LONDON-BORN tuba virtuoso Theon Cross has a powerful grasp of his instrument’s jazz ancestry and you can hear it on the rampant bass pulse of the rumbustiously beautiful album Fyah.

He started his musical journey listening to sousaphone players in New Orleans brass bands such as the Dirty Dozen, playing along to the basslines on their CDs.

“Then I checked out tubists who were amazing at using the tuba as a front-line instrument — Howard Johnson, Bob Stewart, Red Callendar and many more.”

Cross has a strong musical background, with his father a reggae guitarist and singer, brother a trombonist and a sister who plays saxophone.

As a youth he listened to hip hop, grime and soul and a Caribbean heritage meant he was surrounded by reggae, lovers’ rock, soca and zouk music.

He started out on tenor horn, moved to euphonium and then turned to the tuba. He was inspired by his tutor Andy Grappy, longtime tubist of Mike Westbrook’s orchestra, playing in a carnival band.

Hearing Sons of Kemet live, where Cross’s tuba flies and throbs with huge and rampant rhythms, the kinship of jazz and dance is ever-present.

“From its inception jazz has always been a dance music,” he says, “from second-line parades in New Orleans to swing-dance nightclubs.

“It’s multidimensional, with both a focused approach to listening and the imperative of dance.”

His instrument’s empathy with percussion is remarkably emphatic in the two-drummer formation of Sons of Kemet and his partnership with drummer Moses Boyd on Fyah, reflecting the fact that “bass and drums are part of the sonic wellbeing of most musical situations.

“Both drums and tuba as bass instruments require the vibrations of human connection and the particular breath of the tuba connects with people in a different way to other bass instruments.”

Fyah is often an incendiary album but also full of subtle and reflective musicianship.

Nubya Garcia’s tenor saxophone creates melodic and sustaining lines and Cross potently guffaws on Radiation and co-creates a contrasting colloquy with Garcia on Letting Go and on CIYA brother Nathaniel takes an eloquent trombone chorus and saxophonist Wayne Francis plays with a lucid tenderness.

CIYA, he says, is an abbreviation of “confidence in your own ability” and many of the titles are messages to himself learned in life.

“Letting Go means to detach yourself from negative experiences and Activate is to be active and present in the moment regardless of fear and anxiety,” he says.

Underpinning them all is that formidable tuba, an innovative addition to the exciting new upsurge of young British jazz.

Fyah is available on bandcamp, theoncross.bandcamp.com/album/fyah