Saxophonist Soweto Kinch has more on his mind than being a cross-over star. It's about finding his own groove, he tells Jim Carroll
Sometime this year, the inevitable will happen - "Jazz Idol" will hit our TV screens. After all, if pop and opera can do it, surely jazzers shouldn't be discriminated against any longer? You could have a new Norah Jones every week, all pouting and preening and punching her piano with barely-contained gusto. There would be room on the show too for the super-slick Jamie Callum clones that record companies are currently developing, giving jazz frills to Radiohead and Coldplay tunes to get audiences oohing and aahing. And, to give the show a bit of an edge, you could have a few good ol' boys aping Wynton Marsalis and doing a few trad jazz Jelly Rolls.
You wouldn't, of course, get Soweto Kinch within an ass's roar of such a show. For a start, he doesn't really need any more escalator-rides to the top of the queue. In the last year, the most hotly tipped British jazz star in aeons has released a magnificent début album, Conversations with the Unseen, carried off a couple of high-profile awards and received the token jazz nomination at last year's Mercury Music Awards. Blending jazz and hip-hop in a manner which is natural, challenging and uncompromising, Kinch is good news for any jazz watchers wondering where the next leap forward will come from.
Irony of ironies, though, the 25-year-old Birmingham-based saxophonist has already had experience of the Pop Idol game. Lobbed in the back-pages of his CV, which includes reading modern history at Oxford University and playing with the Jazz Jamaica All-Stars, Gary Crosby's Nu Troop and Tomorrow's Warriors, you'll find a reference to a spell with The Big Blue. "That was my exposure to the dumbing-down of music," says Kinch of his time with one of the backing bands on the Pop Idol TV show.
"It was a great learning experience because of the other jazz musicians in the band. They were really skilful but it was bemusing to be backing people who obviously didn't have the same knowledge or experience. It was also strange to have that amount of comfort lavished on you but at a price. Most of the musicians in the band were back to doing 50-quid-a-night pub gigs in their own names and that might have been musically rewarding but the Big Blue gig was where the money was."
While the music and marketing of both Jones and Callum are aimed squarely at the mainstream, there's little doubt that Kinch has the potential to take it further, but he won't be doing this to the detriment of his music.
"Sure, I want to activate the cerebral but I also want to entertain and make sure people who come to see a show leave feeling satisfied and uplifted and spiritually edified. In terms of some of the more mainstream tendencies, I am cautious. A lot of this seems to involve dumbing down the musical complexity and it's quite patronising to the audience, yet it seems to work in a lot of instances.
"But I'm eager to keep the same level of musical and intellectual complexity to what I'm doing and still make it entertaining. Louis Armstrong and Miles Davis could always put their music across in a straightforward way without any tomfoolery or buffoonery."
Kinch believes the profusion of bland music is more to do with "small cliques of people within the music industry looking for fads or artists to control and manipulate" than demand from an audience. "These people are not interested in artists with a modicum of independence who set out to change things and change genres and be quite troublesome by turning out albums which are completely different to the ones they did before. Many in the industry are more interested in a predictable, formulaic approach to mass-produced music. The choice is either the real deal or a watered-down, unchallenging version of funk or soul or disco."
No such charges can be levelled at Conversations with the Unseen. While there have been attempts made before to blend jazz and hip-hop (including Us3 and Guru's Jazzmatazz), Kinch's début raises the bar to new levels. Raw, vibrant and precocious, there's a freshness and a sophistication to how the jazz elements and Kinch's lyrical raps are mixed.
"I wanted to avoid the tripe you get with a lot of records which mix genres." I was quite adamant from the start that both the jazz and hip-hop sounds on the record were unconventional and overall, that the album sounded like one band playing one style of music if you like, even though we are touching on different styles.
"I don't think hip-hop and jazz are mutually exclusive. Even when something is natural, you still want to make sure it achieves the desired effect. Even if you don't envisage making artistic compromises, you still want to make sure it's appealing to you."
Both jazz and hip-hop were equal parts of Kinch's musical education. Mentored by Courtney Pine and Gary Crosby from a young age, he appreciates the likes of "KRS One for his lyrical prowess and De La Soul and A Tribe Called Quest for their appropriation of jazz" and has worked with a host of underground MCs and crews in Britain.
He views hip-hop as seriously as he does jazz. "It's now a musical medium not some fly-by-night teenage fad but it has become a little predictable and staid, so it is time to push forward its improvisational boundaries."
Kinch's own career has a touch of improvisation to it. Besides the session work and his own album, he has been collaborating on various theatre and film projects, including providing a musical score for Newtown, a theatrical collaboration between artists from Birmingham and Johannesburg written by his playwright father, Don.
More of this kind of thing, he believes, can only be good for him. "Part of the joy and excitement is not knowing where it's leading and just working diligently to put my music out and put my art and creativity out. In terms of longevity, some of the longer-term aims of jazz musicians differ from those in the more mainstream or pop sectors. It's not like you leap up on stage and earn your stripes overnight - there is a craft to be learned, there is an induction, there is an inheritance that one does one's best to study and master before releasing an album.
"What I'm striving for is to reach a position where all my musical influences come out together as one convincing genre rather than as a pastiche or montage of different music. That's my artistic concern. As far as my career goes, it this leads me into more collaborations or recording more albums, I'd relish the opportunity."