Featured Interview: Soweto Kinch

UK saxophonist, composer, and MC Soweto Kinch is a highly acclaimed musician, a unique character, and supremely engaging artist. Now highly regarded in the UK and internationally, on both the jazz and hip-hop scenes, at 31 Soweto has had an inspired career that already reads like a novel.

Born in London in 1978, the son of a playwright and an actress, Soweto had an upbringing that clearly cultivated an intuitive approach towards the creative process. After taking instrumental lessons at school, a meeting with jazz royalty Wynton Marsalis in his early teens pulled his interest towards really studying jazz, and Marsalis also became an influential mentor to Soweto’s promising young talent. He went on to cut his teeth as a musician featuring with Tomorrow’s Warriors, Jazz Jamaica All Stars, and Courtney Pine who also took a keen interest in Soweto. As well as finding time to get a degree in modern history from Oxford University, soon after graduating, he really grabbed the attention of the world’s jazz and music media by winning the coveted first prize in the 2002 Montreux Jazz Festival saxophone competition.
After exhibiting his prowess as a talented soloist, he later released his forays into jazz/hip hop with ‘Conversations with the unseen’ and ‘A life in the day of B19: Tales of the tower block’, for which the former received the Mercury music award for album of the year. If you don’t have either of these albums they are well worth a listen, as are all his back catalogue of works. Check out ‘Jazz Planet’ and ‘A war in a rack’. Over the last decade Soweto has been adorned with strings of high profile awards for his exciting work including two MOBOs for best jazz act, BBC Jazz, and Urban Music awards.

At the heart of Soweto’s music there are some common themes. Most obvious is the presence of narrative, a key ingredient of jazz, and an integral part of Soweto, whether soloing, constructing a body of work, or freestyling on the mic. Quality and integrity also seem paramount to his approach. He is totally understanding and respectful of jazz music’s great lineage and as a result is dedicated to both its preservation and innovation. Soweto really is the definition of a multi-faceted modern artist. He is a recording artist, musician, a composer, arranger, teacher, promoter, and seems to have an approach to all these roles that is truly original, shrugging off obstacles that are put in his way by an industry that is often more preoccupied with income than integrity.

Soweto is also a man committed to the next generation and all things grassroots and community-based which is sadly far too rare for artists of his calibre. As well as The Live Box project, Soweto has had great triumph with The Flyover Show. Now in its third year, The Flyover Show is a bit of an unprecedented event and brainchild of Soweto’s which sees him annually take over the Hockley flyover in Birmingham to put on a (free!) high end all day event showcasing some of tomorrow’s stars as well as a generous bill of performances from some big established crowd pleasers. This year was no exception with the likes of Eska, lover’s rock legend Janet Kay, Speech Debelle, and Ms Dynamite among the line up.
I caught up with Soweto at this year’s Flyover Show, and between performances he took some time out to talk to me about his life, the current state of jazz, music in general, and the future…

MOBO: You started learning clarinet age eight and had parents who worked in the arts. Do you have any early memories of times that shaped your musical philosophy/ideology?

Soweto: Yeah, my father’s a playwright and my mother’s an actress. Growing up in a house like that there are so many moments it’s hard to pinpoint one. I remember rehearsing for a play my father was doing called ‘The Balm Yard’. Going up to the Edinburgh festival when I was young and seeing all sorts of music happening... saxophonists, drummers. I think it wasn’t until I was thirteen and went to the Edinburgh festival that I really got the jazz bug, there was a play my father was working on called ‘Foxtrot in the sand’ and it featured a jazz tap dancer called Will Gaines, and that was just one of those really landmark, watershed moments.

MOBO: So what is your musical philosophy/Ideology then?

Soweto: It is … give without the intention of thinking about market. I think that’s very much my philosophy. It’s going back to creating art for art’s sake, and, then we can put a necessary value on it. I think a lot of artists are too concerned about the image and the look and all the things that go around the substance, and the industry, the industry isn’t necessarily concerned enough about how to attach the right value to your creativity… so to re-balance that is what I’m trying to say.

MOBO: Both Wynton Marsalis and Courtney Pine have been mentors to you at different stages of your career, what were those experiences like and what impact do you think they have had on you?

Soweto: Really profound. Just to legitimise a style of music that isn’t necessarily acceptable or deemed as possible for a young black kid or for young people in general. They were both very encouraging, both very structured and definite about the things I should do next. When I first encountered Wynton at the age of thirteen he was like go check out the roots of the music, go study where the music comes from, and those are profound words that still resonate with me today like, how do you plumb the tradition, understand the tradition and still find something new in it. Often the most hip, futuristic stuff to be found in music is like fifty, sixty, seventy years old.

