Bringing Back the Heartbeat: A Conversation with Theon Cross

In 1835, German instrument makers Wilhelm Wieprecht and Johann Moritz patented the first tuba as a brass instrument that could carry the bassline for a marching band. By the end of the century, it could be found in orchestras through scores by Richard Wagner, Hector Berlioz, and others. Jazz was also not immune to the tuba’s low tones, with New Orleans bass band processions putting the horn in a central role. None of these settings set the instrument to the sidelines. Instead, as tubaist Harvey Phillips noted, “The tuba is the foundation of the band, the heartbeat that keeps everything together.” But as jazz artists moved from the streets to the nightclubs, the tuba was often replaced by the strings of the upright bass. There were still great improvisers on the instrument – Bill Barber, Bob Stewart, Howard Johnson, Don Butterfield, and the recently departed Joseph Daley among them – they were often viewed as rare exceptions rather than the norm. Today, no one is leading the righteous crusade to return the tuba to its place as the heartbeat of twenty-first-century music as much as Theon Cross. Across his work, he has affirmed the instrument as a dance music heavyweight. His first live recording, Affirmations (Live at the Blue Note New York) (New Soil/Division 81, 2025), continues this emphasis while Cross also works to resuscitate the tuba as an essential voice in improvisation-based music.

Affirmations captures a quartet of millennial musicians – Londoners Cross and guitarist Nikos Ziarkis with Chicagoans saxophonist Isaiah Collier and drummer James Russell Sims – at the acclaimed club that has been in Greenwich Village for almost forty-five years. The venue has hosted some of the music’s greats over the years, including Dizzy Gillespie, Lionel Hampton, and Oscar Peterson. But the Blue Note has also not been afraid to present artists who were always pushing beyond the genre’s bounds – particularly Miles Davis and Herbie Hancock – and those well outside them like the Roots, George Clinton and Parliament Funkadelic, Talib Kweli, and Wyclef Jean. The diverse influences well mirror Cross himself. A central figure in London’s booming improvised music scene, jazz is just one of the elements of his music. Caribbean music, including his father’s dub, of his Jamaican ancestral home, also inevitably enters into his music. So does electronic music, hip hop, dancehall, and funk. 

All of these elements can be heard in Cross’s earlier works – whether with Sons of Kemet, collaborations with Moses Boyd and Nubya Garcia, or his solo records Fyah (Gearbox, 2019) and Intra-I (New Soil, 2021). But there is something especially powerful about how they emerge in a live setting. Affirmations permeates a vibrancy and excitement that belies the quartet’s relative novelty. The group is more of an ad hoc transatlantic pairing born more of happenstance – visa issues – than extensive preplanning, but sounds like a well-rehearsed, longstanding ensemble. The group is incredibly tight yet free. Slow-moving electronic textures on the convocation “Greetings” belie the heavy danceable groove that begins on  “We Go Again” and carries throughout the record. “Play to Win” hints at the tuba’s role in New Orleans brass bands but kicks it to the cosmos, as if asking what Sun Ra could have done in the setting. By the time “Transcending” rolls around, the ensemble is openly meditating as it moves – confirming deep thought and physical action are not opposite ends. By the time the album gets to “Radiation,” the band’s pure fire is practically burning down the stage. 

While Cross’s prior studio works were notable, he particularly shines live. This author speaks from the personal experience of having seen how, several years ago, Cross brought an audience at the Newport Jazz Festival to dance with wild abandon. Affirmations expertly shares that same energy with anyone who listens. And that is exactly what he needs to do if he wishes to succeed at restoring the tuba to its rightful place. After all, what made the tuba such a central part of brass bands is its ability to make listeners move. With this quartet, Cross is taking a much more modern approach to keeping that power alive, whether on record or in the dance hall. 

PostGenre: Do you feel the breakup of Sons of Kemet in 2022 has given you more time to do your own music over the last three years? 

Theon Cross: Yeah, I’ve got all the time now, which is great. Being part of a group is quite nice because not as much responsibility is put on you compared to managing the logistical elements for your own group. But Sons of Kemet ending was also daunting at the same time. It’s given me more opportunity and more space to think about what I want to say and how I want to say it. The group ending has been quite freeing. But at the same time, it means that a little safety net is gone. 

PG: To keep with Sons of Kemet for a second, Affirmations features a quartet with Isaiah Collier on tenor sax. Is working with Isaiah similar to playing with Shabaka in Sons of Kemet or your work with Nubya Garcia? 

TC: I think Isaiah’s got his own thing. He’s got his own way of playing. He’s quite outspoken, very opinionated, and very intelligent. I feel that all comes through in the way that he plays. I feel he has a lot to say and does so in a very articulate and smart way. But Isaiah is also younger, and that somewhat comes across in his playing compared to Shabaka, Nubya, and anyone else I have played with. So, to answer that question, I’d say Isaiah has his own thing going on. 

PG: How did the two of you get connected? 

