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 bac