In a creative decade of genre-vaulting, Soweto Kinch has hitched jazz finesse to some grittily streetwise spoken narratives, starting with his 2006 inner-city saga A Life in the Day of B19. But if the abstract maths themes of his new album, Nonagram, suggest a move from tower blocks to ivory towers, the multi-talented Birmingham saxophonist is too smart and eager a communicator to ditch grooves that set sweaty clubrooms bopping, even if this is his most instrumental repertoire in years.
Major-league artists such as the American saxophonists Steve Coleman and Steve Lehman have explicitly harnessed mathematical concepts in jazz, but Kinch is more direct and urgent than either. With an ingeniously beboppish sax theme early in the show he duets with his effects hardware, and sparks blaring horn-section expansions of his own improv into roaring behind Reuben James’s Herbie Hancockish keys line. He set the audience chanting “what’s it all for?” on a rap about paranoia-inducing newscasts, Stems and Petals deftly shifted between old-school Latin-jazz and straighter swing in its five-and-four rhythm exploration, and a waltzing ballad had teenage Slovakian drummer David Hodek’s divergent hip-hop rattle beneath. The show closed on a freestyle rap – in which the crowd’s shouted nominations from the word “Camden” obliged Kinch to shoehorn “alligator” and “delicious” into a headlong narrative that came impressively close to coherence.
The show may have been a maths lesson, but nobody in the enthusiastically noisy room seemed overawed about it.
• Soweto Kinch is at the Dundee jazz festival on 18 November, and Cambridge international jazz festival on 24 November.
