The alto saxophonist and composer Immanuel Wilkins has long insisted on a radically expansive framework for his art. He’s a musician fully conversant in the modern jazz language, but that conveys neither the scope of his interests nor the depth of his inquiry. One thing that does begin to capture those elements is Blues Blood, a performance piece he has developed over the last several years, with a handful of collaborators.
Last year, he released an album version on Blue Note, to considerable critical acclaim. But Blues Blood is ideally experienced in performance, as an interdisciplinary project. Its title is borrowed from a quote by Daniel Hamm, who as a member of the Harlem Six was falsely accused of murder in 1964, and subject to imprisonment and abuse. That backstory quietly informs a meditation on bloodline, ancestral memory, and the mythic resilience of Black culture, notably through the tradition of the blues.
Wilkins, 27, will present a special edition of Blues Blood this Wednesday evening at the Penn Museum’s Harrison Auditorium. Joining his ensemble in performance is the venerable poet Sonia Sanchez; joining him in conversation after the concert is the scholar and author Imani Perry.
This free presentation — part of CAMRA at the University of Pennsylvania’s Screening Scholarship Media Festival (SSMF) — was organized by Farrah Rahaman, the Director of CAMRA (Collective for Advancing Multimodal Research Arts) and a PhD candidate at the Annenberg School of Communication. Rahaman, an interdisciplinary artist and scholar originally from Trinidad, answered a handful of questions about the concert over email.
Immanuel Wilkins is someone we’ve been tracking closely since he was coming up through the pipeline here in Philadelphia. When did you gravitate to his music, and how does it resonate with your academic focus?
Immanuel and I met a few years ago when he was in town for the BlackStar Film Festival. He scored Ja’Tovia Gary’s film Quiet as It's Kept, which was shown in the festival. I had programmed a panel on Saidiya Hartman’s notion of critical fabulation in cinema which Ja’Tovia was part of.
My work is about the place of history and archives in contemporary forms of expression. I’m not a scholar of jazz, but I am thinking critically about sound and form, and the communities of care and practice that give life to this work. In that way we’re both thinkers of scale, of long experiences of time and are invested in our cultural lineages.
At Penn, my work with the Center for Experimental Ethnography and CAMRA, the organization hosting the performance, is about the multiple ways of knowing and researching beyond the rigidity of academic writing. What Immanuel does with the rigor of Blues Blood, taking the archival substrate of a thing — in this case with Daniel Hamm and the Harlem 5 — and elongating and transforming it. It is deeply relevant to those of us in the academy in pursuit of something similar.
During an interview on The Late Set, Immanuel described Blues Blood as “a transporting experience,” and each of those words feels important. Could you reflect on that description, and what it means to you?
Blues Blood lands in a very specific way for me. It feels big and stirring like the ocean. The vocalists are a major stand out; they remind me I am part of a chorus. I think Blues Blood belongs firmly to a tradition of music that allows transmutation — not as a way to absolve ourselves from the pain and heartbreak of the world, but to find the thing in us that encourages us to keep going and to shift some of the heaviness alongside one another.
The inclusion of Sonia Sanchez here is really inspired. How did it come about, and what should we expect?
A collaboration between Sonia and Immanuel feels sort of fated — what she does with meter and haiku, the place of jazz, that quality of anguish and sheer life in her work. (In some ways they are pulling on different ends of the same thread — with the Freedom Now Suite and that history of Abbey Lincoln and Max Roach.) No doubt Sonia is a North Star for many reasons, but among them is her formative role in Black Studies — as a department and disciplinary container, but also as a set of practices untethered to any institution. The pleasure of this project has been more frequent and ordinary conversation with Sister Sonia. We can expect a choral response, a free response. Beyond that, I’m ready to be surprised too.
What can you tell us about the culinary aspect of this performance? Who'll be cooking?
Laquanda Dobson (who makes some of the best greens this city has to offer) will be making a meal during the set. She is a chef, grower and educator from Philadelphia who is part of Sankofa Community Farm and the food sovereignty collective Land Based Jawns. I’ve been a fan of hers for a few years, so it’s a privilege to work with her on this.
Finally, Imani Perry is another luminary on hand for this concert. Her new book is Black in Blues: How a Color Tells the Story of My People — was this the inspiration for connecting her with Blues Blood?
Among the many musical focal points in Black in Blues is the reference to Louis Armstrong’s “(What Did I Do to Be So) Black & Blue?” They are holding together color and sound, blueness and Blackness, the condition of everydayness and survival and beauty as a set of political and moral convictions. Imani is deeply attentive to cultural practice across her prolific body of work, and so I’m sure the conversation will help chart connections for the audience too.
Immanuel Wilkins’ Blues Blood with Sonia Sanchez: Wednesday, April 23 at 6 p.m., Harrison Auditorium, Penn Museum. Find more information here.
