If you've never thought about the tuba as a lead instrument, Theon Cross is the guy who'll change your mind in about thirty seconds. He plays it like a bass guitar plugged into a sound system at a carnival — fat, distorted at the edges, built for movement. That's not an accident. Cross grew up playing in South London brass bands and carnival groups before jazz ever entered the picture, so the instrument was never precious to him. It was a tool for making people move.

Most people met him as part of Sons of Kemet, the group led by Shabaka Hutchings where Cross's tuba and two drummers replaced the usual piano-bass-drums setup entirely. That band was loud, danceable, political when it wanted to be, and Cross's low end was the glue holding the chaos together. You could hear him quoting dub basslines and grime one bar and jazz walking patterns the next.

Then he went and made Fyah (2019), his debut as a leader, and it landed like a statement. No piano, no chords in the traditional sense — just tuba, drums, and saxophone weaving around each other. It's a record that sounds like a sound system party and a jazz session at the same time, which is exactly the point. He followed it with Intra-I (2021), a shorter, more inward record that slowed things down without losing the weight in the low end.

What makes Cross worth your time isn't novelty. Plenty of tuba players can do a party trick. Cross actually writes tunes, phrases like a horn player, and leaves space the way good bass players do. He's part of a wider London scene — alongside people like Moses Boyd and Nubya Garcia — that took jazz out of the conservatory and put it back in clubs, and his tuba playing is one of the clearest signs of how far that scene was willing to bend the instrumentation of the music without losing the feel.

Put on Fyah expecting a novelty and you'll leave thinking about basslines for days. That's the whole trick — he makes an unlikely instrument feel completely necessary.