On International Jazz Day, we are taking a closer look at Denzil Forrester’s Dub, a 1985 painting that captures music as something felt collectively as much as heard. Shaped by Forrester’s experience of London dub culture in the 1980s, the work draws on the all-night sessions he attended and sketched. Bodies blur across a compressed, vibrant interior, while the DJ and speaker stack anchor the scene at its edge. Rather than simply depicting a single venue, Forrester paints the sensation of being inside it: the heat, the rhythm, the press of the crowd, the energy flowing between people in the room. This sense of exchange gives Dub a connection to jazz as well, through the two genres’ shared emphasis on playfulness, spontaneity and community. The painting also stands as an important record of Black British social life in the 1980s, preserving a culture of joy, creativity and collective gathering too often overlooked in art history.

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