Immanuel Wilkins: A Critics Poll Trifecta

News, From the Magazine, Immanuel Wilkins

By Bill Milkowski I Jul. 27, 2023

“My work is the intersection between spiritual practice and Black aesthetics,” said Wilkins. “The two symbols I draw from are John Coltrane and the Black church.”
(Photo: RI Sutherland-Cohen)

It was clear from the opening track of Immanuel Wilkins’ stunning sophomore outing for Blue Note, The 7th Hand, that listeners were instantly thrust into some unusually deep waters.

The striking album cover alone — a depiction of the Philadelphia-born, Brooklyn-based alto saxophonist, composer, arranger and bandleader being baptized in a lake in what appeared to be a part-Sun Ra/part-Santeria ceremony — suggested as much.

But what was contained inside that enigmatic packaging was indeed special enough to win Wilkins a Critics Poll trifecta: Alto Saxophonist of the Year, Rising Star Group of the Year and Rising Star Composer of the Year.

The album’s opener — a surging “Emanation,” underscored by Kweku Sumbry’s dynamic pulse on the kit, fueled by Darryl John’s insistent walking bass lines and pianist Micah Thomas’ propulsive comping, all highlighted by the leader’s buoyant, Bird-like momentum on alto — sets an exhilarating tone for the album.

But perhaps more captivating is track two, “Don’t Break,” which opens with Wilkins’ gorgeous alto tones woven soulfully into the fabric of a gospel-flavored piece that soon melds with a mesmerizing 12/8 West African drum choir, courtesy of Farafina Kan, indelibly connecting gospel and jazz to Africa through its rhythmic roots.

“Fugitive Ritual, Selah” is an unhurried, hymn-like meditation on sacred Black spaces intended to soothe and elevate, while the darker, more enigmatic “Shadow” is cast in a vein of Wayne Shorter’s hauntingly beautiful “Fall.”

The tender, harmonically shifting “Witness,” featuring Elena Pinderhughes’ soaring flute, is the lyrical high point of the album, while “Lighthouse” again showcases Wilkins in all-out burn mode, unleashing an explosive stream of notes over a percolating undercurrent that culminates in an incredibly dynamic drum solo from Sumbry.

The 7th Hand concludes with a compelling 26-minute free improvisation that explores the spiritual, speaking-in-tongues energy of the Pentecostal church and the sheer catharsis of latter-day John Coltrane, taking listeners on a long and heady ride. As Wilkins told DownBeat in a March 2022 interview: “My work is the intersection between spiritual practice and Black aesthetics. The two symbols I draw from are John Coltrane and the Black church.”

Again, deep waters.

Of course, the signs for Wilkins’ rise were already firmly in place from his previous conceptual outing, Omega (Blue Note), a suite of adventurous originals that spoke directly to the Black experience across seven movements, from the 1918 lynching of Mary Turner in Georgia to the 2014 killing of Michael Brown Jr. by police in Ferguson, Missouri, to a tranquil reflection on influential Black activist and author Weldon Johnson.

And while Wilkins’ debut was named the No. 1 Jazz Album of 2020 by The New York Times, the 26-year-old’s eagerly awaited followup album is a cut above. Referencing free-jazz, Biblical vesselhood and performance art in its seven-track suite, The 7th Hand offers a startling, fully realized statement by a true Rising Star on the scene.

Since moving to New York in 2015 to attend Juilliard, Wilkins has earned a sterling reputation as a versatile sideman working for artists like Jason Moran, Wynton Marsalis, Aaron Parks, Michael Dease, Ben Wolfe, Gretchen Parlato, Orrin Evans, James Francies and Joel Ross, to name a few. Starting out on violin at age 3, he moved to alto saxophone at 8, later earning a spot in his school band.

“When I started playing the saxophone, community came with it,” he told DownBeat. “I was enrolled in the band and then the Clef Club — a great community organization and old musicians’ union house — which gave me access to so many opportunities, like playing with the Sun Ra Arkestra at 12 after Marshall Allen took me under his wing. I didn’t know who they were at the time — I just thought it was some old people I could play with — but it meant that I learned the music on the bandstand.”

In his teens, Wilkins began performing at his local church as well as at Philly jam sessions, which proved to be an invaluable training ground. Initially meeting current bandmate and bassist Daryl Johns at the Jazz House Kids summer camp when they were in their early teens, Wilkins went on to collaborate with pianist Thomas while the pair were attending Juilliard in 2015. Drummer Sumbry first played with Wilkins during a session for vibraphonist Joel Ross.

“The first time we all played together, it felt like this is what we should be doing, and so we kept it together,” said the saxophonist.

Gigging regularly around New York, the band soon built a repertoire of original music that formed the basis of Omega.

“We had been playing as a band for about three years at that point, so we had a lot of work under our belt,” Wilkins said. “We chose the music for Omega from about 20 compositions we had been playing live. And it soon became apparent that the unifying theme of those works was a cross between the sublime and the grotesque.”

Wilkins further explained to DownBeat that his debut album, produced by pianist-composer Jason Moran (an early supporter who took the young saxophonist on his “In My Mind: Monk at Town Hall, 1959” tour in 2017), was an expression of the nuanced and often contradictory foundations of the Black American experience.

“I was confronting painful moments in our history to mine these ruins and see what comes out in those situations,” Wilkins said. “The juxtaposition between that and the sublime gives you the intricacy of life that is so valuable to Black people — it’s what sustains us. It’s how we’re able to spin the trauma and create hilarious material on Twitter; it’s a specific complexity that is like salted caramel — things that shouldn’t necessarily be together. I’m fascinated with that and how to create it in an aural sense.”

Currently a faculty member at The New School in New York teaching the Blue Note Ensemble, Wilkins appears poised for even more fascinating things to come. He’ll certainly continue to follow his perpetually evolving vision of developing emotionally charged original music that speaks directly to the Black American experience in the 20th and 21st centuries. Though, winning a DownBeat Critics Poll trifecta might prove to be a hard act to follow. DB