I have a love & hate relationship with this man, since on one hand, he has the best jazz/hiphop work among my recent selection of music and on the other hand, i hate him because he’s only a year older than me. (Yes i’m not English, i don’t possess Jamaican heritage and i probably can’t even blow spit through a saxophone but that doesn’t mean it’s ok for someone my age to become more succesful than me!)

Although he’s far out on the jazzy side, listing him only as a jazz musician does him great injustice since he’s fighting an on going battle to be acknowledged by the music-monopoly as a hip-hop artist. In his interview with britishhiphop.co.uk, he says:

“Fusing together the two genres of music is not that difficult at all. The Last Poets, Gil Scott Heron, Charles Mingus, A Tribe Called Quest, Pete Rock, DJ Premier all did it before me. What’s harder at the minute is marketing it – the industry has a fixed notion of what a hip hop act / urban act is supposed to act like. And an instrument playing thought provoking dude doesn’t fit the stereotype.”

It seems he indeed has postponed the second half of his recent double album “A Life In The Day Of B19 - Tales Of The Tower Block” until the War in a Rack (his campaign to be distributed in the hiphop section of music-marts) bears some fruits.

Like his powerful debut, “Conversations with the Unseen” but heavier on the jazz&hop merger side, Kinch keeps his jazz and his hop separate on some tracks and in some merges the two. I’m especially interested in these little merger experiments and i’ll definitely be expecting more in the upcoming sequel. The album also features narration from Moira Stuart, a British journalist who was the first Afro-Caribbean female newsreader on British tv.

Of course, he has a big rack of awards but I don’t believe as some critics suggest that Soweto’s style does jazz good by “upgrading” it with hiphop and that he has a new and exciting interpretation. I believe he just does what is already supposed to be done in a matter of perspective and i see his direction exciting ‘though not new, he’s just re-proving a good point (in a beautiful manner of music production) and the point is jazz has a pulse independent of the same 4 corners which columnists, marketing experts and record conglomos are trying to pull and sometimes it only takes just to reach out and feel its pulse beyond the corners like Soweto does, since music, like anything in life, isn’t just black or white.

And oh, i’d definitely like to see him playing live.

Soweto Kinch - Elision
Soweto Kinch - Expansion
Soweto Kinch - Ridez
Soweto Kinch - Snakehips