Guardian Live review
Monday 9 July 2007
Jazz
Soweto Kinch
Mean Fiddler, London
**** (four stars)
It does your heart good to hear sax player Soweto Kinch at full tilt, playing a blinding solo in a sweaty club. It's not an easy crowd, with lots of chatter audible during the quiet bits, but this prompts Kinch to be even more adventurous, turning the simplest riff into tumbling improvisations that are rhythmically and harmonically challenging. Kinch is delivering genuine hardcore jazz to a diverse bunch of people who have also come to see Gilad Atzmon, live poetry and Jerry Dammers (doing a reggae- and Specials-heavy DJ set) for the second ‘Cultures Of Resistance’ gig.
Julian Joseph once noted (to Ian Carr) that to succeed as a British jazz musician, you had to do more than one thing, and Kinch is no exception. But where Joseph doubles as a classical pianist (and Carr is a writer), Kinch is also an accomplished MC, a right-on rapper, adept with intelligent, multi-layered narratives and off-the-cuff rhyming. Kinch's Dune album A Life In The Day Of B19: Tales Of The Tower Block, profiles three fictional characters living within the composer's Birmingham postcode. Kinch dedicates this live version to ‘the postmen, the milkmen, the primary school teachers, the unspoken people who make a difference,’ to loud applause.
It’s great to note how the band has developed: the backline of bassist Neil Charles and drummer Troy Miller moves effortlessly from broken-beat to double-time jazz. Femi Temowo adds a rich new library of sounds and effects to his guitar parts, while Adrian's Ballad demonstrates Kinch’s maturing saxophone tone. They can rock out, too, in a manner that’s closer to Led Zep than jazz-funk.
There's plenty of participation, including the exuberant ‘So!’, which confronts commercial hip-hop, and Kinch closes by freestyling in response to digital snaps from the audience, sent to his laptop via Bluetooth.
John L. Walters
Live review published in the Guardian, 12 July 2007.