Unseen Talent
More hip-hop people should be unashamed of their education.” Soweto Kinch, as an Oxford graduate, is an unusual hip-hop idol, but the peculiarities do not stop there by any means. Rather than focusing on one particular genre, Soweto has found himself fusing “what I like, really”, leading to an album crossing breakbeat, hip-hop, and, primarily, jazz.
He explains that often jazz musicians cross over across genres in order to try and reach a younger audience, but often end up embarrassing themselves. Rather, he just plays what he likes. While his previous album, Conversations with the Unseen, was billed as hiphop for a jazz audience, and his upcoming, A Day In The Life Of B19 - Tales of the Tower Block is being sold as jazz for a hip-hop audience, Soweto rejects the strict genre boundaries.
“It’s not as if I’ve come to this album saying it’s going to be 40% hip-hop and 60% jazz, I just do what comes naturally.” Tales of the Tower Block resolves the issue of these different styles of music inventively. Having created a collection of tunes, some of which are free jazz, others being battle raps and grimy hip-hop, Soweto created a storyline about where he finds himself musically at the moment.
There are three characters: a teenage rapper who is just getting going, a thirty year-old who is just returned from America finding himself crippled by child support payments, and a twentysomething in a council flat who is signing on, and spending the rest of his time practising and trying to get established on Birmingham’s jazz scene.
Creating an autobiographical jazz album sounds pretentious, but it has worked out to create some powerful soundscapes, which come into their own in a live context. And many of us are going to find the impact of the soundscapes in a few weeks’ time, when Soweto brings his quartet to Oriel Ball. Having played Magdalen as well a few years ago, it turns out that he has always enjoyed the Oxford balls, whether as a punter or as a performer.
“While people might be in some sort of inebriated state, they might not pick up all the nuances. But people pick up the overall feeling and message of the music, and we all have fun with it.” This highlights one of the differences between Soweto’s quartet live and on record — while the energy is there all the time, the sound live varies a lot depending on the mood of the evening, with no two performances being the same.
This is something that no press release can get across, with the live performance depending more on atmosphere and feel than the notes played. This is something highlighted by Soweto’s involvement in the Pop Idol backing band in its first series. “I’d been out of uni for a year and a half, hadn’t taken any definite jazz direction, and, having not done any pop sessions before, decided to go for it.
Soweto found himself as an ornamental backdrop rather than doing anything creative, and while it was not that much more work than anything else he had done, he found himself more tired than ever before. However, he is not dismissive of pop, thinking that there is a lot of great pop music that is actually demanding, adding to his ideas of breaking down genre boundaries. All he writes off is “people singing along to the words everyone already knows”.
Hopes are high that the new album will be able to break down these genre boundaries further.
1st Jun 2006