New faces this weekend – Xhosa Cole, along with Pat Thomas on piano, Josh Vadiveloo on bass and Tim Giles on drums. All recorded at the International Jazzfestival in Münster, Germany on January 5, 2025 and preserved for posterity by RBB Radio Berlin.
Here is a snippet of an excellent interview done by Thomas Rees of Jazzwise (a publication to check out if you haven’t already):
Xhosa Cole isn’t interested in following the mainstream. The 27-year-old saxophonist is a deep thinker. He doesn’t take shortcuts or give simple answers. Recently, he’s been teaching at Trinity College of Music, where he once studied. He enjoys asking students “naughty” questions like “is jazz dead?” When I ask why he plays jazz (a big question, I admit) he starts by considering what the genre is before puzzling to a conclusion.
“It’s the improvisation and the innovation,” he decides. “The freedom the music offers, to those playing it and hopefully to those listening to it, is something I identify heavily with. And I love that [jazz] has this great history of study. It’s important to me to be part of that community that has very deeply studied the music and hopefully to embody the continuation of it.”
You can hear that in Cole’s playing. It’s wildly inventive and free, but reflects a deep love for jazz tradition. When he won BBC Young Jazz Musician back in 2018, he impressed the judges with the maturity and emotional depth of his ballad playing, in particular.
“Maybe what people were seeing is my passion to take care of the music,” he says, thinking back. “A ballad is a sacred thing. If I’m playing a ballad I’m trying to take care of it.”
You can read the rest of the interview here and you also might want to check out Jazzwise as a source of good information you can subscribe to and be on top of things.
In the meantime, dive in and enjoy another Sunday in July.
