Taking the rap for the Soweto uprising - Music - Times Online

Here s how to wrongfoot your fans. You stake your claim as British jazz s rising star, winning the Montreux Saxophone Competition with your dazzling alto skills. You make the Mercury Prize final, win Best Jazz Act at the Mobo Awards and the Urban Music Awards.

You re a star of the BBC Jazz Awards. And then you make a hip-hop album. And not just any old hip-hop album but part 1 of a three-hour concept piece called A Life in the Day of B:19: Tales of the Towerblock, a sort of Ulysses set in inner-city Birmingham, with part 2 due next year.

To beboppers scornful of hip-hop s braggadocio and meagre musical palette it could look suspiciously like swapping sides. The great Wynton Marsalis has gone farther, calling rap the new minstrel scene and the degradation of blacks for the entertainment of all others . And Kinch has problems on the other side of the fence.

In his native Birmingham, where he helps to run music workshops, he regularly meets hip-hop kids who tell him they hate jazz (never mind that they ve never heard any). But Kinch has always pursued parallel interests, as anyone knows who has heard his wry rap Jazz Planet, about the benefits of a world run by saxophone players. And if anyone is going to bridge musical divides, it s this affable 28-year-old with the rangy good looks.

I ve always had an interesting existence in what so many consider diametrically opposed worlds, he says. One minute I ll be performing in the Deal Real record shop or another underground hip-hop space and then in the more calm environs of the jazz club. He s used to sticking out.

Though he grew up in Handsworth, the son of a playwright and an actress, he went to private school. I had my blazer and briefcase, he grins, and I d come back and try to kick freestyles with the guys in the hood. I had my bookish, bohemian interest and kooky hairstyle and glasses, but in the hip-hop fraternity I was accepted on the basis of skills.

At the same time Kinch was showing a precocious ability on the saxophone. At 13 he met Marsalis backstage at a concert and the trumpeter has continued to follow his career. A success at school, Kinch went to Oxford and took a degree in modern history, but music beckoned.

He played with Gary Crosby s great Jazz Jamaica big band and had a stint in the Pop Idol backing band ( Seeing that side of mass-produced, orchestrated entertainment has influenced my approach to pop culture ever since ). His first album, Conversations with the Unseen (2003), was f ted by the jazz press. But whereas that album took hip-hop to a jazz audience, B19 aims to take jazz to the hip-hop audience.

It is an epic work set in the Newtown and Lozells district of Brum that tells the stories of Marcus, a truanting student; S, an unemployed and possibly autobiographical saxophonist; and Adrian, the bus driver alienated from his son. Moira Stuart, the BBC newsreader, links scenes, and the wit and brio occasionally recall Under Milk Wood, if not Joyce s magnum opus. These are small lives that together tell a bigger story about modern urban living.

And amid the beats and poetry, the band sometimes veers into bustling acoustic jazz that will delight any traditionalist. The completed work will clock in at three hours. I definitely didn t start with any grandiose designs to break any moulds, Kinch says.

I just wanted to create the framework to make all the music that I love. Eventually he hopes to do a fully staged version, with actors and rappers and, in the process, help to raise the status of hip-hop. It can be art.

It s important to view the lyrics we write as poetry. It s capable of the gravity of jazz. While too good-natured to be a zealot, Kinch says he gets increasingly emotional about the bland music that pop radio feeds young listeners: It s a McDonald s style of music, never fully satisfying.

People deserve better.