Yoruba percussion, diaspora memory and contemporary funk will meet in Brixton next month when Nigerian-born, London-raised musician Sola Akingbola presents The Eegun Rhapsodies as part of the 2026 EFG London Jazz Festival.
The concert is scheduled for Wednesday, 18 November at Freight Brixton, 33 Brixton Station Road, London. Doors will open at 6pm, with the performance due to begin at 8.30pm, according to the festival and venue listings.
For audiences interested in the movement of Yoruba culture across borders, the show offers more than a conventional jazz date. Akingbola describes his sound as Black Atlantic Funk, a musical language that brings Yoruba rhythmic thought into conversation with funk, jazz, spoken word and orchestral colour.
The programme centres on How Should I…, the artist’s deeply personal project exploring migration, memory and belonging. Freight Brixton says the work was recorded in part at Abbey Road Studios and uses Yoruba drum language as a foundation rather than a decorative reference.
That distinction matters. In Yoruba musical traditions, drums can carry speech patterns, praise, warning, history and communal feeling. Akingbola’s project places that communicative power inside a modern British setting, showing how inherited knowledge can remain active while responding to new places and experiences.
The musician was born in Yorubaland and raised in London. His career developed through the British jazz scene, including work with Gasper Lawal’s Oro Band and the Ronny Jordan Band, before he became widely known through more than 25 years with Jamiroquai.
According to the EFG London Jazz Festival, Akingbola contributed to the rhythmic character of Jamiroquai’s later records and has also worked with artists including David Bowie, Stevie Wonder and Damon Albarn. His composing credits extend beyond the concert stage to theatre and television.
He created original music for Royal Shakespeare Company productions including Hamlet and Othello, as well as work for the National Theatre. The festival also credits him with BMI awards in 2023 and 2024 for music connected with the CBS comedy series Bob Hearts Abishola.
Those experiences help explain the breadth of the Brixton presentation. Akingbola is not approaching Yoruba percussion as a fixed museum object. His work treats rhythm as a living method for carrying experience, shaping narrative and building a bridge between ancestral knowledge and contemporary Black British life.
The current project also speaks directly to the emotional complexity of migration. Rather than presenting belonging as a simple choice between one country and another, How Should I… examines identity as something made through memory, movement and continuing dialogue.
The six-piece line-up announced for the concert places Akingbola on lead vocals, joined by Kwame Yeboah on keyboards and vocals, Eric Appapoulay on guitar and vocals, Yolanda Charles on bass, Michel Castellanos-Rojas on drums and Oli Savill on percussion.
A recent release connected with the project, Olukumi, draws its title from a Yoruba expression rendered by the festival as “my friend”. The track uses percussion and guitar to frame community and cross-cultural solidarity, themes that sit naturally within a festival bringing musicians and audiences together across London.
The concert is part of the EFG London Jazz Festival, which runs from 13 to 22 November. The annual programme has long treated jazz as an international form, and Akingbola’s appearance adds a distinctly Yoruba and Nigerian-British perspective to that conversation.
Brixton is an apt setting. The area has deep connections to African and Caribbean cultural life, while Freight Brixton provides a public venue in which a story rooted in Yorubaland can be heard as part of London’s present, not merely its past.
For Podium News readers in the United Kingdom, the event is also an opportunity to encounter Yoruba culture through sound and performance. For readers elsewhere, it offers a useful example of how artists in the diaspora can preserve cultural intelligence without limiting their work to a single genre.
Tickets are listed by the festival at £16.77 including fees at the time of writing. Prospective attendees should confirm availability, access arrangements and any schedule changes through the official EFG London Jazz Festival or Freight Brixton pages before travelling.
Readers attending the concert are invited to share their reflections on how Yoruba music and language are being reimagined across the diaspora with Podium News after the performance.
