The saxophone has been speaking since the 1840s. The kalimba has been speaking for centuries longer. What happens when you put the two of them in the same room, with two musicians who have each spent a lifetime finding new things to say through their instruments, is not something that has a name yet.
Will Boyd is a multi-reed instrumentalist, composer, and educator who carries the soul sax tradition of Eddie Harris, Hank Crawford, and Johnny Hodges in his blood, and then pushes well past it. He has added the EWI, the electronic wind instrument, to his arsenal, not as a replacement for the acoustic horns but as an extension of them, another voice in a conversation that keeps expanding. His résumé reads like a map of modern American music: Doc Severinsen, Wycliffe Gordon, Regina Carter, Leslie Odom Jr., the Four Tops, John Beasley's Monk'estra, recordings with Nicholas Payton and Chris Potter. He directs the Contemporary Jazz Ensemble of Asheville, teaches at UNC Asheville and Warren Wilson College, and performs weekly at Little Jumbo. Boyd has described his own aesthetic plainly: he likes space, and he likes soul. Those two values, held in tension, are the engine of everything he does.
Kevin Spears has spent his life reimagining what is possible on the kalimba, the traditional African folk instrument, incorporating his lifelong fascination with electronics and science fiction in an Afrofuturistic way, weaving horns, bass, violins, synths, drums, and world percussion into a one-man ensemble that operates on its own frequency entirely. He builds some of his own instruments. The Cirque du Soleil musical director has described his performances as drawing audiences into "his unique yet universal world." AfroPop Worldwide has said his playing would make Stevie Wonder smile.
These are two musicians who do not traffic in the expected. Placing them together is less a concert booking than an experiment, a question posed to the room: what do centuries of African resonance and the American soul horn tradition sound like when they find each other, with no script and no ceiling? Little Jumbo's weekly series exists precisely for nights like this one.
Featuring
There is an instrument at the center of Kevin Spears' music that most people have never heard played this way, and may never hear played this way again. The kalimba, a traditional African folk instrument, becomes in Spears' hands something he has spent a lifetime reimagining: not a curiosity, not a novelty, but a complete sonic world. As a young and quiet child, Kevin began applying his musical abilities and heart expression to speak through the kalimba, a range of emotions, dreams, and...
The house in Orangeburg, South Carolina, was a frequency spectrum unto itself. The Isley Brothers and the Manhattan Transfer and Dolly Parton and Mozart — all of it moving through the same rooms, all of it landing in the ears of a kid from Queens, New York, who had been transplanted to the Lowcountry and was trying to figure out which signal to lock onto. His mother had graduated from Jamaica High School of the Performing Arts, and she made sure Will and his siblings sang. Gospel was the...