by
Juno Daily
on 23.05.2025 at 17:48pm.
Last edited: 23.05.2025 at 17:52pm.
Pan Amsterdam spans the styles
Incredible to think it now, but Leron Thomas was actually on the verge of quitting New York and abandoning his dreams of a life making music at the very moment when his Pan Amsterdam project got its big break.
“I was about to go back to Houston because New York was kicking my ass pretty hard…”
Chatting to us from his Brighton hotel room, preparing for his show at this year’s Great Escape event, he relates how the jazz critic for the New York Times, Ben Ratliff, had supported the trumpeter’s activities on the city’s jazz scene over the years. He decided that before he left New York, he should take the writer for a drink to say thank you and goodbye. As it turned out, it would prove to be a truly pivotal moment.
“I hit him up and asked him he wanted to go for a drink. I didn’t think he’d respond but he did. He asked me what I was up to and I said I was heading back to Houston. By that time I had been in New York for 20 years. He sat and listened to my sob stories, which is something you should never do but I did it anyway ha ha ha.
“He asked me what I was working on and I said I was having a hard time so I was taking a break and trying to get into world of this character called Pan Amsterdam. He said ‘OK, send it over to me’. He likes it so much that he sends it Iggy Pop. And Iggy really liked it. The track I had – I only had one at that point – was a track called ‘Plus One’. He loved it and wanted to play it on his BBC 6Music Iggy Confidential show. Iggy basically discovered Pan Amsterdam.”
As well as being an early and ongoing champion via his BBC 6Music show, Iggy has become a regular collaborator too. In 2019, the pair teamed up on Pop’s acclaimed Free album, with Thomas going on to tour the record and act as Iggy’s musical director. Iggy has also popped up on more than one occasion on Pan Amsterdam releases, and indeed you can hear his dulcet tones on the new, third Pan Amsterdam album Confies, out this week. He’s covering that very same track that first brought them together – ‘Plus Ones’.
If you’ve spotted a link between those titles then you’re on the right track, because if Confines is anything it’s about escaping those musical barriers that dictate the areas that musicians of different types are and are not allowed to visit. Screw that, it appears to be saying, enjoying a proper sense of freedom as it soaks up influences from all over. While it loosely exists in the world of hip-hop, with Thomas’ rapping style occasionally acknowledging a debt (he admits) to the rap world’s most experimental character, Kool Keith, he’s not afraid to use spoken word, poetry and singing alongside his cool-as-fuck rhyming.
Musically, too, it goes on a stylistic rampage that brings electronica, indie, synthpop and of course jazz via his rich trumpet sound to the hip-hop template. It’s musical freedom incarnate, with Thomas’ wordplay proving poignant at times and hilarious at others, as he paints vivid portraits of the dozens of weird and wonderful people he’s crossed paths with.
“My favourite musicians always had a sense of humour,” he says. “When you listen to Charlie Parker you can tell he ahd this devious sense of humour. When I was a jazz purist – there was a time when you could never tell me I’d end up singing, I was a jazz club snob – and there was this great pianist who used to concentrate on the b-bop side of jazz, his name’s Sacha Perry. We were sitting back and having a drink and listening to the Bird, listening to Charlie Parker, and I said it sounded like he was British, like the phrasing had a British accent. Sacha said ‘that’s pretty profound that you said that – Charlie Parker would always joke around with a British accent!’ When I hear him I hear humour, when I hear Jimi Hendrix I hear humour, Miles Davis… I’m always hearing humour, it’s a constant thing.”
The concept of freedom is also central to how the Pan Amsterdam project ended up on the Heavenly Records label via the unlilliest of sources – the controversial and much in the news trio Kneecap, now his labelmates.
Having encountered the trio sharing their forthright political opinions on a TV talk show in Ireland, Thomas and his (Irish) wife wondered which label had not only been brave enough to sign them but also given them such a free reign. He contacted Heavenly just as his Ninja Tune-released collaboration with Metronomy, the single Nice Town, was building up a serious head of steam on Radio 6 Music.
And while he says he himself is a little more liberal and relaxed politically, “I totally get that people feel the need to do what they do sometimes. The fact that someone at Heavenly Records would back that is awesome.”
He certainly doesn’t feel that, even in the current anxiety-ridden politcal climate, musicians should be squeaky clean. Their imperfections and human foibles are as much part of the art they make as anything else – and ultimately art, not business, is what it’s abiout.
“It’s about that need to connect,” he says inconclusion, “and if we’re going to do that then we need to be honest with people. We ain’t selling cheeseburgers here.”
Ben Willmott
Buy your vinyl copy of Confines, out now on Heavenly, by clicking here
