Home > Line up 2023 > 19 july 2023 > Immanuel Wilkins Quartet

This alto saxophonist and composer grew up in Upper Darby, Pennsylvania. After graduation, he moved to New York in 2015 to study at Juilliard. There, he met trumpeter and composer Ambrose Akinmusire, who would mentor him and help him navigate the jazz scene. It was also at this time that he met a musician who would change his professional life – Jason Moran – a prominent pianist and composer who took the saxophonist on tour with him.

Listeners discovered his fascinating sound with his first album, Omega, which has enjoyed great critically acclaim and been hailed as the best jazz album of 2020 by the New York Times. The album also introduced his remarkable quartet – with Micah Thomas on the piano, Daryl Johns on the bass and Kweku Sumbry on the drums, a tight-knit unit that Wilkins presents once again on his mind-blowing follow-up album, The 7th Hand.
Wilkins has worked with a great range of artists, including Solange Knowles, Gretchen Parlato, Wynton Marsalis, Gerald Clayton, Aaron Parks and Joel Ross. The album The 7th Hand explores the relationships between presence and nothingness in a one-hour suite made up of seven movements. "I wanted to write a preparatory piece for my quartet to become vessels by the end of the piece, fully", explains the artist who, according to Pitchfork, "composes ocean-deep jazz epics".

Line up

Immanuel Wilkins: alto saxophone
Micah Thomas: piano
Matt Brewer: bass
Kweku Sumbry: drums