Soweto Kinch White Juju

Soweto Kinch White Juju (world premiere)*

Lee Reynolds conductor
Soweto Kinch saxophone & vocals
London Symphony Orchestra

The world premiere of Soweto Kinch’s new work for orchestra, written in response to the Black Lives Matter movement, Black British history and the past 18 months of lockdown.

Commissioned by the London Symphony Orchestra and Serious, White Juju is made up of six new works for jazz quintet and chamber orchestra. Beginning with the deafening silence of quarantine in 2020, it conjures sounds such as a bird call in Central Park, and the statue of a slaver crashing into Bristol’s River Avon, interwoven with Kinch’s barbed, incisive lyrics. The piece is deliberately danceable and intentionally seeks to subvert expectations of orchestral music.

Kinch’s music melds his distinct approach to Jazz and Hip Hop with Classical music: drawing broad inspiration from European folklore, the African Diaspora and divisive national myths to create a uniquely contemporary tone poem. In the Guardian’s 2019 review of Kinch’s The Black Peril, commissioned and performed with the LSO, they found that his music played ‘like a swirling montage, an effort to resist the linear narration of history’.