Alfa Mist

Alfa Mist is a British musician, producer, song-writer and MC based in Newham. His music mixes hip-hop and club tropes with jazz improvisation. He describes his music as ‘Dark, alternative jazz with elements of hip-hop and soul’.

First teaching himself to produce beats as a schoolkid in East Ham, London, Alfa then went on to discover jazz through the sampling of hip-hop of producers like Hi-tek, Madlib and J Dilla. Delving deeper, he taught himself the piano by ear as a means to dissect these formative records’ harmonic intricacies, gradually forming his own production style of head-nodding rhythms combined with the immediacy of jazz improvisation, all tied together with a pervasive sense of melody.

“There’s no access to jazz where I’m from,” Alfa says. “There’s no way I would have come to it without finding those hip-hop records and wanting to understand them.”