Sax star Immanuel Wilkins: ‘Hands are a symbol of praise – but they are also lifted up at police’

Immanuel Wilkins appears on a video call from his flat in Brooklyn, looking intently at the laptop perched on top of his Fender Rhodes keyboard. A column of light bounces off his forehead, and his red circular glasses magnify his eyes ever so slightly, making him look particularly absorbed in conversation.

We’re speaking before the release of The 7th Hand, the follow-up to his Blue Note Records debut (“an alto saxophonist whose playing is at once dazzlingly solid and perfectly lithe”, trilled the New York Times, as the album topped its best jazz of 2020 poll). He’s warm, effusive and a tad nervous. There’s a tantalising moment where he considers playing the Rhodes to explain a point, before getting tongue-tied, reconsidering and starting again. He’s only 24, and yet this new album – which examines spirituality in its artwork and contemporary dance in its videos – is mature and adventurous.

“At the core of Black existence, which is to say jazz music as well, is this idea of the in-between,” he says. “What makes jazz so great – it’s the solo, right? We play the head [the central theme], then we remix, we do our own thing in-between.”

He was born in Philadelphia, moving 20 minutes east to the suburb of Upper Darby for grade school: “I had grass. I had a playset in the backyard. I had the quintessential suburban kid life.” An only child, music was Wilkins’ way of making friends, via school bands and the historic Philadelphia Clef Club of Jazz and Performing Arts. Back home, his parents encouraged his music, perhaps living out their abandoned artistic dreams – he recently stumbled upon Archie Shepp and Benny Golson transcriptions compiled by his dad, who flirted with professional work as a trombonist and flautist.

Wilkins is a member of the Pentecostal Church of God in Christ, and began his musical career as resident pianist in the worship band at his local church. “I realised early on that there was a correlation between the atmosphere in the room and what I played. That was a turning point for me as a composer, player, everything. The idea of being responsible for how people consumed the spirit.”

He moved quickly through his early instruments: “I started on violin when I was three, and yeah, it didn’t really work out. Then I tried piano, and was not good. I tried singing. Yeah …” he says, chuckling. To convince his parents he was serious about the saxophone (and to fork out the money for one of his own), Wilkins returned home from church one Sunday and found he “could already play through one of the hymns [on it], like halfway, just.” They said yes.

Growing up, it was all about saxophonist Kenny Garrett (“third grade, fourth grade, fifth, sixth, seventh …”) and tips passed down from Branford Marsalis, whose band his unofficial “big brother” Justin Faulkner had recently joined on drums. Fellow Philly dweller Marshall Allen, leader and longtime member of the Sun Ra Arkestra, invited Wilkins aged 12 to the famed Arkestra House in Germantown, where the interstellar adventurers have lived since 1968. Wilkins got to sit next to Allen and experience his caustic sound. “Marshall used to tie a red rope around the bell of his saxophone, and I got a red wristband and put it round mine to be just like him.”

Why did he leave, then? “There’s some good Philly colleges, but I just wanted to go to Juilliard, I wanted to be around Wynton [Marsalis]” – the Pulitzer Prize-winning trumpeter and teacher who typifies august, classy jazz. “So I got up and left.” Marsalis pointed him towards Ornette Coleman’s Town Hall, 1962 album (“Emulating [Coleman’s] sound became a big part of what I do”), and the move to New York also brought him closer to forward-thinking pianist Jason Moran, who would later produce his first album. “I first met him at an Aretha Franklin concert when I was a child. Then, whenever he was in Philly, I went to all his gigs. When his drummer heard me in New York he said to Jason, ‘Hey, you know that cat who used to come to all our gigs? He doesn’t sound that bad, you should probably give him a chance.’” It was at Juilliard that Wilkins also met his quartet (Micah Thomas, Daryl Johns and Kweku Sumbry); there’s now an expectant buzz developing around all four of them.

Juilliard’s jazz department shares a floor with the dance and acting divisions, and Wilkins regrets not branching out across disciplines earlier (his mum was a dancer, and still dances in church on occasion). The 7th Hand makes up for lost time, a collective creative statement with roots in Black critical thought. The cover art, featuring Wilkins mid-immersion, remixes established ideas of southern Black baptism, placing women in the traditionally male leadership role. “I guess I’m trying to ask, who is really worthy of being baptised? Or, what is the established imagery around holiness that we see?” Meanwhile, the video Emanation/Don’t Break (featuring Farafina Kan Percussion Ensemble, and directed by Cauleen Smith, above) searches for the connections between Black dance styles – footwork, line-dancing and double-dutch – weaving yet more rich symbolism into Wilkins’ creation.

The album’s title comes from the Book of Ezekiel, where God commands Ezekiel to build an altar with the measurements of “six cubits and one handbreadth”.

“Hands are at the centre of spiritual life, they’re so powerful,” says Wilkins. “Those lifted hands in the church are some symbol of praise, right? But those same hands are also lifted up at the police.” His philosophy, and music, is utopian in an America that isn’t: “It’s about imagining a scenario that is so far beyond our reach, but that gets us to a certain truth that meets us farther than we are now.”

The album continues where Omega’s rhapsody on the totality of Black life left off: seven movements that flow into one another and culminate in the 27-minute immersive tapestry of Lift. Collective improvisation gradually subsumes the quartet as the record progresses; the group morphs into vessels through whom divine inspiration can flow freely. The sound is excitingly diverse, flowing quickly from harsh, driving dissonance towards gentler gospel tones, before exploding back into vibrant improvisation.

I ask Wilkins where he stands on the idea of spiritual jazz, a genre now bound up with cosmic psychedelia. “I like the phrase sacred music better,” he says. “Like, John Coltrane had A Love Supreme, and Duke Ellington had Come Sunday. I wonder if maybe this is my sacred music period.” Either way, as band members gradually peel themselves away from the group and embrace Wilkins’ idea of vesselhood with transcendent solos, his music always feels carried by spirit.