Knats, a trio from the UK, play nu jazz, but it would be remiss to say they don’t pay homage to their forebears. Their music implements scales invented by French composer Olivier Messiaen; they make pepped-up, near-punky versions of jazz standards; and the cover for their second album, A Great Day in Newcastle, recreates Art Kane’s classic 1958 photo “A Great Day in Harlem.” Here, Knats’ music is part of a different kind of renaissance: an English northern renaissance.
Although they now live in London and are completing their degrees at Trinity College, Knats hail from Newcastle Upon Tyne, England’s northernmost city, where residents are colloquially known as Geordies, and “house” is pronounced “hoose.” The band is led by Stan Woodward (bass) and King David-Ike Elechi (drums), friends since childhood who started out as self-taught musicians; trumpeter Ferg Kilsby, saxophonist George Johnson, and pianist Sandro Shar round out the trio.
On production is ex-black midi frontman Geordie Greep, who also plays on several tracks. (Knats in turn have supported Greep, and sometimes act as his band). Greep is no stranger to working with UK nu jazz, having previously tapped young trio oreglo for support slots and live backing. But where oreglo describe their sound as “trying to define London through music,” Knats are significant for the ways in which their outlook isn’t London-centric. Put simply, they play “Geordie jazz.”
Newcastle is part of Tyneside, an area around the banks of the River Tyne that has been shaped by industry, a context that flows through A Great Day in Newcastle. The Industrial Revolution brought rapid expansion to England’s North East in the 19th century; the mass deindustrialization of the 20th century left a legacy of abandoned infrastructure, poverty, and ensuing civic neglect (it’s fair to say hostility—Margaret Thatcher famously branded the leaders of the 1984-85 miners’ strike as “the enemy within”). Despite modern renewal projects, the rate of child poverty remains chillingly high in the North East.
The key difference to Knats’ self-titled debut, which was released in 2025 and dealt in similar jazz fusion trappings, is A Great Day in Newcastle’s scope and ambition. Here, the group marries jazz-kid experimentalism with taut punk, sprawling worldbuilding, and social commentary. The addition of spoken word passages by local Geordie poet Cooper Robson, who drifts through balladic descriptions of community, working-class masculinity, and pickled onions, aids Knats in their explorations of their hometown.
The album opens with meandering solo wind and Robson’s words on “7 Bridges to Burn,” before filmic strings and nimbly modulating piano harmonies slowly unfold. It’s masterfully executed worldbuilding; a cartography of Geordie history, flecked with humor about Sunderland (Newcastle United’s rivals) and acute political context (Thatcher, but also former Newcastle United F.C. owner and businessman Mike Ashley, whose Sports Direct factories were said to be run like “Victorian warehouses”).
Cooper’s poetry works as a structural device, allowing Knats’ compositions to take on more obvious extramusical meaning. “Wor Jackie”’s oscillations between heaving punk and wry, wandering saxophone lines are anchored by Robson’s poem about Jackie Milburn, a midcentury Newcastle United footballer who was believed to have split his time between the pitch and the coal mines. And on the album’s final track is Woodward’s arrangement of “Farewell Johnny Miner,” a North East folk song written by Ed Pickford, the son of a miner, protesting the unfair terms of UK industrial nationalization and mine closures. Knats front-end their version with the words from a 1972 BBC documentary about Durham miners set to off-kilter melody, before balladic piano chords enter, and Cooper speaks a refrain based on the folk song.
It’s moments like this where Knats excel not only as individual players but as a collective whose compositions reach beyond the purview of UK jazz. Newcastle has always been shaped by music—Northumbrian folk song, metal, gabber, and even pivotal jazz clubs. But perhaps Knats embody a history Newcastle-based writer Alex Niven observes in his book, The North Will Rise Again. Countless artists, Niven writes, have used the North as “inspiration and ideal,” an attempt to imagine “brave new forms of collective being.” It’s this practice of “passionate Northern progressivism—based ultimately on the [...] dream of a northern renaissance” that A Great Day in Newcastle sees bubble to the surface, realized here through hard graft, and true Northern optimism.
