Dark Days signals a seismic shift in the UK jazz landscape, with Neil Charles fusing the gravity of his double bass with the literary charge of James Baldwin. Rather than offering homage or lament, Charles mobilizes his quartet - Pat Thomas, Mark Sanders, and Cleveland Watkiss - as a restless engine for clarity, invoking Baldwin’s unflinching prose. The result is an album steeped in reckoning, its Mingus-haunted pulse entwined with electric lyricism, volcanic drums, and a voice that both conjures and challenges.

Inspired by the searing collection of essays that gives the album its title, Charles extracts and fragments Baldwin’s words, letting Cleveland Watkiss channel them into visceral, sometimes choral, sometimes incantatory waves over shifting themes and free improvisation. The result is not nostalgia, but a razor-sharp commentary on the present - a dialogue with silence, dissonance, and the weight of the unsaid. Army, the standout track, layers voice, bowed bass, and piano into a haunted crescendo, exemplifying the ensemble’s ability to balance emotional intensity with subtlety.​

Each member brings singular authority: Charles with resonant, exploratory bass; Thomas painting lyric and melodic forms; Sanders grounding and erupting by turns; Watkiss looping vocal fragments into living testimony. This is not just jazz-meets-poetry - it's a mediation on race, resilience, and global unrest, reflecting not only Baldwin’s America but the world beyond. Dark Days arrives complete with evocative photography and liner notes - a testament to the quartet’s conviction and Baldwin’s literary legacy. This is witness music - neither resigned nor hollowly hopeful, but urgent, challenging, and ultimately alive to the possibility that art, at its fiercest, compels us to confront the darkness with open eyes.​