Soweto Kinch: ‘I’ve been reflecting on the meaning of the word apocalypse’

Lately, Soweto Kinch has been thinking a lot about his father. A playwright and director who founded theatre companies and community arts groups, the late Don Kinch was, Soweto says, ‘a maverick’ whose energy and invention had a profound impact on his son. ‘Being surrounded by art-making from the earliest age taught me the power of art to transform people’s views of the world,’ Kinch says, calling from the apartment in Birmingham’s Jewellery Quarter where he often records his acclaimed BBC Radio 3 show Round Midnight. ‘The idea that you can start with something incorporeal – a concept in your head – and manifest it in the world is really, really powerful.’

The younger Kinch has been manifesting just such concepts for over two decades now, a master saxophonist and incisive MC fusing the kindred disciplines of jazz and hip-hop into a sonic dialect all his own. His work has only grown more ambitious, more acute. Check his recent trilogy of fiercely, fearlessly political works: 2019’s The Black Peril, 2021’s White Juju and a final chapter, Soundtrack to the Apocalypse, which Kinch premiered here at the Queen Elizabeth Hall on 1 February.

He ‘got the jazz bug in earnest’ at the age of 13, following a show of Don’s at Edinburgh Fringe that featured Guyanese singer/percussionist Frank Holder and jazz dancer Will Gaines. ‘I didn’t understand what any of it meant. But I found myself scatting and wanting to get jazz tapes’. Soon he acquired a saxophone – ‘a cumbersome, onerous weight around my neck,’ he grins – drawing knowledge from ‘various uncles and cousins, not related by blood but through the extended family of jazz’. Saxophonist Jean Toussaint tasked Kinch with transcribing delirious solos by bebop pioneer Charlie Parker; trumpeter Wynton Marsalis taught Kinch that focusing on his horn and not the noise of the industry that surrounded him ‘would bring humility and consistency along a very rocky artistic road. In jazz, our craft is akin to being in a dojo. The same is true with hip-hop.’

Born in 1978, Kinch fell under hip-hop’s spell during its late 1980s and early 1990s golden age, when – having stripped James Brown’s grooves bare of sampleable elements – producers started in on jazz for source material. ‘It was all De La Soul, A Tribe Called Quest and The Roots,’ he says, of this inspirational jazz-rap epoch. ‘People were questioning the solidity of genre, and realising these artforms could and should inspire each other. Jazz is powerful, this non-verbal realm where you can express emotions words fail to describe, while hip-hop is very direct, lyrically barbed and impressionistic. They’re different limbs; the idea of having to pick between my left and right hand is ridiculous. I need them both.’

After studying History at Oxford, he joined veteran bassist Gary Crosby’s Tomorrow Warriors and Jazz Jamaica All Stars, and moonlit with The Big Blue, the backing band for TV talent show Pop Idol (where he realised he ‘didn’t have the constitution to deal with the world of hype surrounding manufactured pop’). He formed his own trio, and found himself tipped as part of an early 2000s jazz renaissance. ‘I did this crazy photo shoot with Jamie Cullum, Amy Winehouse and Katie Melua. We were ‘the new faces of jazz’. And it’s interesting, because I was the only Black face in it.’

Kinch takes a dim view of such media hype, preferring to see himself within a continuum of musicians, from those who inspired him and championed him – Tony Kofi, Dennis Baptiste, Courtney Pine, Steve Williamson – to the current wave of British jazz artists like Shabaka Hutchings, who played on Kinch’s 2010 album The New Emancipation. ‘An unbroken cord connects us all, and at various points the media will be interested or uninterested,’ he says, mindful to focus on how he plays his horn, not the noise he can’t control.

From the off, Kinch distinguished himself from the jazz pack. His debut, 2003’s Conversations With the Unseen, showcased not just his musicianship, but also the power of his words and his flow. His foundational love for hip-hop taught him there must be ‘a path where I could be the dopest MC and also the best jazz musician. If that path didn’t exist, I’d forge it myself.’ Kinch was no dilettante MC assuming the surface trappings of jazz for a patina of sophistication, nor was he some cynical jazzbo co-opting rap to seduce the youth market. No, here was a saxophonist and a rapper throwing himself into the deep end of both disciplines, arising in triumph.

