The Jazz Café Festival returned in 2025 for its sophomore year, bringing another wave of eclectic performances to Burgess Park on Sunday 3 August. Headlined by Masego, the second iteration of the festival brimmed with promise, building on the solid foundation laid in 2024 with bigger stages, smoother logistics, and even greater sonic variety. It’s quickly cementing itself as a must on London’s busy summer festival calendar, offering a more laid-back alternative for those craving the atmosphere but unwilling to brave the chaos of mainstays like Wireless or All Points East.
A great deal of buzz surrounding this year’s event centred on Buffalo rapper Westside Gunn, whose appearance at the Jazz Café Festival marked the first UK performance of his career. He featured on the bill alongside Griselda Records label mate Benny the Butcher, with the latter scheduled to play the twilight slot on the Plant Room stage later in the day. The duo appeared at the festival a year after fellow East Coast rap stalwart Roc Marciano, who packed out the Plant Room tent in 2024.
For the uninitiated, Westside Gunn’s catalogue spans five studio albums, six EPs, and a whopping seventeen mixtapes. His music occupies a curious niche halfway between grit and luxury, every track punctuated by his unmistakable high-pitched delivery and signature ad-libs. His interests are equally eclectic — a lifelong wrestling fan, many of his festival visuals nod to the sport, including a background video loop featuring former WWE star Sid Eudy, who also appeared on the cover of Westside Gunn’s 2024 mixtape ‘Still Praying.’ The rapper also has one foot planted in the art world, thanks in large part to his collaboration with the late Virgil Abloh, who cemented Westside Gunn and Griselda Records’ ties to high fashion when the pair connected after a 2020 runway show. Abloh later designed the cover art for Westside Gunn’s critically acclaimed album ‘Pray for Paris‘ — a riff on Caravaggio’s David with the Head of Goliath — which remains among Gunn’s most recognisable and evocative imagery.
Westside Gunn is scheduled to appear on the Parkway Stage at 17:55. At 17:42, the big screen onstage updates to read ‘Up next: Westside Gunn.’ By 18:08, it updates again, this time adding that the rapper will arrive ‘in five minutes.’ The performance doesn’t actually start until 18:30, when Brother Tom Sos, Griselda Records’ latest signee, takes the stage solo. Westside Gunn appears a few minutes later — and the audience loses it, though excitement for the performance is somewhat tempered by the knowledge that his set is likely to be trimmed to keep the festival running on time.
Scheduling blunder aside, Westside Gunn delivers a performance for the ages — tearing through his extensive catalogue at breakneck speed to make up for lost time. Flanked by a sizeable entourage, he opens with ‘GUMBO YAYA,’ his 2025 collaboration with Brother Tom Sos. He largely avoids material from his most recent (and ostensibly final) studio album Still Praying, instead opting for a mix of earlier highlights and newer mixtape cuts like ‘OUTLANDER‘ and ‘Big Ass Bracelet.’ He pauses only briefly to address the crowd, promising to return to London soon. For the finale, he brings out Benny the Butcher to perform Griselda collective cut ‘DR BIRDS.‘ At that point, it’s clear he’s seconds away from having his sound cut, but in what reads like a eureka moment, he announces he’ll join Benny later that night for his Plant Room set. It likely causes another capacity issue in the tent, much like Earl Sweatshirt’s late-night set the year before — though I don’t stay to find out.
After the whirlwind that is Westside Gunn, I make an incredible discovery in the form of Lexa Gates. I stumble upon the Queens-born rapper’s set later in the afternoon after what proves to be a noticeably male-dominated day — catching French DJ Guts, South London MC James Messiah, Australian neo-soul outfit Don West, and Montreal rapper Skiifall between intermittent rain showers and Westside Gunn’s performance. Gates’ sound draws me out of the rain and into the Plant Room tent which, as it turns out, isn’t entirely waterproof. I find her midway through her outrageously catchy earworm, ‘Latency.’ Her delivery is warm and relaxed, her presence infectious. “Buy me a Chanel bag / Take me to the Hamptons / We could go out dancing,” Gates sing-songs over a sample of Hamilton Bohannon’s ‘Tell Me You’ll Wait’ — a cut so deep it only lives on YouTube. ‘Lexa Gates brought me here!’ reads the top comment.
Gates released ‘Latency’ in the afterglow of her third LP, ‘Elite Vessel,’ which dropped in October 2024. Produced by Grammy-nominated hitmaker Jasper Harris, the track is playful, inviting, and a complete breath of fresh air. It shows a different side to Gates — on ‘Elite Vessel,’ she wrestles with themes of isolation, even staging a ten-hour promotional stunt where she locks herself in a glass box in Brooklyn’s Union Square to promote the project. ‘Latency,’ by contrast, is lighter and flirtier: Gates muses on a romance in limbo, fantasising about designer bags, Hamptons getaways, and nights out as a way to move things forward. It’s as hopeful as it is tongue-in-cheek, and a promising sign of things to come from the 24-year-old rapper.
The festival marches on into the night with standout performances from Elmiene and Masego on the Parkway Stage, but I’m forced to bow out earlier than I’d hoped, thanks to an untimely bout of summer flu. Tickets for the Jazz Café Festival 2026 are already on sale, and I recommend snapping yours up early — the year-on-year growth is evident in 2025, and I can’t wait to see what this outstanding festival has in store for next summer.
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Words: Madeline Anderson