35 Black British musicians

Alexander Junior Grant, professionally known as Alex da Kid or by.ALEXANDER, is a British musician, record producer, songwriter, record executive and fashion designer from Wood Green, London. He has gained recognition for producing several hit singles for artists of multiple music genres, such as Dr. Dre, Nicki Minaj, B.o.B, Eminem, Diddy, Imagine Dragons ("Radioactive") and Cheryl.

UB40 are an English reggae and pop band, formed in December 1978 in Birmingham, England. The band has had more than 50 singles in the UK Singles Chart, and has also achieved considerable international success. They have been nominated for the Grammy Award for Best Reggae Album four times, and in 1984 were nominated for the Brit Award for Best British Group. UB40 have sold over 70 million records worldwide. The ethnic make-up of the band's original line-up was diverse, with musicians of English, Welsh, Irish, Jamaican, Scottish, and Yemeni parentage.

Harold Winston "Harry" Beckett was a British trumpeter and flugelhorn player of Barbadian origin.

Adegbenga Adejumo, known as Benga, is a British musician from Croydon, known for being a pioneer of dubstep record production. He has been featured on a variety of compilations including Mary Anne Hobbs's Warrior Dubz, Tempa's The Roots of Dubstep and the BBC Radio 1Xtra anniversary mix.

Jak Beula Dodd, commonly known as Jak Beula, is a British entrepreneur and cultural activist of Caribbean heritage, who is best known for inventing the board game Nubian Jak and designing the African and Caribbean War Memorial. He is also a musician, social-worker, and former model. Beula has received recognition for campaigning to commemorate black history in the UK. He is the founder and chief executive of the Nubian Jak Community Trust, which since 2006 has been memorializing the contributions of African-Caribbean people in Britain.

John Blanke was a black musician in London in the early 16th century, who probably came to England as one of the African attendants of Catherine of Aragon in 1501. He is one of the earliest recorded black people in England after the Roman period. His name may be a reference to his skin colour, derived either from the word "black" or from the French word "blanc", meaning white.

Dennis Bovell is a Barbados-born reggae guitarist, bass player and record producer, based in England. He was a member of the British reggae band Matumbi, and released dub-reggae records under his own name as well as the pseudonym Blackbeard. He is most widely known for his decades-spanning collaborations with Linton Kwesi Johnson.

Moses Boyd is a British jazz drummer, composer, record producer, bandleader and radio host. His debut solo studio album Dark Matter (2020) was nominated for the 2020 Mercury Prize.

Yolanda Faye Brown is a British saxophonist, composer and broadcaster.

Daniel Williamson, better known as LTJ Bukem, is a British drum and bass musician, producer and DJ. He and his record label Good Looking are most associated with the jazzy, atmospheric side of drum and bass music.

Benjamin Sainte-Clémentine is a British artist, poet, vocalist, composer, musician and actor. Clementine's debut album At Least for Now won the 2015 Mercury Prize. In February 2019 he was named a knight of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French government, in recognition of his contribution to the arts.

Geraldine Connor, PhD, MMus, LRSM, DipEd, was a British ethnomusicologist, theatre director, composer and performer, who spent significant periods of her life in Trinidad and Tobago, from where her parents had migrated to Britain in the 1940s. Her father was actor, singer and folklorist Edric Connor and her mother was theatrical agent and cultural activist Pearl Connor. Geraldine Connor is best known for having written, composed and directed Carnival Messiah, a spectacular work that "married the European classical tradition of oratorio with masquerade and musical inspiration from the African diaspora". For more than 20 years, she lived in Skelmanthorpe in Yorkshire, where she went in 1990 as a lecturer at the University of Leeds.

Kizzy Meriel Crawford, known as Kizzy, is a Bajan-Welsh singer songwriter from Merthyr Tydfil, who sings in both English and Welsh, using traditional and modern sources.

Gary Crosby is a British jazz double bassist, composer, music arranger, and educator. He was a founder member of the celebrated group the Jazz Warriors in the 1980s and has worked with many top international artists.

Grantley Evan Marshall, also known by the stage name Daddy G, is a British DJ and a founding member of the band Massive Attack.

Ayodele Fadele was an English musician and music journalist who was active from the mid-1980s. He wrote for the NME in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and was one of the first music critics to introduce then emerging US rap artists such as Public Enemy, De La Soul and A Tribe Called Quest to mainstream British music fans.

Clifford Joseph Price MBE, better known as Goldie, is a British musician, music producer, DJ, visual artist and actor.

