Soweto Kinch

Born in London in 1978 and long associated with Birmingham, Soweto Kinch has developed a musical language at the crossroads of British jazz and hip‑hop, blending alto or tenor saxophone, rap and narrative writing. Trained from a young age—via the Tomorrow’s Warriors programme and Gary Crosby’s Jazz Jamaica All Stars collective—Kinch established himself in the early 2000s with the Soweto Kinch Trio alongside Michael Olatuja and Troy Miller, performing on stages such as Ronnie Scott’s, the Royal Festival Hall and the Cheltenham Jazz Festival. His music combines improvisation, groove, spoken word and social observation, with a marked taste for conceptual formats. This approach runs through albums and projects including Conversations with the Unseen (2003), A Life in the Day of B19: Tales of the Tower Block (2006), War in a Rack (2009), The New Emancipation (2010), The Legend of Mike Smith (2013), Nonagram (2016) and The Black Peril (2019). Alongside his concerts, Soweto Kinch has also worked as a broadcaster, presenting Jazz Now on BBC Radio 3 and, from 2024, ’Round Midnight. Straddling contemporary jazz, Black British heritage and forms derived from rap, he has built a distinctive career on the British scene for more than twenty years.