Breathe Deep

“I've always known I wanted to do my own thing,” Oscar Jerome tells Apple Music. “But now I feel ready.” Since his first, self-titled EP release in 2016, the singer and guitarist has been cultivating a varied sound of his own on the fringes of the nascent UK jazz scene. He has played a key part in the Afro-jazz group KOKOROKO, collaborated with the likes of Mercury Prize-nominated drummer Moses Boyd and saxophonist Shabaka Hutchings, and supported West Coast jazz giant Kamasi Washington on tour. Yet it took until August 2020 for his debut album to be released. “My songs have to live in me for a while before they are ready for the world,” he says. “I’ve always been torn between solo artistry and being able to play and learn music in a more collective situation. It has taken me a while to feel like I've developed enough as a musician and as a person to be able to just focus on my own project.” The result of this awaited introspection, Breathe Deep, is a beguiling 11 tracks, a necessary compendium of Jerome’s key releases to date—rearranged anew through dozens of live iterations—as well as new numbers, all refracted through his propensity for personal and political thought. In Breathe Deep, Jerome presents his music as a living entity—a collection of songs that have largely lived with him for the past five years and that will continue to evolve through their onstage interpretations. Like the jazz standard that is constantly reworked and covered over time, here is Jerome’s musical offering to the future. Read on for his in-depth thoughts, track by track.
searching for aliens “I wanted to open the album with something that would set the tone and really put people in my space. I recorded this instrumental on the balcony of my flat in London last summer [2019] while I was playing around with a new guitar effects pedal. I was just trying to make these intergalactic sounds and I thought it was coming out pretty cool, so I decided to record it on the fly. Once I listened back, I realized it worked so well because you can hear planes flying overhead and you can hear kids playing around in the courtyard—I love the fact that it sounds like where I live. It is musically just like me.”
Sun for Someone “When I wrote this song at the end of last year, the conversation around climate change was really heightened. I felt like there were lots of people within the climate movement who were acting as if they wanted to save the planet when really it seemed like the emphasis was on just saving ourselves. Yet the earth will continue to exist for a lot longer than we will, just as the sun will continue to shine for someone. We don't really view ourselves as a finite thing, but we are—we are just a speck in time. This song gestures towards that wider perspective, and it’s really helped along by having my good friend Joe Armon-Jones playing on the keyboards. We’ve played music together for a long time, so it felt natural to have him on my debut album.”
Give Back What U Stole From Me “This is a song I wrote for my first EP in 2016, and it has become something of a fan favorite. In some ways it ties in with ‘Sun for Someone’ as it is about the greed and arrogance of some humans, prioritizing their needs over others and over nature, too. When I first recorded it, we had Moses Boyd on the drums and he gave it this really nice, chilled hip-hop vibe. But as we’ve continued to play it live over the years, it has ended up being much more upbeat and funkier, so we wanted to record it in that context this time around as it always goes off in front of a crowd.”
Your Saint (feat. Brother Portrait) “My brother used to live in Paris, and when I visited him around three years ago, I remember seeing a lot of refugee families in metro stations and people just completely ignoring them or looking scathingly at them. In the UK, in some ways, we're sheltered from seeing the human cost of the refugee crisis and the extent to which refugees are fighting for their lives, perhaps because of the Channel crossing and the harsh immigration laws. But in Paris it was shocking to see the reality and not just the statistics. This song is about the hypocrisy of a country like France or the UK, supposedly built on Christian values which would say help my neighbor, but then being governed by those who refuse to recognize these people. It was a pleasure to have my friend Brother Portrait collaborating on this one too. I’ve heard his poems before on these themes and I knew that he would give a poetic representation of this journey more than I ever could. He came through with something very melancholy but very beautiful.”
Coy Moon “‘Coy Moon’ is a love song. When I wrote it a couple of years ago, I was thinking about Keats and the Romantic poets and how they use natural imagery and metaphor to describe their emotions. Often when you are deeply in love with someone, you feel like there is no way to put it into words, so you have to use language in a different way. A lot of the songs on this album I wrote a while ago, since they need to exist in me for a bit before they can go out into the world. I wrote this about a particular moment and person in time, so it's nice to now have a little portal back there by playing it again.”
what’s up buttercup “This was originally written as the outro to another song, ‘Misty Head / Sunny Street,’ which I had released as a single. It was on the demo for that tune, recorded in my old flat when I was just mucking about with a microphone. It’s supposed to be a bit of a joke, but it didn't really work tacked on to that tune. That’s what's great about an album—you can fit in these little fun elements that might be a bit out of place in a single or EP. You can’t quite make out the lyrics because they’re distorted, but the person who it’s addressed to knows what I’m saying…”
Gravitate “‘Gravitate’ is about wanting someone to be able to view themselves how I know that other people see them. It's hard to see you're doing great things yourself, especially since we compare ourselves to others a lot these days, but it’s so important to recognize potential. This tune was written with Ben Hauke, who makes house and hip-hop-referencing music and is very much into the sampling and drum machine process. So there's a broken beat influence musically—people like Kaidi Tatham, Dego, 4hero, which is all very reminiscent of London nightlife.”
Fkn Happy Days ‘N’ That “I've studied jazz guitar for many years, ever since I went to school at Trinity College of Music. When you come to watch us live, you can see that we like to improvise a lot and then the songs take on a new energy which is more focused on the instruments. I wanted to be able to put that across in this tune, and it's also a homage to some of my heroes on the guitar—people like Grant Green and Kenny Burrell. There’s humor to it too, as I’m using Foley recordings that I took in Devon and the sounds of a herd of goats on the side of a mountain in Crete in the background. It’s a nod to my country roots, and with the goats you can hear them running away from me as I'm trying to record. It would have been a pretty funny sight to any locals, I bet!”
Timeless (feat. Lianne La Havas) “I'm very lucky to have Lianne La Havas feature on this. We have been friends for a while and I have wanted to collaborate with her on a tune for a long time. I wrote ‘Timeless’ about my dad, and it's all about seeing someone that you love as a constant through your life and not just who they are now. Once I had finished the demo, I realized it would be really nice with a female vocalist singing along with me, and Lianne was of course top of the list. She is probably one of the best vocalists ever. It was hard to find the time to get her in the studio as she was busy with her own record, but I’m so glad that we did because she absolutely smashed it.”
draggin’ my “This is a homage to George Benson. He was the first jazz guitarist that I listened to after a teacher at my school had taught me to transcribe his solo from ‘On Broadway.’ I was so amazed by hearing him singing and playing at the same time, and from that point I was hooked and listened to loads of his music. He was my gateway drug into playing jazz. With an album, often these skits give a piece of work more of its character, and it's also nice to be able to make something that is less set in the structure of a song but that is more evocative of a feeling. I have a lot of songs that are in different styles on this record, so this moment can be a palate cleanser too.”
Joy Is You “This song was written around six years ago to celebrate the birth of my nephew and is also dedicated to my family, both past and present. It felt important to me to end the record on this song because my family has been incredibly supportive. I have recorded it in so many places over the years—on a salt marsh in Norfolk, on the beach in Margate, and in multiple studio sessions with different band setups. I’ve always loved the tune, but I just never really felt that I had managed to capture what I wanted before. I finally came back to it more recently, after some time away from the song, and it all fell into place. It has a folky John Martyn vibe, as he’s another massive influence of mine, and it’s the perfect way to round everything off with something personal and meaningful to me.”