J.A.M. String Collective at Hot Numbers, Cambridge

J.A.M. String Collective
Hot Numbers
Cambridge Jazz Festival
Cambridge, England
November 14 2025

It was a wet, dark night to follow a day so wet it felt like the sun never really came up at all. There was a food van in the street working hard to keep up with the demand for burgers and fries. Lights twinkled and beckoned through the glass door and inside it smelt of coffee, wine and damp-but-drying music lovers. In the corner, three young women were finishing tuning their instruments and checking levels. Violin, viola and 'cello. Only the pedal boards suggested that this was not going to be an evening of Viennese string trios. Annelise Lam, Julia Dos Reis and Miranda Lewis-Brown have had their work remixed by Leafcutter John and Wonky Logic, which further suggested this might not be an evening of entirely plain sailing. Good...

J.A.M. String Collective are a band on a roll. Formed after the members met at London's hardest-working jazz youth club, Tomorrow's Warriors (launching pad for Moses Boyd, Nubya Garcia and Ezra Collective, amongst many, many others), J.A.M. are an improvising string trio playing their own compositions, works by other composers (notably the Elemental Suite by Oleta Haffner) and covers of tracks by their favourite jazz artists. They have a lot of famous friends who seem to hold them in high regard. Exactly why is about to become clear.

They started gently, with some meditative pieces which showed off the depth of their ability as a string trio; played with grace and fluency and sounding, as Goethe said, like three intelligent people having a conversation. The music was filmic and sonorous. The windows were steamed up. The coffee machine was burbling. The beer was cold. Man, what a way to spend a Friday night.

But there is more to J.A.M. than some well-honed modern composition. "Sun Gold iii—Everyone in North London Took a Photo of the Sky That Night" was a lovely vignette amongst the increasingly edgy flow of the set. The final track of the first set, "The Hum of 4 am," ramped things up sharply; a massive improvisation bolstered by the judicious use of loopers and throughout which J, A and M were heads down, eyes closed, thrashing away at their chamber instruments as hard as ever any musician did. The performance was captivating and the music exhilarating; lurching and twirling in twenty directions at once.

The fifteen-minute break hardly seemed long enough for them to draw breath before they were back and tucking into the "Elemental Suite," which was brilliant, and punctuated with a splendid version of GoGo Penguin's "Hopopono," the tricky rhythm absolutely nailed.

Too soon, it was over. Waiting staff wiped the tables, the band packed away their stuff and we were back out in the rain, but rain can't dampen the warmth you get from a great night of live music. Who would have thought that there would be such a wonderful gig in such a small corner of Cambridge on such an unpromising night?

Small venue, huge heart.

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