TC: After Sons of Kemet toured [the United States] in 2022, I ended up staying [in the country] a bit longer and went down to Chicago. While in Chicago, everyone there kept telling me I should check out Isaiah. His was a name I couldn’t avoid while I was in the city. I also went to watch one of Isaiah’s performances, a duo with a drummer.

PG: Michael Shekwoaga Ode?

TC: That’s right. And they were amazing. They truly transformed the space. I feel Isaiah is in the line of sax heavyweights like John Coltrane and Sonny Rollins. You can hear that in his playing. So, he was initially someone I just observed and heard a lot about when I was in the city. 

But later that year, I was putting together my first US tour as a leader. I was unable to bring all of my usual UK musicians for the tour because of difficulties with visas. So, I needed to find a saxophonist and a drummer from the US. I put some feelers out to [the record label] International Anthem because I’ve worked with [label co-founder] Scotty [McNiece] several times and assumed he might know some US musicians I could work with. He suggested Isaiah, and I reached out to him. I was worried Isaiah might be too busy or not interested. But he was fully up for working together, which was quite surprising and humbling. It is a testament to his character that he was so open. And, so, we did two shows in 2022 with the band on the album.

PG: What about the quartet’s drummer?

TC: The drummer, James Russell Sims, I met through the guitarist, Nikos Ziarkas. Nikos and I have worked together in the UK for years. As a quartet, our first show was in Chicago, followed by a show at BRIC in New York. I then had a few more dates booked the following year, 2023, at the Blue Note, and that became this record. 

For those Blue Note dates, I decided to, again, book the same group as the year before. Isaiah and James understood straight away what I wanted musically, even though we had only one or two rehearsals. I also loved the energy all four of us had together. I think sometimes you work with people who only want to do their own thing. But the other three in this quartet had a great respect for what I wanted out of them and went away and learned the music. I loved that respect they had. And the chemistry was there to ask all three guys to do the Blue Note dates with me. 

PG: One thing that stands out about the record is how the group sounds so cohesive. It sounds like a band that regularly rehearses together. It does not sound like two groups of two musicians from different countries who have collaborated only a few times.

TC: Yeah, it felt like we truly gelled. And by some miracle, I think Isaiah’s manager, Sonny [Daze], spoke to the sound guy at the Blue Note and asked him to press the record button for us. The whole process of recording it was out of my hands. I had enough other things to focus on that day to think about the recording process. And once we heard a demo of the group, we realized we needed to find a way to release the music, which ultimately led to the record.

PG: Affirmations is your first live album, right? 

TC: Yeah. 

PG: How do you feel the live element can be most felt in the recording? There is clearly a palpable energy to this record.

TC: Ohh yeah definitely, I think you can feel how it is a live record. I feel the mentality that we musicians play with on it is not to capture something specific, but to let the music grow organically. When you go into a [recording] studio, there is often a mindset that you are recording something to be captured for later and that will be listened to later as a document of the time it was recorded. Whereas, recording live, none of us on that stage went in thinking we were making something to be released later. I think the energy is very much of the moment. It is an appreciation of what we’re doing right now. 

My last album, Intra-I, was very much a studio album in terms of colouring things. If you think about recording as making a painting, I think that record was like colouring things in by using an eraser. I crafted the moments on the record to match what it needed at any specific moment. Fyah was different from that, but even there, we did some things in post [production]. But Affirmations was much more about accepting what we captured in the moment. We focused on being true and respectful to the moment in time when we created it, not molding it to later fit a preset image. It felt like the right thing for me at the right time with the right people. 

PG: What about the venue? Many artists have recorded at the Blue Note over the years. Dizzy Gillespie alone made three albums there. Do you feel the space itself can be heard on Affirmations in some tangible way?

TC: I mean, simply being in the venue and looking at the number of people who have played there and the different albums that were recorded there brings the weight of a lot of history. I think that history did play a factor in how we performed there. I think, if I’m not mistaken, that it was the first time everyone in the group –  including Isaiah and James – had played there. So, it was a first for each of us, and you only get one first chance. You try to make every moment count. But yeah, the weight and privilege of being asked to perform there was part of what made that moment, and how we approached that moment. 

PG: Since this quartet represents both,  do you see parallels between the London and the Chicago scenes? 

TC: Yeah. They both differ significantly from New York. In New York, people expect things to be presented a certain way. And in some ways, Chicago is almost a second city. London is almost one too in terms of attention to the music scene compared to New York. Both Chicago and London are a bit removed from most people’s expectations of the music, and removing that expectation creates a lot of openness and allows for more experimentation. So, out of Chicago, you’re getting a lot of that from people like Makaya [McCraven] or Ben Lamar Gay. People in and around the International Anthem [label] and beyond. I feel like London has that same free-spiritedness of respecting the tradition and music that comes from the States – particularly from New York and New Orleans, but also Chicago. But London is also, like Chicago, a major city that carved out its own scene and space. And that shared need creates quite a special synergy between the scenes in London and Chicago. 

