Award-winning jazz musician and rapper Soweto Kinch releases new work White Juju
Recorded live at the Barbican during last year’s London Jazz Festival, 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.
The album melds Kinch’s distinct approach to jazz and hip-hop with classical music and draws broad inspiration from European folklore, the African Diaspora and divisive national myths to create a uniquely contemporary tone poem.
After 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.
“It fascinates me how we’re all acquainted with an unspoken architectural and symbolic language of power” said Kinch
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“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.
Following the release of the digital album in December 2022, White Juju will be made available on vinyl on April 14 to coincide with Record Store Day on Saturday, April 15.
Soweto will be performing the album in full at Printworks on March 16.
Picture: Soweto Kinch Picture: Izak Korsak
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