Stirrer TV

THE LUTZ REPORT....ON SOWETO KINCH

22-03-2010

Musician Soweto Kinch talks to Richard Lutz about growing up in Handsworth, sticking to his jazz and hiphop roots and why he won’t leave Birmingham.

First of all, let’s get one thing out the way. That name: Soweto. Is that really it? Or a stage name?

No, says Kinch. He was born two years after the 1976 township riots and the smoldering hell of those times seared themselves into his family’s collective mind.

‘My mother had a vision in a dream and a voice told her to give me that name.’

‘And I’m proud of it (the name).’ he says.

Kinch is talking as we sit in his tower block flat in B18, almost overlooking the Hockley Flyover- a stretch of road under which he is about to hold his third open air free concert this spring.

He comes straight out of Handswortth and his parents worked hard to send him to the fee paying Bromsgrove School. It created decision-making in his early years.

‘I went to an independent school and lived in Handsworth which is predominantly Afro Caribbean. And sometimes I’d be embarrassed listening to hiphop with certain friends and other times I would be embarrassed whether it was cool loving books and big words. And all this all depended on which social context I was in.’

He says now, as an adult, he appreciates the mix and realises what an asset it was to have his feet implanted in two camps- though it had its moments.

‘I went to school on a Saturday with a briefcase and school uniform and that wasn’t exactly in vogue in terms of urban streetwear at the time. And I’d be coming back to the city centre when most of my friends from Handsworth were just chillin’ and trying to chat to girls and I’m carrying this briefcase and wearing this stuffy middle class outfit like some mini type of commuter.’

This gave him a resilience, he says, because they were jarring moments in his life and it made him assess who he was and what he wanted.

He did well at Bromsgrove and ended up with a modern history degree from Oxford.

Then came decision time. What to do after the degree? He’d already been mightily influenced after meeting up with American musician Wynton Marsalis and there was guidance from Courtney Pine too to help him stick with the world of music rather than a professional career in journalism

‘The penny dropped when I realised I could still use my rational faculties and create work with my saxophone and my lyrics and I started organising and putting on shows in Birmingham.’

But it wasn’t rarified stuff. Hiphop was always thrumming and threading through his life along with jazz. He combined the two. He sees no confusion in this, no great contradiction.

‘I never want to feel that I’m turning my cap backwards and making my jeans sag to identify with the youth. It has to come from a position of integrity.’

‘I love hiphop and there are people who enjoy the lineage of jazz and I want to find a way of combining the two languages.’

His opus so far has been A Life in the Day of B19: Tales of the Tower Block - just a postal code away from his own home- which tells the story of three guys in Handsworth. It’s a project that uses jazz, rap, video and poetry to summon up his own personal urban territory. Looking out his window, you see the landscape he writes about and plays to.

Kinch remains a student of his craft. Names, names of giants such as Miles Davis, John Coltrane and Johnny Hodges, pepper his chat over a cup of tea. Outside in the late winter’s day, light suffuses the jumbled neighbourhood of houses, the small cul de sacs and the regiment of tower blocks in this part of Birmingham.

He won’t leave this city. ‘I’ve grown up in the musical scene here. I don’t feel the need to pack up and sell my wares in London.’

He points to Birmingham’s black British musical history: Steel Pulse in the 1980s and Andy Hamilton since the 1950s. ‘There is this lineage here that you can tap into to make a relevant statement now, here, in 2010.’

‘This place nourishes me.’

+The Third Hockley Flyover Show takes place on May 29th, 2010.

Watch the interview here.

See more of Soweto Kinch on his site here

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