I have also found that people in Chicago are often very hospitable. They’re very warm people compared to the stereotypical New Yorker. I feel Chicagoans kept a lot of the southern hospitality that went up through the Great Migration there. 

PG: Since you mentioned the Great Migration, in several other interviews, you have revealed how you have studied the history of the music. If you go back to old New Orleans brass bands, the tuba was always providing the bassline. Although there were people like Bob Stewart or Bill Barber who continued to explore improvised music on the tuba, over time, the instrument’s role was largely filled by the upright bass instead. Do you feel that playing improvised music on the tuba now – especially in taking a very modern approach to the instrument – is freeing because there’s less expectations on you as a tuba player in this arena or is it more resrictive that the history is a bit more hidden than would be the case if you played, say, the upright bass?

TC: It is more freeing. In some ways, the presence of fewer expectations allows you to express yourself in a way in which people aren’t expecting things. Obviously, that is more freeing. 

But also, as you said, there is a long lineage of tubaists from New Orleans, where the instrument was the heartbeat of bands, onward. And Ray Draper, Bob Stewart, Bill Barber, and various other people are an important part of the instrument’s story too and remain very much unsung. I hope that I can be an introduction point for some people to those histories. And, because of that, I also feel in some ways I’ve got a job to do. There is a little pressure in some ways to be a spokesperson for the instrument. 

The tuba is an instrument that is, to some extent, unspoken for. But at the same time, it is a bass instrument. Because of that, away from the physicality of what the tuba is and how it looks, it uses a frequency that people respond to and know the role of. I guess it is also my job to connect the frequency and the timbre of what this thing is to music that people recognize. To me, from a London perspective, I have approached the tuba through the passageways of sound system culture, where bass is very much the feeling on top or leading the music.  I feel I’ve always been on the tightrope of showing my jazz influences and connecting the tuba to my Jamaican roots. That process has been freeing in many ways, even as it creates a challenge and responsibility. 

PG: Do you have any sense as to why the tuba’s history in jazz is generally so largely hidden?

TC: Unfortunately, I feel some of our double bass friends may have kind of given us the hard elbow out of some bassline roles. Also, the tuba is a very powerful instrument. Sometimes, a frontline setting can be too powerful for it to blend in well. With the tuba, we’re still trying to find the right scenario to equalise all of its powers, where its power does not get drowned out, but it also doesn’t overpower everything else. The perfect scenario for the tuba is still being carved out.  

PG: In terms of carving that space out in your own music, what is your process for writing music? Do you start with a tuba part and build around it? Or are you taking basslines from other music as an inspiration and seeing how you can adapt them to the tuba?

TC: My process is not generally something where I sit down intending to write music and do so. Instead, normally, something will come to me. Maybe I will think of some distinctive feature of the music, whether the bass line, a melody, or a drumbeat, then I will quickly capture it on my phone before it goes away. I will then work with it for about a week to develop the idea. After that, I work on it in the notation software, Sibelius, to add instruments or rhythms and develop it there. 

PG: One of those pieces was the album’s title track. You have been performing it regularly in your performances, but this album is the first time you have recorded it.

TC: Yeah, with “Affirmations,” I can’t even remember exactly how the melody came to me, but it kept showing up in my live shows, so it made sense to have it on my first live record.

PG: Affirmations also includes your song “Wings,” which was initially released with a version you did of Aswad’s “Back to Africa.” What was behind the decision to cover “Back to Africa”?

TC: So, I was asked to record the song as part of a session I did for Apple Music, which was celebrating Black History Month. For it,  I wanted to do a cover of a Black British band, particularly one I feel is a little unsung. My dad was a singer and bass player in the reggae scene of the 1970s and 1980s. He had his own band, but, unfortunately, it never recorded. Regardless, he was part of that scene. I also remember him having that album [Aswad (Island, 1976)]. Years later, I looked up “Back to Africa” and listened to it and remembered how it had such a cool vibe. I thought it was something I could interpret in my own way, with my means of multi-tracking, and that is how I started playing it. 

PG: So, with “Back to Africa,” you played a reggae song and your own style touches upon jazz, funk, hip hop, Caribbean music more broadly, and a lot more. Do you see those all as different things being pushed together in your music, or are they all one thing musically? 

TC: I think it’s all one thing. They’re all branches of the same tree. It’s all music stemming from the African diaspora, just going in different directions. Different ships went in different ways and created different things. But they’ve also influenced each other. American culture has been very influenced by the Caribbean, and America has been very influential on Caribbean culture. Once you read the stories in the music, research its history, and look into the origins of the music, you see the same places with the same stories. Each of the kinds of music that I use is a different branch on a single tree. Labels are only something other people put on them. To me, it’s all one. 

‘Affirmations (Live at the Blue Note New York)’ is out now. It can be purchased on Bandcamp. More information on Theon Cross is available on his website.

Photo credit: Ian Hippolyte