David "Dread" Hinds is a British musician and the founding member, rhythm guitarist and lead vocalist for the reggae band Steel Pulse.

Brewster Hughes, born Ignatius Abiodun Oke and who later used the name Ernest Henley Oke Hughes, was a Nigerian guitarist, bandleader and community leader who was active in Britain as a highlife performer and recording artist after the Second World War.

Tre Jean-Marie, is a British songwriter and record producer. His writing and production credits include AJ Tracey, Anne-Marie, Burna Boy, Craig David, Jacob Banks, Joy Crookes, Kaytranada, Labrinth, Little Mix, Mabel, Nathan Dawe, Paloma Faith, and Tom Grennan amongst many others.

Ras Kwame is a British musician, record producer, radio DJ and presenter of Ghanaian heritage.

Joseph Martin Leeway is the former multi-instrumentalist, and stylings guru, for the 1980s band Thompson Twins. He joined Thompson Twins in 1981 after being one of their roadies.

Malik Al Nasir, formerly Mark T. Watson is a British author and performance poet, born to a Welsh mother and a Guyanese father. He grew up partly with his family in Liverpool and after the paralysis of his father, he was taken into local authority care. He successfully sued the government for neglect, racism and physical abuse whilst in their care, and received a public apology from Liverpool's Lord Mayor.

George Evelyn, better known by his stage name Nightmares on Wax or DJ E.A.S.E., is an English DJ and record producer from Leeds. His music has been released by Warp Records. He is based in Ibiza. Nightmares on Wax were originally a group consisting of Evelyn and John Halnon, and then later with Kevin Harper.

Kwadwo Quentin Kankam, better known by his stage name Novelist, is a British grime MC and record producer from Lewisham in South London. He was a founding member of the Square crew and was nominated for Best Grime Act at the 2014 MOBO Awards. He has been called the "new face of grime" and was described as "the poster child for the first generation of real grime kids" by DJ Logan Sama.

Peter James Turner, better known as Pete Turner, is a British musician and songwriter who has been the bassist for the rock band Elbow since the group's formation.

Courtney Pine,, is a British jazz musician, who was the principal founder in the 1980s of the black British band the Jazz Warriors. Although known primarily for his saxophone playing, Pine is a multi-instrumentalist, also playing the flute, clarinet, bass clarinet and keyboards. On his 2011 album, Europa, he plays almost exclusively bass clarinet.

Charles Ignatius Sancho was a British abolitionist, writer and composer. Born on a slave ship in the Atlantic, Sancho was sold into slavery in the Spanish colony of New Granada. After his parents died, Sancho's owner took the two-year-old orphan to England and gifted him to three Greenwich sisters, where he remained their slave for eighteen years. Unable to bear being a servant to them, Sancho ran away to the Montagu House, whose owner had taught him how to read and encouraged Sancho's budding interest in literature. After spending some time as a servant in the household, Sancho left and started his own business as a shopkeeper, while also starting to write and publish various essays, plays and books.

Julius Soubise was a freed Afro-Caribbean slave who became a well-known fop in late eighteenth-century Britain. The satirized depiction of Soubise, A Mungo Macaroni, is a relic of intersectionality between race, class, and gender in eighteenth-century London. His life of luxury as a free man of colour allowed him to excel in elite activities such as fencing and made him notorious in London's social scene as an exception to norms.

Jerome Sydenham is an electronic music producer, DJ and multi-record label owner known for establishing a pan-African electro direction within the house and techno genres.

Leeroy Thornhill is a British electronic music artist and formerly a rave dancer and occasionally keyboardist for the British electronic group The Prodigy. Thornhill's live performances throughout the 90s included his unique style of shuffling.

Ash Walker is a London-based musician, multi-instrumentalist and DJ, whose music spans a diverse range of genres, such as jazz, blues, soul, funk, reggae, dub, trip hop, acid jazz, and electronica, among others. He has released three studio albums: Augmented 7th (2015) and Echo Chamber (2017) on Deep Heads, and Aquamarine (2019) on Night Time Stories.

Byron Wallen is a British jazz trumpeter, composer and educator. He was described by Jazzwise as "one of the most innovative, exciting and original trumpet players alive". As characterised by All About Jazz, "He does not fit into any pigeonhole, however, and is also something of a renaissance man: he has long been involved in cognitive psychology and also travels widely, spending extended periods in South Africa, Uganda, Zimbabwe, Nigeria, Morocco, Indonesia and Belize ."

Steve Williamson is an English saxophonist and composer. He has been called "one of the most distinctive saxophone voices in contemporary British jazz".