Written by I’ve been keeping half an eye on the Jazz Cats series since its first volume, mostly because Lefto Early Bird has never been a curator who waits for consensus to catch up with him. Volume 4 lands on September 4, and it confirms something I’ve suspected for a while: this compilation is really a direct readout of one man’s ear.
Lefto’s relationship with music started at home, listening to his father’s records, and it hardened into instinct during his years working the counter at Music Mania, Brussels’ legendary record store. That job trains a very specific skill — you learn to hear what’s coming before the rest of the room does, because the customers in front of you are asking for it. Two decades of radio shows, DJ sets and festival bookings later, that instinct is now the organising principle behind Jazz Cats, and it’s why the series carries more weight than most themed compilations. Artists have turned up on these volumes before wider recognition arrived. That’s not marketing copy. It’s a track record.
Volume 4 is fourteen tracks, and it earns the “cutting edge” tag by refusing to sit still stylistically. Kunde’s “BITTERSWEET,” featuring Fred Gata’s raw-edged vocal, pulls from hip-hop phrasing without ever softening into pastiche, and it sits a few tracks away from Ragini Trio’s “Ahberi,” which is built on a much more traditional groove-and-interplay foundation. KVR and BREAD FOR PIGEONS take the opposite route entirely, leaning into unstable textures and compositional left turns that resist easy description. Gaiko and VLIEGWERK favour something closer to immersion — soundscapes that don’t announce themselves so much as accumulate. None of this reads as a compilation trying to cover its bases. It reads like a scene that genuinely doesn’t have a single dominant dialect right now.
The opening run sets that tone early. Aquiles Navarro, who plays in Irreversible Entanglements, leads things off alongside Ola Tunji and Helena Casella, and the sequencing does real work here — it tells you within three tracks that this isn’t a spiritual-jazz record or a beat-tape or a groove record, it’s all of those, made by people who don’t see much distinction between them. By the closing stretch, Lucid Lucia, SLAGADER and Kuna Maze pull the focus back toward funk-inflected momentum, which gives the whole thing a shape rather than just a running order.
What holds fourteen tracks like this together is Lefto’s selection, not a genre. That’s the argument for treating Jazz Cats as a barometer rather than a sampler. The series has functioned this way for a few volumes now — less a snapshot of a single sound than a record of who’s actually moving the Belgian scene forward at a given moment, filtered through someone who’s spent enough years behind a counter and behind a mixer to tell the difference between a trend and a real signal.
If you want to hear where this goes when it’s played live rather than pressed to record, the compilation gets its release show on September 30 at Ancienne Belgique in Brussels, with a triple bill pulling three of the featured artists — Kuna Maze, Foutloos and Lupo Spaccaro — onto the same stage. Jazz Cats Volume 4 is out September 4.
Last modified: August 4, 2026
