Lauren Foster chats to the award-winning jazz musician Soweto Kinch ahead of his performance at this month's Flyover Show.

You’re the curator of free Birmingham festival the Flyover Show. Can you tell us a little bit about what to expect? 
It’s been in operation since 2008 and this will be our sixth edition of it. Expect the unexpected; it’s a festival which combines different genres, from jazz to hip-hop, and celebrates the best forms of cultural expression from the black British experience. And it takes place underneath a motorway flyover in Hockley. So an unconventional location and an unconventional assortment of genres but certainly something for the whole family. It’s quite passionate about art and transforming the perceptions of areas. For people who have preconceptions of what inner city Birmingham is all about, come to the show and find out for yourself - it’s actually a colourful, exciting place.    

You’re bringing the Flyover Show back to Birmingham after a four-year hiatus. Why the break? 
Lots of reasons. The most practical is that I wanted to concentrate on a new piece of theatre, which will be on tour next year, but also I needed to establish a more autonomous administration around here. I’ve kind of been working with other freelancers and other people who wanted to do other stuff, other companies, and I felt like I needed to establish my own ideas and my own projects within a new company. That’s taken a lot of time to do. There’s a new CIC called Uprize which focuses on socially engaging work to really change the cultural ecology of Birmingham and the country more widely.

How did the venue choice come about? Hockley Flyover is quite a unique venue in which to hold a festival...
It absolutely is. Thankfully we’ve now become established, I think, within the city’s consciousness as a venue, but the venue choice initially came because I lived right next to it. My album, B19: Tales Of The Tower Block, was interesting because I wanted to write a story about inner city, urban living, but one that wasn’t filled with gangsta stereotypes, the usual assumptions about what it’s like in black or brown communities and stuff. The whole album explored ordinary lives. The Flyover Show, to some extent, followed on from that. I wanted to showcase the art that existed in the community, the people who actually live there, as opposed to those who just make the headlines. Obviously everyone can sell crack if they want to sell crack, but there are poets, jazz musicians, singers, visual artists all living in the same community, and I wanted to really make the area habitable. I wanted us to step out and say, ‘This is the space that we claim’ - especially when there are so many headlines about postcode rivalry, racial conflict, gang crime and gun violence. We wanted to change that negative narrative. 

As well as recently performing together at Glastonbury and Montreal Jazz Festival, you’re headlining Hockley Flyover alongside jazz composer and guitarist Ernest Ranglin. How did that come about and how’s it been so far?
It’s been wonderful. The first time I played with the legend that is Ernest Ranglin was in 2003. We went all the way to Womad in Adelaide, then to New Zealand. They asked me to come and sit in with them. Mafia & Fluxy were the backing group at the time and it was wonderful. It just felt like an incredible hand-to-glove experience musically and culturally. I felt like I slotted right into the group. I was blown away then - but even more so now - by somebody who was, at that point, 71, playing the most virtuosic guitar I’d ever heard, writing incredible compositions but also accessible music and hits that we can all identify with in reggae terms. So he’s still a role model and mentor at the tender age of 84.

What’s been the most memorable performance of your career to date?
That’s really hard to pin down. I think there are a few very memorable moments from Flyover shows gone by. Performing with Akala was pretty incredible - just the nature of the pieces he performed and the audience. I have to say performing in Johannesburg with the Flyover Show in 2012 was also quite a watershed. Stars in South Africa and stars in Britain together on the same stage. It felt like the coming together of many years of planning. 

What’s your view on the UK’s jazz scene at the moment?
It’s in very good health. You’ve got groups like Ezra Collective - young groups coming through and expressing a way of making music that’s hybrid but not compromising anything. It’s personal, it’s unique, and I think it’s the kind of jazz that can only be made in Britain right now. It’s an exciting time for new and emerging jazz musicians. It’s great for me too, I’m enjoying it. I’m doing a radio show; it’s very lovely. It’s good to hear the full breadth of music in the world, but particularly in Britain today.

The closure of Ronnie Scott’s was a knock to the jazz scene in Birmingham. How do you feel the scene’s grown in recent years?
I think things kind of go around in cycles. Perhaps when it was established, the venue owners there thought to themselves - without an understanding of the full breadth and tradition of Ronnie Scotts in London - ‘Great, we’ll just get the yuppy crowd, sell lots of cocktails and make lots of money’. This story seems to repeat itself - a gleamy-eyed venue owner thinking it’s the route that generates money and then finding out that it’s not, losing faith, closing down the venue. They’ve not all become strip clubs thankfully, but I also feel that things are coming back around. The Fiddling Bone, which was closed around the same time, is reopening as a pub. Then there’s what’s happening around Birmingham Central University and other courses. The conservatoire student population is going to continue to grow; they’re going to be people who, after graduating, are looking for things to do, places to play. I think we’re on the cusp of change, I really do. I think that the alternative culture, which has often lagged behind the high street and Broad Street and the club culture in Birmingham, is going to take its rightful place in the city. 

Why is Birmingham a good city in which to be based as a musician?
Pop to London for a couple of hours and that should crystalise what the advantages of living in Birmingham are! Accommodation and the sense of space - creative space, to do something that’s not been done before, to find a niche for yourself and to find an artistic community. If you make that trip the other way, you’ll see lots of Londoners making the trip in the opposite direction. There are going to be a lot of London people who’re thinking, ‘I can’t afford to live here anymore, I’m going to live in Manchester or Birmingham’. Let’s take back control!

What was your first experience of jazz music? 
Technically I suspect it was going to see Dizzy Gillespie when I was about four. It’s funny, I didn’t realise what that was until much later. I went along with a friend of my dad’s to go and see him. I was just a little kid, and years later I thought, ‘Hey, that guy with the big cheeks who I can remember people going crazy about in this big concert hall was Dizzy Gillespie!’ These little, diffused memories and experiences, even if you’re not fully conscious of them at the time, form a composite that gives you the interest, gives you the ability to fall in love with the music. Really small, skeletal performances or experiences can add up, and that’s why I do the Flyover Show - for people who stumble across it and discover years later that they love jazz. 

You’re an MC as well as a jazz musician. How did that come about?
I think in large part just growing up hearing music around me and hearing the power of MC-ing. I’d say around the age of 13 I got the jazz bug. I also got the hip-hop bug. I was going round with MCs in Birmingham and we practised our freestyling and making tunes, booking out studios and laying down tracks. I think a lot of my specific hip-hop skills were honed in that period; all the technical aspects of being an MC came together for me in my teenage years. 

Who would you most like to work with in the hip-hop world?
There are a few! Madlib, Kenrick Lamar - there are loads of people. I’m really interested in working with people in leftfields with some completely different audiences, whether it be dance music or rock or classical. I think some of those hybrids, when they’re done with the music and the artists leading them as opposed to a label doing it, are quite interesting. I’m also happy to do more stuff with my long-term collaborators, such as Eska, who’s performing at the Flyover Show. Most of my favourite songs that I’ve done have featured her; she’s going from strength to strength. 

And finally, what’s in the pipeline for the rest of 2016?
I’m releasing a new album called Nonagram in October, so that’s had me in the lab with my eyes wide open until four o’clock in the morning, programming and editing new material. It’s all based on sacred geometry and numbers, but also on the principle of healing through sound. We’re going to be doing some dates up and down the UK, particularly in London, in November. 

The Flyover Show takes place at Hockley Flyover on Saturday 20 August.

By Lauren Foster