JAZZ
BY ANDY COWAN
Soweto Kinch
★★★★
White Juju
LSO LIVE. DL/LP
Saxophonist links with London Symphony Orchestra for powerful live treatise on lockdown and its aftermath.
“I feel like crying and exploding,” says Soweto Kinch towards the end of this 2021 Barbican show. As politically acute as The Black Peril’s treatise on historical race riots, White Juju’s electric blend of articulate rap, small-ensemble jazz and orchestral filigree is shot through with soundbites: the murder of Sarah Everard, David Starkey’s views on Black History Month, Boris Johnson blustering “You must stay at home”. Kinch offsets the drama with pensive sax solos and scattered free jazz abstractions alongside pianist Rick Simpson, bassist Nick Jurd and drummer Gregory Hutchinson, intercut by the LSO’s fluttering flutes, weaving brass and sweeping violins. An Oxford history graduate, Kinch’s nimble raps boil with anger as government cronies profit from despair on an unblinking evisceration of recent times.