Scott Vander Werf: The Blue Note All-Stars are performing at St. Cecilia Music Center in downtown Grand Rapids on Thursday, January 18th at 7.30 p.m. Pianist Gerald Clayton has gathered the ensemble, including saxophonist Immanuel Wilkins, vibraphone player Joel Ross, drummer Kendrick Scott, and bass player Matt Brewer, who's the son of Aquinas College professor Paul Brewer. The group is touring to celebrate the 85th anniversary of the legendary label that brought us albums by Thelonious Monk, Bud Powell, the Horace Silver Quintet, Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers, and so many more great artists. I had an opportunity to talk to Emanuel Wilkins about the tour and his own work on Blue Note, but first here's his composition, “Don't Break.”
I asked Immanuel Wilkins if the group would be performing famous Blue Note tunes of the past or the newer work.
Immanuel Wilkins: I think it's I think it's gonna be a combination. I think we're playing mostly originals and Then maybe a sprinkling of old Blue Note repertoire in there We haven't rehearsed or even really discussed what we're playing yet and Grand Rapids is gonna be the first date So we're very much gonna figure it out when we get there
SVW: Immanuel Wilkins albums for Blue Note include Omega and The Seventh Hand, each contained a suite of music that is both composed and totally improvised. I asked him about the creative process:
IW: Yeah, it was just kind of a suite of music that I had written to challenge my band to maybe think of ourselves as fanels and I wanted to write a piece that maybe prepared us for or gave us a vehicle to freely improvise. And yeah, the way the piece works, the first movement is pretty much all written material, and it kind of tips away and works its way to no written material. The last movement has no written material. And yeah, I like writing in the context of fleets a lot. I like preparing a...maybe hour long kind of experience for people versus song to song sort of things. And so when we play that, we usually play it straight down. We don't really play them as long as we kind of play it as one long hour long kind of thing.
SVW: I asked him if there was a new album on the way.
IM: Yeah, I mean, hopefully soon. We always, I mean, I always have some music in the can. But in the can, I mean, up my sleeves, you know, I think I guess the band…the quartet has been playing together for, I guess, seven years now, six or seven years. And we have a lot more repertoire than we have albums out. So we're always ready to record another record and we're kind of backlogged now. It would be amazing to catch up and get to a point where I'm actually writing music for albums versus usually the music I record, music I wrote maybe four years prior to that.
SVW: It appeared as if Emmanuel Wilkins had suddenly burst onto the jazz scene in 2019 or 2020, but he and his group had been working together for years before the Blue Note debut.
IW: Yeah, for sure. I mean, and I mean, I'm so thankful just to like, a lot of venues in New York and in the surrounding areas that kind of gave us opportunities to play even though we didn't have a record out yet. You know, so when I first started the band, I tried to maybe do a I guess a gig a month. I would try to just try to book one gig a month, even if I lost money on the gigs. Just trying to make sure we really were working a lot and we had rehearsals to, you know, that meant something versus just rehearsing for the sake of rehearsing. So yeah, we did pretty much a gig a month. We tried to get enough buzz around town to the point where having the record was a logical next step. And we recorded the record, our first record in 2019, and then it got released during the pandemic, which actually ended up being a nice thing. Actually, no booking agents would sign me before I had my first record out. So it was nice for that to get some traction before I decided to start booking gigs and book tours.
SVW: Wilkins is part of a rich jazz history of Philadelphia, having grown up just outside the city as a young teenage player. He was mentored by elders Larry McKenna and Dick Oates, among others. John Coltrane, McCoy Tyner, the Heath brothers, Benny Golson, Bootsy Barnes and Lee Morgan are just some of the names associated with the city. This tapestry was important in Wilkins development.
IW: Yeah, I mean, man, Philadelphia is just a super strong music town, not only jazz music, but also the sound of Philadelphia Gamble and Huff, Teddy Pendergrass, there's so many great artists from Philly. And in the jazz realm, I always tell people, I think I got a really kind of old school sort of mentorship way of learning the music and my relationship to the music was through just, I don't know, people like Trudy Pitts, Mickey Roker, Bootsy Barnes. Really just like kind of older legends of the music that you know kind of took me under their wing and Taught me to ropes pretty early I was playing with the Sun Ra orchestra when I was maybe 12 or so before I really even know who they were It was it was really just amazing to have these experiences Just I mean, I wish I could I wish I could relive that now. I wish I could relive those moments But they really like really helped me kind of get indoctrinated in a way that was organic and it wasn't through the, I mean it was also through YouTube videos and stuff but that wasn't my main, you know I don't know, I think about people who live in you know Ohio or you know or Idaho and it's like man how do you even, it's tough to even find, you know, places to play with other people you know let alone play with people who played with Elvin Jones or played with John Coltrane. So I don't know. I think I really was blessed and I'm really thankful for Philadelphia.
SWV: Wilkins has also studied the history of his instrument from the earliest alto sax masters Benny Carter and Johnny Hodges through bebopper Charlie Parker to the avant-garde of Ornette Coleman and Roscoe Mitchell.
IW: Yeah, I think I got a pretty good mix from early on. I always was pretty into the avant-garde scene and also very much into the like traditional scene. Yeah, I really, I don't know, when I moved to New York, I started really studying like a lot of music of the 1920s and 30s, Don Redmond, Bill Chalice, and Fletcher Henderson, and Bix Beiderbecke, and all those folk, Jelly Roll. And so that became kind of an obsession of mine for a couple of years, really trying to get that down and get that vocabulary into my playing. Yeah, I don't know. I've tried to maybe synthesize as many different influences as I can into the music. And yeah, just, I don't know. I feel like as a young person playing jazz music, it's incumbent upon us to really carry maybe 100 plus years of music on our backs. And so as much justice as I can do to the...the lineage of great players, you know, I'll try my best to do that, you know.
SVW: Immanuel Wilkins, the alto player will perform as part of the Blue Note All Stars, including pianist Gerald Clayton, vibraphone player Joel Ross, drummer Kendrick Scott, and bassist Matt Brewer at St. Cecilia Music Center, Thursday, January 18th at 7:30 PM. Here's Fugitive Ritual Selah from Immanuel Wilkins.
I'm Scott Vander Werf, WGVU.
