Results for "Soweto Kinch"

Soweto Kinch

Award winning alto-saxophonist and MC Soweto Kinch is one of the most exciting and versatile young musicians in both the British jazz and hip-hop scenes.

Nubiyan Twist: Freedom Fables

By CHRIS MAY

Guitarist Tom Excell's Nubiyan Twist is one of the more substantial groove-based fusion outfits orbiting the perimeter of Britain's alternative jazz world. The band combines soul, funk, modal jazz, hip hop, and West African Afrobeat and highlife in a dancefloor-friendly melange which is a whole lot of fun while also possessing some depth. Based in Leeds ...

Um Yang

By EMMA-JEAN THACKRAY

Label: Night Dreamer
Released: 2020
Track listing: Um (Radio Edit); Yang (Radio Edit); Um; Yang.

Chris May’s Best Releases Of 2020

By CHRIS MAY

Not the best year for live gigs in London, but Dele Sosimi's Afrobeat Orchestra just made it under the wire, lighting up the Jazz Cafe in late January. Rather like Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers, Sosimi's band has form as an incubator of young talent. A recent star in the making was trumpeter Ife Ogunjobi, who has ...

Makaya McCraven: Cross Border Traffic

By CHRIS MAY

Like his near contemporaries Shabaka Hutchings, Kamasi Washington, Nubya Garcia and Robert Glasper, the Chicago-based drummer, bandleader, producer and self-declared beat scientist Makaya McCraven is routinely described by the more breathless commentators writing about modern music as a “saviour" of jazz. Certainly, McCraven and his peers are enriching jazz by their embrace of other ...

Makaya McCraven: Universal Beings E&F Sides

By CHRIS MAY

Universal Beings E&F Sides is an addendum to drummer and producer Makaya McCraven's paradigm-shifting underground hit Universal Beings (International Anthem, 2018). That album was a double (four sides: A, B, C and D). The new album is a single (two sides: E and F). Geddit? Most, but not all, of the tracks on ...

Emma-Jean Thackray: Um Yang

By CHRIS MAY

Right now, in summer 2020, using new and recent releases as the yardstick, the two most exciting musicians on London's alternative jazz scene are trumpeters. One is Laura Jurd, whose recent To The Earth (Edition) is a high-water mark for her electro-acoustic band, Dinosaur. The other is Emma-Jean Thackray, whose EP Um Yang is also remarkable. ...

Lift Every Voice And Sing: Twenty #BlackLives Albums That Matter

By CHRIS MAY

Jazz has been inextricably linked with social and political protest since at least the late 1930s, when Billie Holiday made famous the leftist songwriter and poet Abel Meeropol's “Strange Fruit." The song, which has a power to move that is undiminished by familiarity, likens the bodies of lynched African Americans to fruit hanging in trees.

Denys Baptiste: Pathfinder For The New London Jazz

By CHRIS MAY

Bandleader, composer and educator Denys Baptiste is among the generation of musicians, many of them of Caribbean or African heritage, who pointed the way for the younger players who have emerged on the London jazz scene since around 2015. Baptiste's contemporaries include saxophonists Jason Yarde, Soweto Kinch, Steve Williamson and Courtney Pine, and trumpeter Byron Wallen, ...

New Jazz From London: Top 20 Paradigm Shifting Albums

By CHRIS MAY

After a lifetime trying to get on an equal footing with its American parent, British jazz has finally come of age. Since around 2015, a community of young, London-based musicians has forged a style which, while anchored in the American tradition, reflects the Caribbean and African cultural heritages of many of its vanguard players. The scene ...