Shane Forbes – drums, Nick Jurd – double bass, Soweto Kinch – saxophones
“It’s a clever and entertaining juxtaposition of idioms that kicks pure Jazz and authentic rap into a brave new world.” The Guardian
“Mr Kinch demonstrates what England has to teach [the USA] about narrative Hip-Hop. Don’t sleep on Mr Kinch” The New York Times
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. Undoubtedly, one of the few artists in either genre with a degree in Modern History from Oxford University he has amassed an impressive list of accolades and awards on both sides of the Atlantic. In October 2007, he won his second MOBO Award, at the O2 Arena, London where he was announced as the winner in the Best Jazz Act category- fending off stiff competition from the likes of Wynton Marsalis. These very special shows with a striped back trio (TBA but probably bassist Karl Rasheed abel and drummer Shaney Forbes) are in support of his brilliant new album ‘The Legend Of Mike Smith” which draws on Dante and The Seven Deadly sins, telling the tale of a young MC caught in a very modern world of temptation.
THE LEGEND OF MIKE SMITH
Release Date: 18th February 2013
“There's no getting away from it: The Legend of Mike Smith is a triumph” Stephen Graham – London based writer for DownBeat
“His most ambitious and compelling work to date.” Mike Flynn – Jazzwise
The Legend of Mike Smith is a major work by the British saxophonist, rapper writer and composer Soweto Kinch.
The concept of a work based around the Seven Deadly Sins - has been evolving for five years, and will continue to develop in live performance.
The story follows a day in the life of Mike Smith, an aspiring MC who gets call from a talent scout on behalf of ‘Industry Professionals’ who have been tracking his underground progress. He falls asleep and dreams that he is on a battleground with injured soldiers and demons before chancing upon a gold microphone given to him by a group of sages.
Smith is portrayed by a double narrator, a device, coincidentally, also used in Kurt Weill’s Seven Deadly Sins from 1933. Smith’s inner thoughts are narrated by Soweto; the protagonist in the story is his brother Toyin Omari-Kinch, with whom Soweto also worked in The New Emancipation.
The listener follows his trials and tribulations (being overcome by gluttony whilst trying to buy a microphone at a shopping centre for example) before he eventually realises that he will not sell himself as a brand and will instead use his art to free himself and others from corruption and control.
The new double album from Soweto Kinch melds his wide-ranging influences, with elements of jazz and Bach chorales to Hip Hop and freestyling. There’s Klezmer-revival style clarinet from Shabaka Hutchings, who also worked with him on his 2010 release The New Emancipation.
On the stage, Soweto has blended these influences into something combining elements of dance, design music and visual art. Full staging of the piece will be on 12th September 2013, part of Birmingham Rep’s Re-opening
Soweto has been working on the stage show with long-time collaborator Jonzi D (building on a professional relationship stretching back 10 years) as choreographer.
The show also reaches out to the community; providing workshops for schools and other partners, and will feature lessons on vocal techniques, lyric-writing, choreography, jazz and hip-hop improvisation techniques. And Dante.
PRESS COMMENT
“There's no getting away from it: The Legend of Mike Smith is a triumph” Stephen Graham – London based writer for DownBeat
“scalding display of post-Coleman alto-sax improvising, a virtuosic and intelligent exposition of political rap” John Fordham - The Guardian
“..the wealth of young genre-bending talent in the UK and the most impressive of these was the rapper-cum- saxophonist Soweto Kinch” Ivan Hewett - The Telegraph
I guess Soweto Kinch...is the only man who could have given both those concerts generally the odd numbered performances were the jazz and the even ones the hip-hop on the same night to the same audience. And bring both off with such intelligence, such panache and such an effortless sense of it being thoroughly natural to mix these styles in this way. Peter Bacon - The Jazz Breakfast
RECENT: Since his last album The New Emancipation (2010) Soweto Kinch’s career has taken him round the world. A tour of Germany as the headliner for the BritJazz Week in Germany in 2011 was followed by appearances at the Grahamstown Festival in South Africa. The Flyover Festival has been exported to Johannesburg in March 2012, and is due to be produced in Mumbai where he will feature artists from the Dharavi slum. Soweto Kinch has also appeared in festivals in Hamburg, Rochester, Philadelphia...
AWARDS: Two MOBO awards for best jazz act (in 2003 and 2007). His MC skills have also garnered significant support from artists like Mos Def, Rodney P and BBC 1-Xtras Twin B.
OTHER PROJECTS: Kinch wrote two scores in 2010 for two hip-hop theatre productions; Jonzi Ds Markus the Sadist and Sampads In The Further Soil which toured India for a month; his score for Hitchcok’s The Ring has just been well received by a crowd of 6,000 in Kerala in India.
A significant focus over the past 5 years has been The Flyover Show, an annual festival taking place under a motorway flyover in Birmingham.
The Legend of Mike Smith may well stand the test of time as a work which brings to the surface widely-held anger at the injustices of the UK in recession – with humour and humanity.
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