Words by Rhian Daly

There is value in stories that are commonplace. That’s an idea that Alfa Mist explores on his latest album ‘Bring Backs’, celebrating the typical experiences of immigrants and the children they raise in a new country. On the record, the London jazz pianist and hip-hop producer pull from his own family’s history, in which his mother emigrated to the UK from Uganda. Instead of treating her journey as an outlier, though, he dives into aspects of it that many people in his home city and beyond will find familiar. 

“I grew up with people [who had stories like that] all around me,” Mist says in the weeks following ‘Bring Back's release. “I don’t really see it as this unique and rare journey, but I still wanted to touch on it because I still feel like even journeys that aren’t so rare and unique need to be spoken about. Not everything is the extreme – glitz and glamour, or famine. Life isn’t as extreme as that.” 

The album – his first for the renowned label Anti-, home to the likes of Fleet Foxes, M Ward, and Danny Elfman – splits his subject into two halves. First, there’s Mist’s own perspective as the child of immigrants; not having to start a new life in an unfamiliar place but keenly aware of the sacrifices that have been made for him to be in the position he is in.

Secondly, there’s the story of the generation that came before – who left their homes behind and began again elsewhere. That thread is told through a poem by Hilary Thomas, the poet reciting verses about her own mother’s journey from Jamaica at various points across the record. “The land of her birth gave her the tools to navigate the world,” she says proudly on ‘Last Card (Bumper Cars)’.

“When I read back [the poem], there were so many similarities [between our parents’ stories],” Mist explains. “I just left it to her to write what she thought and how she remembered her parents.”

Although Thomas’ poem and the London composer’s own words illuminate some of the songs on ‘Bring Backs’, much of the record takes instrumental form – be that for whole songs, or large chunks of them. Lyrics only come into play at the points where Mist felt the melodies and rhythms couldn’t fully communicate what he was trying to say. “Music can only say so much,” he reasons. “There were some songs where you listen to them and take what you want from them.” The possibility of interpretation on those tracks was something he was drawn to, but other pieces he had a more specific vision for. 

“Certain songs, I just want to tell you what the song’s about,” he explains. “In making intentions clear, there’s nothing more powerful than words. Although I predominantly make instrumental music, I do understand why people gravitate to things with vocals a lot more – there’s something about words that will make things click inside your brain easier.” 

Mist says a song will show when it needs that additional vocal layer in whether he feels space in what he’s created. “I won’t have any gaps or emptiness – there’s music where it can sound quite sparse, but it’s doing the job that it needs to do, but there are certain songs where I feel like it needs something else to be complete. I tend to start from quite minimal stuff and keep adding to it until it’s complete.”

Growing up in east London, the producer was surrounded by the sounds of grime and hip-hop as he started his own voyage into music but discovered jazz – among other things – while learning how to make samples. Lured in by the warm feeling the likes of American pianist Ahmad Jamal, jazz icon Herbie Hancock and the more modern works of Robert Glasper evoked, he was faced with one challenge – how to replicate the sound they were making. “That’s what made me want to start learning the piano so I could learn how to do things like that and create my own combinations,” Mist recalls. 

As well as something new to master, jazz also presented the young musician with a helpful, new outlet – a way to express himself. “I was trying to [recreate the warmth] of the music because, in real life, I’m not really this warm person. But I try and put all of my feelings into the music. If you sat down and talked to me, you wouldn’t get the same thing because I can’t articulate myself properly.”

One listens to ‘Bring Backs’ – and, indeed, Mist’s back catalogue of gorgeous creations – will flood your body with emotions. Sometimes these are serene, sometimes a little darker, or, sometimes, an amalgamation of the two. On the instrumental ‘Coasting’, we’re hit with the latter – taken on a tranquil journey that soon finds itself hitting a rocky patch, the brass melody becoming more urgent and agitated. “Just because you’re coasting doesn’t mean a storm can’t hit you,” he says sagely. “The idea of coasting normally is ‘we’re just sitting back and coasting’ but, for me, it means going forward, regardless of what hits you. It’s a perseverance thing.”

