We Out Here Festival 2025
Wimborne St Giles 
★★★★★

WE OUT HERE is a relatively new festival, conceived and curated by legendary radio DJ Gilles Peterson. Co-founder of both the Acid Jazz and Talkin’ Loud record labels back in the ’80s and ’90s, he has for decades showcased music at the intersection between jazz and dance music of all flavours, the whole gamut of which is on display here this weekend.

Particularly outstanding is the Tomorrow’s Warriors Big Top. Tomorrow’s Warriors is a powerful mentoring scheme providing up-and-coming young talent (as young as 10 years old) from inner-city areas with free tuition from professional jazz musicians. 

Now in its fourth decade, the scheme has helped produce an entire ecosystem of incredibly dynamic and innovative musicians, many of whom are in the audience for each other’s sets this weekend, and often playing in each other’s groups.

Ade Kayode’s band are the freshest thing I’ve heard in a long time. Kayode was raised under a roof that also included Lord Eric, of the Master Drummers of Africa, a living legend who pioneered the Afro-rock genre following his appearance with the Rolling Stones in Hyde Park in 1969, and a major node in the network of African musicians arriving in London ever since.

Growing up exposed to all this, Kayode has lived and breathed innovative and creative music his whole life and it is thrilling to witness this joyous 40-minute exhalation of it all. Like all the best music here, it is hard to pigeonhole: jazz is the “medium” but the sound incorporates huge swathes of contemporary African, Caribbean, Latin and club sounds, with drummer Cassius Cobson channelling the power and urgency of hiphop and drum and bass into intricate and complex rhythms to massively gratifying effect, while Kayode’s soprano sax weaves it all together into a truly joyous and life-affirming blast.

Other stand-out performances on the stage come from Mali Sheard’s Homestead, whose sound traverses many different terrains and eras of jazz, from bebop to the psychedelic-tinged sound of artists like Lonnie Liston Smith and the funky fusion of Weather Report; Manchester’s Ellen Beth Abdi, who loops up angelic vocal harmonies as the backdrop to some gorgeous pieces combining soul music with elements of English folk; and the Klara Devlin Quartet, whose set spans introspective Scandinavian-style pieces, several incarnations of Miles Davis and a glorious take on Ornette Coleman’s Blues Cantation, driven by a bassline that throbs like a ragga dancehall banger before evolving into something that wouldn’t sound out of place on a Gang Starr track.

Another breath-taking — and genre-defying — highlight comes from rapper Pa Salieu. Hailing from Coventry with Gambian roots, Salieu’s performance heavily references the epoch-making struggles that are shaking west Africa right now, with all three vocalists dressed in the trademark red beret of Burkino Faso’s Ibrahim Traore, itself an echo of the pan-Africanist revolutionary Thomas Sankara.

With several references to his homeland in the lyrics, playing against a backdrop of Timbuktu’s iconic Djinguereber mosque — a 14th century centre of learning from a time when Mali was the richest country in the world — and accompanied by dancing red monsters evoking the Hausa warrior tradition, the show makes it clear that Africa has always been at the heart of the matter.

British youth culture’s experience of Africa has until recently largely come via the Caribbean, but the growing presence of second-generation Africans from the continent has opened up a potent new dialogue between the black music subgenres of Africa, the Caribbean and urban Britain. Musically, Pa Selieu’s rhymes embrace the polyrhythms of his homeland and his lyrics come steeped in the defiant spirit of contemporary west Africa.

For the jazz players in the big top, figures like Pa Salieu are considered one of their own: part of the same tradition and practice of taking whatever musical tools they have acquired and putting them at the service of black musical innovation. Hip hop came from jazz in any case and all of it came from the blues and from Africa, so the road from jazz to British-African rap and back is simply another cycle of the spiral. The whole scene is deeply inclusive; most of the bands here are gloriously multiethnic collaborations, but based on a clear understanding that this is black music and only remains genuinely universal to the extent that it is respected as such.

For the past three years, the event has taken place on the Wimborne St Giles estate belonging to the 12th Earl of Shaftesbury, Nicholas Ashley-Cooper. The original earl, of course, was an enclosing landlord who employed the political thinker John Locke to come up with his seminal legal justifications for the appropriation of land from Native Americans and English peasants, and (in the infamous Carolina constitution) the torture and murder of enslaved Africans.

The current earl, meanwhile, is an absentee English landlord whose family have owned the biggest freshwater lake in Ireland ever since the conquest of Ulster in the early 17th century. Loch Neagh’s sustainability is now seriously threatened by the current earl’s predilection for sand dredging the lake; otters and swans have been turning up dead on the banks with alarming frequency and a campaign is under way to return the lake to the Irish and put it into public ownership.

So when the earl turned up to play at the festival under his DJ name Nick AC, campaigners took the opportunity to unfurl a banner. They were swiftly set upon by the earl’s heavies while security intervened, confiscating the banner and detaining the protesters “for their own safety” until both his sets were finished.

It was a stark reminder of the coloniality of music festivals, which are, after all, effectively mini-enclosures of their own, barring the poor from this temporary gated community. So it was refreshing to meet a band of merry youth who had used their local knowledge to defy their exclusion (big up Alan, Harry, Nia and Chas!) and thoroughly avail themselves of the musical delights on offer — maintaining a venerable English tradition stretching back to Captain Pouch and beyond.