Moers Festival Interviews: Lakecia Benjamin

The last day of the Moers Festival is also the Monday holiday of Whitsun, still marked in Germany, even if it's dormant in England, but still technically observed in the USA, although not granted a public day off work. As a climax of both the five-day festival and the (Pentecost) holiday, the NYC alto saxophonist Lakecia Benjamin will storm the Moers castle, filling this main stage with extreme jazz hyperventilation, patterned with some elements of funk, hip-hop and poetic-narrative rhyming.

Benjamin plays with her now regular crew of Oscar Perez (piano), Elias Bailey (bass) and Jonathan Barber (drums). She's established a very strong presence on the European touring scene during the last five years, and during 2026 she's unveiling the new original material that populates her We Dream album, to be released in June. A clutch of already available singles are presently streamable. The LP pulses with the presence of an extremely impressive group of guest artists, some of the starriest players on the jazz scene, including Terence Blanchard, Chris Potter, Hiromi, Chief Adjuah, Kassa Overall and Jeff 'Tain' Watts. All of these artists emanate a feeling of being a fully involved band member, providing deep-rooted parts to each composition, strongly influencing their flow. Benjamin also has very good taste in who she's invited to participate.

Benjamin's quartet have been highlighting the new repertoire since the beginning of 2026. "We might play something a little older, maybe one or two songs" said Benjamin, days before heading towards her European dates. "It depends how long the set is... "

Catching Lakecia just before her jump to European parts, your scribe asked the burning question of how the material will sound, being interpreted by the core quartet, without its myriad guests. "People are asking me that all the time," she responded. "I think it's such a ridiculous question. I'm six albums in, and I'm asked 'is it going to be different without Dee Dee Bridgewater?' I don't think that the audience will find any difference. They won't notice, and say, 'oh, I don't hear a trumpet harmony,' because they don't know the song. Based on how much time we have, there's no way we're going to play all 11 songs. But there'll be differences, because each of the guests have a unique way of playing, so if we don't have Hiromi, I'm still playing the song myself. It will be more my personality, my show. We won't be getting splashes of different personalities. The features come improvisationally, they don't come in the core essence of the song."

Of course, most folks will only have heard the advance singles, so will be almost completely unfamiliar with the material. Not that most jazzers will complain when being confronted with a fresh manifestation of a tune. This is what they naturally seek. "Since March we've been playing the music non-stop, so we are embedded," said Benjamin. "When we were doing the album it was new to us in the brain. Now, we're more of a working unit."

One noticeable development on We Dream is the increased importance of Benjamin's vocal input, sometimes rapping, but increasingly rhyming in the poetic declaimer fashion, filling her lines with an urgent topicality and inhabiting a more personal verbal world. "As time passes on, with maturity and evolution... " Benjamin observed her process of narrative change.

"Sometimes, when you're playing the saxophone, it's a little bilingual," Benjamin elaborated. "So the listener is interpreting how you feel, 'oh, this is a happy song for Lakecia Benjamin,' and it could be a song about the death of everybody in my family. So we have a gap. As time's been going on, and I've been doing more shows, playing for different audiences, I've found that I'm talking to them, and expressing, communicating with them during the songs, during the set. It's brought a different type of understanding, and they feel included. So I felt that for this LP, I wanted to put the listener in a different head-space, when each song comes on, to kind of guide them. I'll walk them through the album. It's almost like I wanted to narrate throughout, so there would be no question about the words, because you understand them right away. The right mood that you need to be in: every day is not a bad day, but every day is not a good day."

It's almost two decades since Benjamin was gigging with Rashied Ali, who was one of the last of John Coltrane's drumming partners. They used to play regular gigs together at the much-missed Jazz Standard club. A few years later, between 2016 and 2020, she gigged with guitarist James Blood Ulmer, going out on tour with the avant-blues-harmolodic singer-guitarist. "When Rashied was still alive, he gave my number to Blood, because he'd said he wanted to have an alto player in the band," Benjamin recalled. "I would go to his house and play his music, and hang out with him, for years, because he lived across the street from Rashied [in SoHo]. One day, he said, I want to have a tour with you, and it totally happened. The last shows we did, there's a video film, with Calvin Weston on drums and Mark Peterson on bass."

Around 15 years back, Benjamin was simultaneously making the journey towards funk and fusion with her Soul Squad, appearing with them at the Moers Festival in 2012. Recently, Benjamin has found her true position (and full public popularity) with the Pursuance and Phoenix albums, melding post-Coltranes jazz with a harder manifestation of funk, soul and hip-hop. Benjamin now prefers a kind of hyper-jazz, or even speed-jazz, drawing out her strengths in powerhouse blowing extremity, fast-paced, but charged with a supple virtuosity. She's concentrating the natural force of a deeper-rooted soloing that certainly hits the witnesses hard. "I turn up and be myself for every show. I know that I'll be pumped up and ready."