Polar Bear

Polar Bear is a British experimental jazz band led by drummer Seb Rochford, with Pete Wareham and Mark Lockheart on tenor saxophone, Tom Herbert on double bass and Leafcutter John on electronics and occasionally guitar or mandolin.

Their debut album “Dim Lit” was released in 2004 and met with huge critical acclaim, earning a nomination for Best Band at the BBC Jazz Awards. The following year they released “Held on the Tips of Fingers”, which thanks to its skilful blending of different genres such as jazz, dance music and electronica proved accessible to a much wider audience. Critical consensus on their sophomore effort was unanimous: Jazzwise magazine included it in its list of the “100 jazz albums that shook the world”. It also received a rather unusual nomination for a purely instrumental record at the popular Mercury Music Prize. The two following albums, “Polar Bear” and “Common Ground”, failed to match the widespread acclaim of their predecessors, but were still well received by most of the specialist press.

Their 2014 album “In Each And Every One” was shortlisted for the Mercury Music Prize, and that same year they released the single “Cuckoo” in collaboration with singer-songwriter Jin Jin. In March 2015, Polar Bear released their sixth album “Same as You”, which also features a collaboration with Shabaka Hutchings of Sons of Kemet.