Immanuel Wilkins
PROJECTS:
QUARTET
Award winning alto saxophonist and composer Immanuel Wilkins burst onto the musical scene in 2020 with the release of his critically acclaimed Blue Note recording debut, Omega. October 2024 saw the release of Wilkins’ third album on the legendary Blue Note label with Blues Blood.
Accolades, awards, and critical acclaim have followed with each of Wilkins’ album releases. In 2020, Omega was named the best new jazz release by The New York Times, the best debut jazz album by NPR, and was nominated for an NAACP Image Award for Best Jazz recording. The year ended on an even higher note, with Wilkins winning the prestigious Letter One Rising Stars Award. Two years later, Wilkins released his sophomore album on Blue Note, The 7th Hand. Like his debut release, The 7th Hand topped numerous year-end lists including Jazzwise, NPR, The New York Times, The Financial Times, and JazzTimes. In 2023, Wilkins was awarded with three DownBeat Critics Poll Awards: Best Alto Saxophonist, Best Rising Star Composer, and Best Rising Star Group. In 2024, his quartet won the prize for best international live act of the year by the German Deutscher Jazz Preis.
Wilkins and his quartet have toured extensively and graced some of the most esteemed stages in the world. Notable performances include the Montreal Jazz Festival, Monterey Jazz Festival, Umbria Jazz, North Sea Jazz, Pori Jazz, and the Newport Jazz Festival, plus the Kennedy Center, the Library of Congress, SFJAZZ, and Elbphilharmonie.
Being a bandleader with a working group has allowed Wilkins to grow both as a composer and as an arranger and has led to him receiving numerous commissions and grants including: The National Jazz Museum in Harlem Commission (2020), The Jazz Gallery Artist Residency Commission (in collaboration with Sidra Bell Dance NY, 2020), The Kimmel Center Artist in Residence Commission Program (in collaboration with photographer Rog Walker and videographer David Dempewolf, 2020), The Roulette Emerging Artist Commission Program (2021), The South Arts Creativity Residency Grant (with fellow saxophonist and mentor, Odean Pope, 2022), and the Pew Center for Arts & Heritage Grant (in collaboration with saxophonist Odean Pope and poet Herman Beavers, 2023). Wilkins constantly seeks out opportunities for creative connections with artists both within and outside the world of Jazz. The realm of visual arts is of particular interest to Wilkins. He has worked with the filmmakers Cauleen Smith and Ja’Tovia Gary, the sculptrice Kennedy Yanko, the painter Leslie Hewitt, and the interdisciplinary artist Theaster Gates. These collaborations have played a decisive role in his ever-expanding aesthetic vision.
In addition to touring as a leader, Wilkins continues to record and share the bandstand with both his peers and his longtime mentors including: Jason Moran, Kenny Barron, Wynton Marsalis, Bob Dylan, Solange, Joel Ross, Gerald Clayton, and Lalah Hathaway to name just a handful.
Wilkins’ interest and passion for sharing and preserving jazz musical traditions has led him to continue to give back to his community and to present clinics and masterclasses at various educational institutions including: The Philadelphia Clef Club of Jazz and Performing Arts, Yale University, The Consevatorium van Amsterdam, Basel Jazz Schule, The Faculty of Music in Belgrade, The Royal Conservatory of Antwerp, and Oberlin to name just a few. He also teaches regularly at NYU and the School of Jazz at the New School in New York City.
BLUES BLOOD
A multimedia performance about the legacies of our ancestors and the bloodlines connecting us, Blues Blood marks the first time Wilkins has included vocalists on an album, with each of the distinctive voices tapping into different aspects of heritage.
The album title culls inspiration from a quote by Daniel Hamm, a member of the Harlem Six, a group of young boys who were falsely accused of murder in 1964 and severely beaten by prison guards while awaiting trial: “I had to, like, open the bruise up and let some of the blues [bruise] blood come out to show them,” he said this while attempting to seek medical attention for his wounds. The police refused to address Hamm's injuries because, although they had beaten him themselves, he had no visible blood running across his skin.
Within Hamm’s quote, the mistaken placement of the word “blues” in place of “bruise” when read aloud or silently, lends subtly to a new interpretation of the sentence. “The blues as a feeling has served as a symbol of pleasure in pain for Black folk dating back to work on the plantation,” Wilkins says. “There is a dichotomy of Black people singing songs about how bad their conditions were, yet the blues is something that feels so good.
“Blood is often a symbol of things ancestral and generational,” he continues. “The history and preparation of most foods across the African Diaspora have been passed down through oral tradition. Mothers teach their children recipes that they learned from their mother, and their mother’s mother, so on and so forth, generating a sensorial and ancestral memory through taste and smell.” Meals are cooked onstage during the live performance of Blues Blood. The pan and table are set up with mics, allowing the composition to fill up with the sounds of knives chopping, water boiling, and oil frying in a pan.
Blues Blood concerts feature Wilkins’ quartet plus guest vocalists and chef onstage.
PRESS:
“Immanuel Wilkins’s stunning fluency on the alto saxophone was clear from his first solo on his 2020 debut, ‘Omega.’ But his second record — ‘The 7th Hand,’ a sweeping, thematically weighty set informed by biblical symbolism — showed that this rising jazz star was aiming at something higher than mere proficiency. That’s clearer than ever on ‘Blues Blood,’ where Wilkins makes ample space for vocalists and reflects on memory, ancestry and the rich history of the blues as an expression of, in Wilkins’s words, 'pleasure in pain' for generations of Black people.”
The New York Times
“‘Blues Blood’ brims with fresh harmonic ideas, but also an emotional potency that resonates long afterwards”
MOJO ★★★★
“If Miles Davis had been a generation older and still a talent-spotting genius, he would very likely have hired Immanuel Wilkins before the Pennsylvanian alto saxophonist had even recorded his acclaimed Blue Note debut”
Jazzwise ★★★★
“Immanuel Wilkins’s transcendent third album, ‘Blues Blood,’ will be counted in the lineage of great long-form suites in the history of jazz music”
BOMB
