AVAILABLE TO pre-order from last week, ‘White Juju’ is award-winning British saxophonist and rapper Soweto Kinch’s powerful new work for jazz quartet and symphony orchestra, written in response to lockdown, BLM, British history and the culture wars.
Recorded live at the Barbican during last year’s London Jazz Festival, The album, melds Kinch’s distinct approach to jazz and hip hop with classical music—it draws broad inspiration from European folklore, the African Diaspora and divisive national myths to create a uniquely contemporary tone poem.
In many ways, 2020 gave us all the opportunity to see our lives from a fresh perspective. From appreciating the natural world, to reassessing our work life balance and de-cluttering our homes, the nation began an overwhelming cleanse.
A summer of racialised police violence, the murder of Sarah Everard and discussions around ‘essential’ workers meant the nation was beginning to draw causal links between, racism, misogyny, class and environmental degradation.
This reassessment, contrasted starkly with government mismanagement, disinformation and a noisy and disorientating culture war—all provided rich inspiration for Kinch’s work, White Juju.
Towards the end of the first lockdown, Kinch visited Liverpool, Salford, Hull and Cardiff with a small group of musicians and dancers, staging a socially distanced version of The Black Peril as an online festival.
As he walked the streets, then denuded of pedestrians, he was immediately struck by imperial emblems, flags and statues in these British port cities—innumerable mock Elgin marbles, Queen Victoria statues, Union jacks and military monuments that, in the previous bustle of city life, went relatively unnoticed.
“It fascinates me how we’re all acquainted with an unspoken architectural and symbolic language of power” says Kinch.
“How do these monuments or myths affect how we see ourselves as a nation? Naming the piece White Juju deliberately inverted ideas of the ‘savage’ or primitive. Perhaps the bizarre fetishes and obsessions of a cult religion are more visible in modern Britain than third world countries.”
A big facet of Kinch’s music is the presence of humour, and through White Juju he invites listeners to join him in poking fun at these hypocrisies as he confronts awkward truths about a nation, but also to feel the catharsis of being truly freed from a spell.
‘White Juju’, set for release in conjunction with LSO Live on December 3, will be available via all major streaming and download services.
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‘White Juju’ by award-winning British saxophonist and rapper Mr Soweto Kinch’s Album, composed in response to lockdown, BLM, British history and the culture war, is standard background modern “jazz:” that has been rendered unlistenable by the introduction of tuneless current affairs rapping.
Miles Davis thought the classic defining Jazz of his 1950s-era was for museum by the 1970s.
I do not think even English museums would want to preserve this album by Soweto Kinch.
Gil Scott-Heron, one of the fathers of Rap, assembled a fantastic group of jazz musicians, whose musical composition allowed the listeners to feel the hopelessness and injustice of the drug filled U.S. cities of the 1970s.
Gil Scott-Heron’s rapping was a soulful musical instrument, whose words haunted the soul and the mind, but allowed us to dream of a better city.
Can anyone with a human soul fail to hear the soul in Donny Hathaway’s “The Ghetto?”
Donny Hathaway’s “The Ghetto” is a musical experience which can be felt.
Donny Hathaway’s musical composition yearns for justice; the yearning can be felt in one’s soul.
Listening to “white Juju” is all the evidence one needs of the soullessness, pretentiousness African-heritage musicians have descended.
African-heritage jazz musicians have no clothes.
African-heritage musicians have lost their soul.
The best in African-heritage Jazz has been celebrated and honoured; but the best African-heritage musicians have left the stage, and their classic Jazz is to be found in the museums of the world.