Joe Armon-Jones - new album and UK tour.
Saturday, April 05, 2025
Keyboard player, composer, producer & bandleader Joe Armon-Jones will release his new album ‘All The Quiet (Part II)’ on 13th June 2025. This will be followed by a series of UK tour dates in October.
We have received the following press release;
Joe Armon-Jones
‘All The Quiet (Part II)’
Album released 13th June
Vinyl/download/stream/CD
Aquarii Records
The critics on ‘All The Quiet (Part I)’:
“Welds funky shades of Herbie Hancock’s fusion era with a heavy dub influence and much post-production tomfoolery.” Mojo ★★★★
“Boundary-pushing future-jazz. Intricate, intoxicating and nodding in multiple directions often simultaneously” Electronic Sound
“Joe Armon-Jones tantalisingly displays a new darker side to his introspective compositions” Jazzwise
“The winning blend of soul, funk, Afrobest, hip-hop and electronica has a personal imprint, with pleating subtlety and restraint in places, but the input of vocalist/MCs such as Asheber, and Goya Gumbani who grace Kingfisher and Eye Swear respectively, is impressive” Echoes
“It’s in his solo work that the purest form of Armon-Jones’ vision shines though, combining elements of jazz, dub and the more atmospheric ends of UK electronic music his first solo album in six years represents his most ambitious statement to date” Music Radar
Following the release of ‘All The Quiet (Part I)’ – his first solo album in 6 years – London-based keyboardist, producer, songwriter, and bandleader Joe Armon-Jones returns with ‘All The Quiet (Part II).’
Having been championed by media including Mojo, Electronic Sound, Jazzwise, BBC Radio, Jazz FM, and more for ‘Part I,’ ‘Part II’ of these distinct but conceptually linked albums finds Joe expanding his sound into new musical and sonic realms, assisted by a wealth of special guests including Asheber, Greentea Peng, Wu Lu, Hak Baker and Yazmin Lacey.
Six years have passed since Armon-Jones’ last solo album, 2019’s ‘Turn To Clear View’ – but don’t mistake that gap for a break. In this time he’s toured the world, built a studio, contributed to albums from the great and good of UK jazz and recorded collaborative releases with Maxwell Owin, Hak Baker, and dubstep legend Mala. ‘All The Quiet’, though, marks a new artistic peak. Its two instalments showcase Armon-Jones’ prodigious talents as a pianist, improviser, and songwriter, while opening his music’s rich soundworld up to the influence of dub techniques.
You can trace the genesis of ‘All The Quiet’ back to lockdown, when in search of a creative distraction, Armon-Jones decided to teach himself how to use a mixing desk, inspired by his love for the radical productions of King Tubby and the feeling of experiencing a live dub sound system in the flesh. Before long he’d built a home studio complete with reel-to-reel tape machines and spring reverb and was experimenting with mixing his own solo and ensemble recordings, testing out the results on his friends’ Unit 137 sound system in nearby Lewisham. The methodology, he discovered, wasn’t so different from jazz improvisation. “I got really into exploring the soundworld of dub,” explains Armon-Jones. “Taking that process and applying it to jazz, funk, and all the other music that I really love.”
Written, produced, and mixed by Joe, the performances that comprise ‘All The Quiet’ came together in four days of intensive recording at Livingstone Studios and Press Play, Armon-Jones working with a crack team of musicians including drummer Natcyet Wakili, bassist Mutale Chashi, percussionist Kwake Bass and a horn section consisting of Nubya Garcia and Ezra Collective’s James Mollison and Ife Ogunjobi. With those sessions captured to tape, he then entered a deep period of editing and production, adding his own vocals and synth, and tweaking bass and drums with hints of dub delay and echo to create a sound both fastidiously textured and infused with the freedom of improvisation.
As the music that would become ‘All The Quiet’ began to take shape, he began to think of it in thematic terms, crafting a fantasy narrative of elite paladins of sound, battling to keep the soul of music alive in an age of indifference and hostility to the creative spirit. Fanciful, perhaps, but within it lies a serious point around the way that music has become commodified and devalued. “It’s an extreme end-game result of what we’re seeing at the moment,” says Armon-Jones, who worked with his long-term visual collaborators, Divya Scialo and Ralph Berryman, to turn his narrative into artwork and a comic book that will be available with ‘All The Quiet’s’ deluxe vinyl editions.
Ideas of freedom, community and resistance run throughout ‘All The Quiet’, from the lead-off single ‘Kingfisher’ (Part I) – which finds West London dub poet Asheber singing sweetly of community, celebration and revolution – to the cooly assured ‘One Way Traffic’, featuring Yazmin Lacey, which ends ‘All The Quiet (Part II)’ in one final feat of dub reconstruction. This, though, is unmistakably Joe Armon-Jones’ record – both a profound expression of music’s ability to move us, and a galvanising statement of intent: that such a thing is worth fighting for.
‘All The Quiet (Part II)’ Tracklisting
1. Acknowledgement Is Key (feat. Hak Baker)
2. Lavender
3. Westmoreland (feat. Asheber)
4. PSR Orchestra
5. Paladin of Sound & Circumstance
6. Another Place (feat. Greentea Peng & Wu-Lu)
7. War Transmission
8. Joe Armon-Jones – 505 Standby
9. Joe Armon-Jones – Journey South
10. Joe Armon-Jones – One Way Traffic (feat. Yazmin Lacey)
‘All The Quiet’ Tour Dates
Oct 21 – Manchester, Band On The Wall
Oct 22 – Bristol, St. George’s
Oct 24 – London, Hackney Church
Oct 26 – Brussels, AB
Oct 27 – Paris, Badaboum
Oct 28 – Amsterdam, Tolhuistuin
Oct 30 – Berlin, Saalchen