Saxophonist Immanuel Wilkins: “The 7th Hand” – culture

Every now and then you come across an album that you immediately know will stay with you for a long time. “The 7th Hand” (Blue Note) by alto saxophonist Immanuel Wilkins is one of them. His debut “Omega” landed in 2020 (also in this newspaper) on most annual leaderboards. With the successor he is now making another amazing step forward. It is not so easy to explain why this is so. His label boss Don Was is a bass player himself and said in one of the video chats he likes to have with his artists about new records that he tried to play along with the album. But he was lost there.

Now Don Was doesn’t usually have a problem with self-confidence. Before he took over the jazz label Blue Note, he wrote a lot of music history. For example, he has a good part of the late work of Rolling Stones produced and then always played the bass himself. He’s done that on records by Bob Dylan, Bob Seger, and Kris Kristofferson, and Bonnie Raitt, whom he’s made big. As a producer, do you have to dare to make it clear to the legends that you will lay the foundation yourself. Of course, true greatness also includes admitting your own limitations. So Don Was said he had no idea how Immanuel Wilkins’ music worked. Although it doesn’t throw you off course as a listener. It definitely swings, even if the quartet plays with rhythm and harmony structures that sound good but are difficult to understand.

Video for “Emanation/Don’t Break”:

These are by no means intellectual finger exercises. Anyway, Wilkins explained it to him from the spiritual side. The number seven in the title, he said, refers to all those religious texts that associate the number six with human perfection and the number seven with the intervention of the divine. But precisely this intervention is a dimension of the music, which always begins when the performers get into a state of ecstasy from the here and now and afterwards often no longer know themselves what they were playing. Wilkins calls this “vessel-hood”. With this he paraphrases the idea that as a musician he is only the vessel for the input of a higher power. You don’t have to look at it religiously. In worldly terms, that would be the spark of inspiration. Of all forms of music, jazz, blues and gospel achieve this state best. Wilkins continues the tradition that John Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders began to bring the intellectual complexity of modern jazz into new forms in spiritual liberation.

Or you can delve deep into cultural history. As Wilkins put it elsewhere: “When I think of vascularity, I think of African practices of spirit possession. You see that in most spiritual practices of the African diaspora. Among the Yoruba, the drums are used to invoke a deity , and the dancer then becomes possessed by that deity. But that’s kind of universal, in all African practices – even in the Black Church, where you capture the Holy Spirit – and it’s directly related to the spiritual power that the drum contains carries, and how she can channel that power.”

jazz album "The 7th hand": Immanuel Wilkins: The 7th Hand.  Blue Note, 2021

Immanuel Wilkins: The 7th Hand. Blue Note, 2021

Wilkins himself grew up as a person and a musician in the church. And that, he explains, has always been a free and safe space for Afro-Americans. For example, one of the pieces is called “Selah”https://www.sueddeutsche.de/kultur/.”I’ve been thinking about the idea of ​​escape and how the black church serves as a place for people to escape the gaze and their And how that leads to some really amazing spiritual revelations. Speaking in tongues. All these things that are indescribable. And also hilarious things like people acting all out in church. This is a place that evades control. That’s where the word Selah comes in. It means ‘Pause’https://www.sueddeutsche.de/kultur/.”

Immanuel Wilkins is 24 years old. If there is such a thing as the old souls, then he embodies that image at his best. In March he will be on tour with his quartet.

8.3. Vienna, 9.3. Munich, 10.3. singing, 11.3. Basel.

.
source site