MOBO: Wynton and yourself seem to have some differences in musical ideology with him being more traditionalist and you being more of a boundary pusher who’s open to fusion. Is there a middle ground where the two meet?

Soweto: I don’t’ think they are that different at all actually. Both boundary pushing. I think those terms do a disservice to what the philosophy’s all about, traditionalist only in that tradition is important the same way lineage is important, you wouldn’t call people that play classical music traditionalists, there’s just a right way to do it. If you want to understand the idiom you have to look at what’s happened before. You wouldn’t depart from Mozart. So as far as me being boundary pushing, as I said I think some of the most ground breaking and innovative stuff can be found in music that is eighty ninety years old. I don’t think of myself as supremely futuristic but I’m definitely experimental and I’m always trying to do something I haven’t done before

MOBO: Jazz has been so influential to so many other genres, and the face of modern popular music. It’s also now an interesting time for jazz with lobbies for more adequate media representation growing stronger. What does jazz mean to you in 2010?

Soweto: It means the same thing that, hopefully, it meant in 1910. I think about all those young musicians who are still doing things, creative things, pushing back the boundaries like Nathanial Facey, Jay Phelps, both in this country, and a whole other crop of even younger musicians who are coming through. I can hear this band that are playing in the background now, ‘Judy’s House’, there’s so many great musicians who are coming through. I think it means breath of fresh air when I think of jazz, a breath of fresh air from the commercial, conveyor belt, manufactured, focus-grouped pap that we’re fed as an audience.

MOBO: This is now the third Flyover Show. How’s it going and are you achieving what you set out to do?

Soweto: Yeah absolutely. It’s growing year by year. This is the first year we’ve had some patchy weather but people have still turned out and people are still dry under the flyover…it just really works.

MOBO: And this year’s theme is black femininity. Where has that come from?

Soweto: It’s come from some of the artists whom I’ve really wanted to programme in previous years that I didn’t have the space for or who weren’t available, like Eska Mtungwazi and Zena Edwards, I think to me they really symbolise a model of success, not necessarily reared or celebrated in the mainstream but to me tremendously ground breaking, and game changing. And then people like Janet Kay and Ms Dynamite you know, who really define Britishness for different generations.

MOBO: Tell us about latest offering ‘War in a rack’. What’s the meaning behind it all?

Soweto: That’s partly to do with those genre classification issues, being like ‘Are you jazz? Are you hip-hop?’ and feeling like I needed to break out of those restrictive terms and make music that I really felt. It’s also an E.P that’s out now. And you know, I’m all for making real art, real hip-hop. If you follow the blog I wrote a couple of years ago… people are like ’you don’t belong in the hip hop department’ and I’m like who are these suited and booted dudes, you don’t rhyme, you don’t freestyle, you don’t make beats, you know, who are they to lecture us and pontificate to an audience what is and what isn’t hip hop. If I shoot someone is that hip-hop?
MOBO: So what’s next for you, what does the future hold for Soweto Kinch?
Soweto: It’s hard to say, I know creatively I want to continue to push the envelope. I don’t imagine that I’ll just stick to one style of music. I have just finished writing a hip-hop theatre piece.

MOBO: So what are your top records of all time?

Soweto: It’s very hard to say. That’s a very tricky one. A lot of it is unreleased you know, like listening to Julie Townsend’s music is really next level, I think once it’s released it’s going to change the face of music. Eska’s stuff is out soon and that is just scary to listen to cause it’s so incredible, like what kind of music can I make after hearing that. Damien Brown… Guilty Simpson’s last album was sick.

MOBO: Of your own work is there anything that you’re most proud of?

Soweto: I would say this event. I would say B19, I was very proud of both parts of it; the second part hasn’t been heard yet.

MOBO: When might we get to hear that?

Soweto: Oh that will be heard in the fullness of time. And my new work as well there’s a couple of songs on my new album, which I’m very exited about. My new album is called ‘The new emancipation’ and there’s one song on there called ‘Trying to be a star’ which I’m really happy about the way it turned out. It’s coming out in September so watch this space.

MOBO: What do you feel have been the highlights of your career so far?

Soweto: Obviously, winning the MOBO for best jazz act. For the second time actually in 2007 that was a high point. It’s great to have your album endorsed and get out to a new audience, and get a little TV exposure.

Written by Matt Hamilton