Saxophonist and composer Immanuel Wilkins has been in demand since his beautiful 2020 debut album “Omega.”
There’s no official award for taking part in probably the most units throughout a single Monterey Jazz Competition season, however Immanuel Wilkins made a formidable bid for high honors final September.
Ever because the 24-year-old alto saxophonist launched his 2020 Blue Word album “Omega,” which was extensively hailed because the 12 months’s most spectacular debut, he’s damaged by means of the pandemic doldrums with one in every of jazz’s most enjoyable younger bands and an ancestor-summoning e book of authentic tunes.
His title appears to be popping up in all places nowadays, and even with two levels as an alternative of the same old 5 for Monterey’s COVID-abbreviated 2021 program Wilkins could have surpassed trumpeter Terence Blanchard’s earlier record-setting mark for pageant ubiquity.
Along with the three units Wilkins performed together with his spectacular quartet on the aspect stage within the meals court docket he was a gentle presence in the principle enviornment, becoming a member of keyboardist Gerald Clayton for a program of lean and spacious funk/fusion and showing as a visitor soloist with the hard-swinging Clayton-conducted Subsequent Era Jazz Orchestra. Most memorably, he served as a lyrical foil for the ebulliently charismatic Nashville keyboardist and vocalist Kandace Springs.
“That weekend was fairly ridiculous, I used to be actually working from stage to stage,” mentioned Wilkins, who performs Feb. 18 at SFJAZZ’s Joe Henderson Lab, Feb. 20 at Bach Dancing & Dynamite Society, and Feb. 21 at Kuumbwa Jazz Middle.
He returns to California together with his prodigious working quartet, the identical band featured on “Omega” and his spiritually charged comply with up, “The seventh Hand,” which was launched by Blue Word final month. Whereas Wilkins doesn’t describe the brand new challenge as a set, the seven items generate unusual narrative power, encompassing delivery, struggling, pleasure, and transcendence.
The equally buzz-inducing Berkeley flutist Elena Pinderhughes, who performs at SFJAZZ Miner Auditorium in drummer Terri Lyne Carrington’s New Requirements band whereas Wilkins performs within the Joe Henderson Lab, contributes on two “seventh Hand” tracks. She helps set the scene for the cathartic 26-minute conclusion, “Elevate,” a bit created spontaneously by the group based mostly on the earlier six actions.
“I like to consider it as a track cycle or a ready set, a ritual that we undergo,” Wilkins mentioned. “We positively comply with the sequence. It offers with cells or motifs like a set, however this report is actually an in-depth have a look at a efficiency by the band as we attain to change into a vessel. It’s much less concerning the viewers per se, and extra about working this factor out.”
Wilkins grew up in in Higher Darby, Pennsylvania, simply exterior of Philadelphia. It’s not a shock that John Coltrane, who received his begin on the Philly scene within the mid-Nineteen Forties and remained carefully tied to the town for the remainder of his life, resonated deeply for the younger altoist.
“You go to jams classes and listen to ‘Decision,’” he mentioned, referring to the second motion of Coltrane’s religious masterwork “A Love Supreme.” “There was a way of making an attempt to succeed in for the next factor within the music, and a common consensus on the bandstand that you simply didn’t cease till you transcended one thing.”
In 2015 he moved to New York Metropolis to review at Juilliard and related with pianist and MacArthur Fellow Jason Moran, who ended up producing Wilkins’ first album (Moran performs at SFJAZZ Sunday with Terri Lyne Carrington in an all-star quartet celebrating the late piano nice Geri Allen).
Wilkins’ quartet is constructed on deep relationships, beginning with bassist Daryl Johns, who was a teenage prodigy after they began enjoying collectively as a part of Christian McBride’s Jazz Home Youngsters program. Drummer and percussionist Kweku Sumbry, whose immersion in West African drum ensembles straight informs a number of “seventh Hand” tracks, lived with Wilkins in Harlem for 3 years. And pianist Micah Thomas is a Juilliard comrade, “a kind of transformative gamers who can take any materials and play it like he wrote it,” Wilkins mentioned.
At Monterey, Thomas was virtually as busy as Wilkins, anchoring three units led by the sensible Bahamian trumpeter Giveton Gelin (one other group that Wilkins sat in with). An adventurous composer himself, he’s drawn to the emotional energy of Wilkins’ music.
“I actually liked his writing,” Thomas mentioned. “It makes individuals need to work with him. We type of grew up musically collectively by way of enjoying. Whenever you begin you need to sound just like the bands you want, and within the quartet it seems like we’re taking that and creating one thing from the bottom up.”
Rooted in exceedingly fertile soil, Wilkins and his band conjure music that reaches heavenward, sweeping listeners up within the enveloping maelstrom.
Contact Andrew Gilbert at jazzscribe@aol.com.
IMMANUEL WILKINS
When & the place: 7 and eight:30 p.m. Feb. 18 at SFJAZZ Middle; San Francisco; $25; www.sfjazz.org; 4:30 p.m. Feb. 20 at Bach Dancing & Dynamite Society, Half Moon Bay; $35-$45 ($10 livestream); bachddsoc.org/calendar; 7 p.m. Feb. 21 at Kuumbwa Jazz Middle, Santa Cruz;
$36.75-$42; www.kuumbwajazz.org