World Heart Beat Embassy Gardens hosts ten nights of the EFG London Jazz Festival this November, with Jean Toussaint, Tony Kofi and Ricky Ford leading a programme that opens with a Grammy winner’s quintet and closes with a Gershwin tribute.
World Heart Beat Embassy Gardens will host ten nights of live jazz this November as part of the EFG London Jazz Festival, marking the fourth year running that the Nine Elms venue has taken part. The line-up spans contemporary jazz, soul, global music, vocal performance and cross-genre collaboration, running from Friday 13 to Sunday 22 November, with a different headline act each night. Produced by Serious, the EFG London Jazz Festival brings hundreds of performances to venues and public spaces across London every November, and World Heart Beat’s ten-day residency is one of the more consistent fixtures on that calendar.
Ten nights, ten distinct programmes
The festival opens on Friday 13 November with the Jean Toussaint Quintet, an opening set from the Nnamdi Nnachi-Cole Quartet ahead of it. Toussaint, a Grammy Award-winning saxophonist best known for his years with Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers, brings a combination of lyrical expression and technical brilliance that’s shaped generations of British jazz musicians who came up under him. Saturday 14 November turns to soul jazz, with acclaimed saxophonist Tony Kofi and The Organisation marking 100 years since the birth of Lou Donaldson, tracing the sound that came out of bebop, blues, Hammond organ and the Blue Note label meeting in the middle. Sunday 15 November brings legendary Boston saxophonist Ricky Ford and his quartet, a former Charles Mingus sideman whose own career has taken in Roy Hargrove, Abdullah Ibrahim, McCoy Tyner, Sonny Stitt and Jaki Byard.
Monday 16 November is the programme’s most unusual booking: Float Like a Butterfly: Muhammad Ali, a musical portrait of one of the twentieth century’s most influential cultural figures, presented by World Heart Beat Music Academy and drawing on his poetry, activism and identity as much as his career in the ring. Tuesday 17 November brings the Bálint Gyémánt Trió’s UK debut, the Hungarian guitarist and composer known for his long-standing work with vocalist Veronika Harcsa, and Wednesday 18 November pairs Romanian vocalist Luiza Zan with Muse Quartet for A Soul Journey: From Bucharest to London, tracing the musical connections between Romanian folk, classical and contemporary jazz traditions.
Thursday 19 November belongs to Sudanese singer and composer Amira Kheir, described by BBC World News as “the Diva of the Sudanese Desert,” whose sound draws on Sudanese musical traditions alongside jazz, soul, rock and desert blues, a style she calls Nubian Jazz. Friday 20 November is a genuine cross-cultural pairing, British jazz pianist Julian Joseph joining virtuoso tabla player Alok Verma for When the Roads Meet, a Silk Road-inspired duet exploring where jazz, classical and global traditions meet.
Saturday 21 November is a double bill, Christine Tobin’s Pseudologia Fantastica, a multimedia piece combining spoken word, song and electronic effects to explore disinformation and political extremism, alongside Brian Eley & Ashley Wales’s SONGS. The festival closes on Sunday 22 November with the Chris Coull Quartet featuring award-winning vocalist Imogen Ryall performing songs from Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess, reworked through hard bop grooves, ballads and Latin influences alongside John Turville, Simon Thorpe and Matt Fishwick.
A 200-seat room that keeps turning up in other people’s best-of lists
World Heart Beat Embassy Gardens opened in Nine Elms in 2023, an intimate 200-capacity concert venue and music education hub selected by Wandsworth Council and EcoWorld Ballymore as a cultural anchor for the wider Nine Elms development. In the years since, it’s picked up a run of notices from people who cover London’s live music scene for a living: The Observer called it “a priceless cultural legacy,” the Camden New Journal “an oasis of civilisation and humanity in a soulless world,” and Shortlist ranked it among London’s top jazz venues in 2025, praising its “astonishingly vivid” sound. UK Jazz News, in two separate reviews a year apart, called it “one of South London’s best kept secrets for serious music lovers” and “a little treasure in Nine Elms.”
Every ticket sold funds World Heart Beat Music Academy, the Wandsworth-based charity behind the venue, which provides bursaries, instruments and performance opportunities to around 446 young people a year facing financial or social barriers to music education. Sahana Gero MBE, the charity’s founder and artistic director, said: “Jazz is a vast kaleidoscope of expression, always alive, beautiful and unpredictable, with the power to transport the listener somewhere completely thrilling and unexpected. This sense of wonder, curiosity and adventure is exactly what we want people to feel when they walk through our doors.”
The London x London Take: a 200-seat room is a genuinely different way to see musicians of this calibre, and that’s the actual draw here over the festival’s bigger stages. Jean Toussaint’s opening night and Tony Kofi’s Lou Donaldson tribute are the two we’d book first if we could only pick two, but Float Like a Butterfly is the one worth taking a chance on if you want something you won’t see programmed anywhere else this festival. With ten different nights and a room this size, we’d book early rather than leave it to the week itself, several of these feel like the kind of gig people end up telling other people they missed.
Need to know
- Where: World Heart Beat Embassy Gardens, 3 Ponton Road, Nine Elms, London SW11 7BD
- Nearest station: Nine Elms (Northern line)
- When: Friday 13 to Sunday 22 November 2026, one performance each night
- Price: From £15, varying by show
- Booking: Full programme and tickets at worldheartbeat.org
