Award winning saxophonist, MC and broadcaster, Soweto Kinch talks about the magic of Handsworth, discovering jazz in Edinburgh and being an ambitious swot
Photography by Iza Korsak
Musician and broadcaster Soweto Kinch might have been born in London before moving to Birmingham aged nine, but he’s a Brummie through and through. He’s quick to condemn Robert Jenrick’s divisive and factually questionable comments about Handsworth and he’s a beacon of positivity about Birmingham, from its world class cultural institutions to its wonderful people.
Soweto has reached dizzying heights in career terms. He’s won multiple MOBO awards for best jazz act, a Mercury Music Prize, a British Jazz Award, Urban Music Awards and BBC Jazz Awards among others. He’s worked with our very own City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra (CBSO) and the London Symphony Orchestra (LSO) as well as recording with jazz legends such as alto saxophonist Gary Bartz and trumpeter, Nicholas Payton.
He’s a regular on Radio Three with his Round Midnight show featuring jazz from all eras with live sessions and guests as well as platforming undiscovered talent. His Radio Four series, Rethinking Music explores the crisis in music education and what it means for musical life in the UK in the 21st century.
At the end of last year, Soweto performed Soundtracks of the Apocalypse at the Barbican with the LSO which will be released as a studio album in the spring. We suggest, the end of the world doesn’t sound very lightweight… Soweto explains that the meaning of apocalypse is also unveiling and the album has a twin approach – i.e. the world might be on fire but we’re unveiling hope. Of the current darkness in the world, he says: “There’s no doubt the global majority wants less genocide and less starvation, etc.”
CUMBERSOME SAXOPHONE
At a state primary school in London, young Soweto first picked up an instrument. He says the Eighties was a different time with a lot of funding for music in the state sector. Not so now. Once Soweto moved to Handsworth he attended private prep school, West House in Edgbaston where his music flourished followed by Bromsgrove School where there were many opportunities to further explore his musical studies.
Outside formal education, Soweto was immersed in the arts from an early age thanks to his father, Don Kinch who was a playwright and his actress mother. Soweto credits one of Don’s shows at the Edinburgh Fringe with giving him the jazz bug. The show featured Guyanese singer and instrumentalist Frank Holder and jazz dancer Will Gaines, and while Soweto wasn’t sure what it all meant, he couldn’t leave it alone and started seeking out more jazz. Before long he was lugging around a cumbersome saxophone.
The hip hop influence was spawned during the late Eighties and early Nineties and fusing the two felt powerful and exciting. Inspired by the likes of De La Soul, A Tribe Called Quest and The Roots, Soweto embraces both genres saying he needs both the directness and lyricism of hip-hop and the emotional expression of jazz.
RICHLY PRIVILEGED
While Soweto was privileged to attend great private schools, he feels like he was further enriched by his community in Handsworth. He says: “I grew up richly privileged. It was different to my Bromsgrove friends. They didn’t pass the pakora shop on the way home or go to carnival being exposed to African music. I had the best of both worlds.” He also began to question the idea of what society views as high and low brow.
Soweto credits the cultural centre in Handsworth with encouraging creativity. The centre ran a summer playscheme where, among things the kids were allowed to use the recording studio. It provided a place to meet, jam and create. The community was precious to Soweto which is partly why Tory-turned-Reform politician Robert Jenrick’s divisive comments about not seeing another white face and comparing it to a slum hit hard.
He says: “His comments about Handsworth were not properly explored. I’m a BBC presenter. I have a degree from Oxford. I lived across from a senior partner in a London law firm. He (Jenrick) must have walked past the Slovenians and the third generation Irish immigrants. It’s meant to trigger people and cultivate a race war.”
He adds: “For multi-cultural living cheek by jowl we’ve done a good job. At West House I got the Aston Villa bug from a Jewish school friend. We’d see our Asian Punjabi friends on the terraces. The idea that there are no-go areas in my city is ridiculous. These nefarious actors have no interest in reality.” Of the rise in racist anti-immigrant rhetoric generally, Soweto says: “I’m conscious that within my lifetime black people were being chased down the street. The US is terrifying. There seems to be amnesia at work. I thought we’d had these discussions and fought it.”
AMBITIOUS SWOT
When Soweto graduated with a degree in Modern History from Oxford he wasn’t hoping for a career in music. He says: “I was always an ambitious swot. I thought I would walk into a really great job – it was a different time.” Soweto looked into teacher training and applied for a research post at the University of Birmingham but was rebuffed due to lack of experience. He was then asked to perform with Gary Crosby’s Jazz Jamaica group in Singapore. Soweto recalls: “I couldn’t believe they wanted to pay me and I started to conceive music as a career.”
He has been tremendously cynical about the music industry not helped by a two-week stint playing in the Pop Idol big band which Soweto describes as incredible but the manufactured genre is not for him. Gary Crosby’s Tomorrow’s Warriors – a programme of nurturing talent – helped Soweto, giving him space to incubate ideas and work on things and the rest as they say is history.
COOL COLLABS
Soweto has collaborated with many great musicians and we wonder if there are any Brummie artists he’d like to work with. It turns out there’s a list as long as your arm which says a lot about Birmingham’s rich pool of talent. Names like Lady Leshurr, Mist, Sonnyjim, who he has worked with before but would jump at the chance to again, and his ‘very cool’ friend Xhosa Cole among others.
We’ve been interviewing talented Brummies for over 150 issues – that’s a lot of high-profile people. And there are some that stand out like Benjamin Zephaniah, Stewart Lee and Steven Knight and we’d put Soweto up there as someone who sticks with you. An all-round good egg doing great things and flying the flag in the best of ways for Brum.