Similarly, underneath Thomas’ spoken word on ‘Last Card (Bumper Cars)’, instruments interweave forlornly before, suddenly, things shift and a strutting new mood takes over. The final minute-and-a-half of music is both an exercise in restraint and inspired by the US producer, DJ, and rapper Madlib. “A lot of producers used to do beat tapes where you have one or two-minute beats, but it would have 30 of them in a tape,” Mist explains. “I wanted ‘Bumper Cars’ to be like that.” 

Keen-eared fans who tuned into his recent livestream concert from Metropolis Studios will have heard a much longer version. That take presented how the song was originally intended to be until its creator realised a full rendition was unnecessary for the album’s purposes. It’s a great example of the fluidity of music – how songs can be opened up more on stage or trimmed down when the time is right. “When I play live and depending on who I’m playing with, the songs sound completely different anyway,” Mist laughs. 

The way ‘Bring Backs’ was made acknowledges that ever-changing format too and nods to what’s most important about a piece of music – the energy and spirit that it contains. The album was recorded to tape, with only two takes available per song without having to record over what he and his band (bassist and double bassist Kaya Thomas-Dyke, tenor saxophonist and bass clarinetist Samuel Rapley, drummer Jas Kayser, guitarist Jamie Leeming, percussionist Junior Alli-Balogun and trumpeter and flugel player Johnny Woodham) had already laid down. 

“I’m a perfectionist and I will just sit on something for ages – nothing will ever be right to me,” Mist says with a sigh that suggests he can be his own worst enemy in the creating process. Restricting recording helped him to zoom out and look at the broader picture on each take, rather than nitpicking each individual layer. “We had to keep the take that got the most generally great feeling, even if there were imperfections. I think that makes music real anyway because it’s just the moment that happened. The only time you should re-record something is if it keeps you up at night, but there’s a happy medium between that.”

Without any formal training, since the release of his debut album ‘Nocturne’ in 2015, Mist has made himself a respected figure in the jazz scene but there’s another world he’s still hoping to open doors to for himself. When he was first starting to make his own music, he harboured ambitions to create film soundtracks – again thanks to his experience with sampling. Although he notes that many classical musicians “have beef with” him for his love of Hans Zimmer, the renowned composer was his gateway into being interested in movie scores, eventually leading him to discover more creators in that field to be inspired by along the way. 

As with jazz, Mist found his musical background and his limitations in not being able to read or write sheet music formed a barrier to diving headfirst into that world. “I got told in uni that I probably should have gone to this school to do that and you have to go through this path to get into film composition,” he says. “It just seemed really hard.” Instead of giving up, though, he formed a new plan – make his own music and get recognition on his own terms in the hopes that film studios would then come calling. 

That, he says, is definitely still the goal and he has some specific visions of where his music would work best. “Any anime – Flying Lotus’ thing recently for Yasuke was really good,” he begins. “I play a lot of shoot ‘em up games, like Call Of Duty, a lot and they have really nice soundtracks. In terms of films, things shot in London, like Luther [would be good]. I’m really into crime dramas so I’d really love to get into that.”

Until he gets the nod to start working on a soundtrack project on that scale, Mist has other plans in the works to keep himself busy. He’s spent the time since completing ‘Bring Backs’ focusing on how to get other artists’ music out into the world. He already has his own label, Sekito, on which he released all his music prior to this latest album and now he wants to use it to pay forward the success he’s achieved. The first releases will likely come from the musicians who have played on his own material. 

“The people that have played on my stuff are really good and if you speak to my band they’ll say that I’ve had an individual conversation with each of them,” he says. “I’ll say, ‘What are you doing? Put music out.’ The fact of the internet is anyone can make music and put it out there and somebody will listen to it. There is no perfect storm to release stuff, especially if you have the compositional itch where you’re like, ‘I want to make my own stuff one day’. I’m just like, ‘OK, let’s make this happen’.” 

The answer to making that happen for Mist is helping his friends and collaborators where he can, paying for studio time or instruments, and using the attention he has on him to highlight other musicians who deserve the same success. “It’s me just shining the light – these people are amazing anyway so you get to have a listen to what they’re doing and what they think,” he shrugs. 

As for his own projects, he says he’s always working on “that full-length thing” and has some new music of his own already underway. Much like the stories he tells on ‘Bring Backs’, his aims as an artist are “nothing grand”. “We’ll just see how life goes,” he says in his usual relaxed tone. As his most recent album can attest to, that laidback attitude can – and has – produced special moments from the most ordinary beginnings.