Exodus group, and since then he’s straddled the line between traditional jazz and electronic music as a composer, bandleader and solo artist. On his 2020 album Dark Matter, he’s as likely to summon the rhythms of a New Orleans second line as a Hyperdub-style electronic beat. “It was just a very raw process of making music,” he tells Apple Music of the album’s omnivorous genre hopping. “I was less concerned with barriers and what things are and just more with how they felt.”