Kinch had developed a taste for weighty concepts, guiding the trilogy he would undertake next, three bold and adventurous works he says are ‘linked by history and circumstance’. The centenary of the First World War kickstarted what became 2019’s Black Peril, an impressionistic evocation of Black life in the UK years before Windrush and a chronicle of the violence and erasure those communities experienced. ‘In all the commemorations of the war, no one mentioned the contributions of the Black diaspora,’ Kinch says. ‘And no one talked about the race riots in Wales, Glasgow, Liverpool and elsewhere that followed. The fact that there were enough Black people in Britain in 1919 to suffer significant racial disturbances was mind-blowing to me.’

But these communities existed and helped to build the UK’s port towns, for which they were persecuted and erased from history. ‘They lived as Britons, and they coloured irrevocably the nature and the style and verve of British culture forever,’ Kinch says. Black Peril tells their story, Barbadian swing backing Kinch’s poetic recreation of these communities and their world. ‘I wanted to explore the ordinary lives of Africans who came to Britain at that time, to reconstruct their music. It’s not always dejection and pain that we express – there’s mirth, there’s celebration. I wanted the joy and the happiness that we associate with Soca, with Calypso, but with some darkness and dissonance via the saxophone solos. I’m always exploring the tension between assonance and dissonance, lightness and darkness, and what’s really happening behind the eyes of a smiling entertainer from a hundred years ago.’

The pandemic scuppered plans to tour Black Peril, so Kinch performed a socially distanced tour of some of the port cities where the riots had occurred, without audiences but filmed for posterity. ‘I went looking for the streets where the Somalians who had helped build Cardiff had found lodgings, where the West African dock workers had lived,’ he remembers. ‘But they had been completely demolished, erased. All these new port cities were growing and expanding. But the people that made that wealth were never credited for it.’

The follow-up, White Juju, was a feverish response to the pandemic era and ‘the feeling of how we were gaslit by our government’. Performed with the London Symphony Orchestra, the music is dark and turbulent, and in the moments where it turns sweet, this is quickly drowned out by samples of Boris Johnson and Priti Patel and snippets of news reports of the PPE crisis, the Black Lives Matter protests and Sarah Everard’s rape and murder by policeman Wayne Couzens. ‘There are passages where you’ll hear us attempting to play a ballad or conventional, jazzy changes, but they’re layered with disturbing, dystopian news clips, drowned out by ugly noise. Because that’s what it felt like when it was all happening.’

His new piece Soundtrack to the Apocalypse ‘looks to the near and distant future’, Kinch says. He adds that the final piece of this turbulent trilogy will balance the darkness with moments ‘that are like a musical balm’. The tracks are shorter and ‘very hip-hop and beat-oriented’, and see Kinch ‘playing my aerophone, my electronic saxophone, for the first time. I’m embracing the technology of this moment in time, the ADHD way we listen to music now, always scrolling on to the next thing. There are moments that make you want to dance, to move, and as you’re getting into it, BOOM! the next idea hits. It’s very different from anything I’ve done before.’

There’s a recurring theme throughout these pieces, of history purposefully obscured by dark forces, and of the pain of the past resurfacing and repeating nevertheless. ‘If you don’t heal the historical things, people behave like they’re under a spell, because they’ve never really questioned the past,’ Kinch says. This compulsion to snap people awake is another legacy of his father’s influence. ‘As a playwright, he’d tackle massive subjects and grand ideas. I grew up in the 1980s, immersed in pan-African consciousness. I remember being at the Africa Centre in London at the age of seven, involved in anti-apartheid activity. I learned that art, enmeshed with identity, is a power-tool to give the dispossessed a voice and agency in the world.’

He says that, despite the doomy title, this final chapter of the trilogy is ‘spiritual in inclination’. ‘I’ve been reflecting on the meaning of the word ‘apocalypse’,’ he smiles. ‘The original Greek origins are “to uncover, to unveil”, which puts a different complexion on the typical doomsday connotations’. And he suggests a narrative that steals victory from the jaws of defeat – that this dark moment in history might be the gateway to some kind of rejuvenation that will rescue us from the brink.

‘There’s this international nexus of terrifying wars with no immediate end in sight, but I don’t think things are going to end as darkly as everyone expects. Maybe this is just the lunatic optimism of a jazz musician,’ suggests this jazz musician who seems neither lunatic nor unduly optimistic. ‘But a lot of us are deeply offended by how the world is run, and are craving it to be reconstructed in a different way.’ Right now he has no answers to what this reconstruction might look like, or how it might come about. But you’re sure he’d know how to soundtrack it.