LED by drummer Jake Long, Maisha brings a fresh slant to the spiritual jazz tradition.

As well as tipping their hats to jazz titans like Don Cherry and Pharoah Sanders, the band also imbue their music with their own individual influences, including hypnotic West African rhythms and afrobeat.

The result is a brilliant, often heady mix, that combines the spiritual of Alice Coltrane with the swing of Fela Kuti and the greatness of Kamasi Washington and Sun Ra.

The young London-based spiritual jazz collective is bringing its beguiling and intense rhythms to Kendal's Brewery Arts Centre next Wednesday, June 5, as part of its Arts Council sponsored UK tour.

The gigs are on the back of their recent acclaimed debut album There Is A Place, out on Brownswood Recordings.

As well as Jake, the line up includes Yahael Camara-Onono, percussion; Shirley Tetteh, guitar; Nubya Garcia, saxophone and flute; Amané Suganami, on piano and Wurlitzer and double bass player, Twm Dylan.

Drummer Jake says Maisha's been playing together for about the last three years: "A lot of us met at university (Trinity College Of Music). We were playing together a lot at that time in different bands and ensembles and I was really enjoying everybody’s playing.

"When I put the band together I thought it would be good to bring all those people together.

"A lot of people that are creating jazz have realised that, for a long time, it was very much an intellectualised music and I think that put the general public off listening to it. If you’re led to believe that you won’t understand it if you don’t know anything about it, I think that is a massive put off.

"So I think what a lot of people have done is they’ve changed the way that people can perceive the music; performing it in spaces they wouldn’t previously have performed jazz before, fusing it with elements of dance music, hip-hop and popular music, stuff like that. That allows people to find it a bit more accessible and to be able to go out and dance to it.

"I think why I enjoying playing with Maisha so much is because it’s so free and it allows us to explore the music so deeply. When we perform, we all take the approach we intend and we don’t want it to be any show we’ve done previously.

"I think that even though that aspect is taken on by a lot of different bands, I feel that potentially a lot of other people’s music is slightly more structured than Maisha’s. The fact that there’s not so much structure allows us to be a lot freer with it."

Brewery box office 01539-725133.