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| Vermont Jazz Center LIVE STREAM: Immanuel Wilkins Quartet Saturday, June 6, 2021 The Immanuel Wilkins Quartet's debut record, Omega, released on Blue Note and produced by Jason Moran, has received numerous "best of" awards including NPR's Best Debut Jazz Album of 2020 and it also topped the New York Times' Best Jazz Albums of 2020. Other accolades showered upon Wilkins include Best New Talent of 2020 by Musica Jazz. And a LetterOne Rising Stars Jazz Award. In a recent Zoom interview with jazz blogger Marty Duda, Wilkins discussed the premise of his new recording, Omega. He said that he was trying to come up with an audible representation of what Black identity sounds like to him. He said that as a Black man he experiences two tiers of existence simultaneously, one that is made up of "super-horrific material, that is terribly graphic and explicit, " and another Black experience that is "super-hilarious, sublime and beautiful." He explained, "our everyday lives deal with both tiers in conjunction with each other. So I'm trying to create music that audibly sounds like that. It's audibly grotesque but also really beautiful, sublime and heavenly." The name of the album and the names of all the compositions reflect this theme. For example, the album's title, Omega, literally means "the end." Wilkins says he is using the word Omega as a metaphor to represent "the end of an era." He asks "what does the end of police brutality look like, the end of prejudice, the end of racial oppression? What does true liberation look like?" This dichotomy of experiences is explored in Wilkins' work which revolves upon the contrasts of beauty and pain, love and injustice that he experiences as a Black man. write your comments about the article :: © 2021 Jazz News :: home page |