Xhosa Cole: Young King Cole

There’s an online video of Xhosa Cole at the final of BBC Young Jazz Musician 2020, playing alongside Nikki Yeoh’s piano, with the Mondesir brothers providing bass and drums. The saxophonist has the kind of assurance and erudition you would expect from an established jazz star, and with his close cropped hair and wide-lapelled chalk stripe suit he looks the part. His soloing throughout the jumps and repetitions of a brisk reading of Thelonious Monk’s 'Played Twice' reveals an effortless flow of ideas, clever without being tricksy, always respecting the tune. It’s nothing if not a mature performance - and yet only two years previously, as the first person of colour to reach the final stages, he was himself the competition’s young winner.

It’s clear that Xhosa Cole is on a steep trajectory, and while that is something he is only too aware of, he also seems well-prepared: “After the Young Musician business things were put into fast forward,” he recalls. “Things that were in a five or 10 year timeline happened in one or two years instead. But it felt quite organic and normal. It would have been easy to get rushed into things and burn up but I had a lot of support from some great people to keep me focused and prioritised.”

It was natural that those early priorities would include recording an album and a major national tour but here the Birmingham-based tenor player gave an early indication of doing things on his own terms. Despite the conventional wisdom to first make the record and then later tour with product to sell he nevertheless decided to get straight out on the road. Thanks to support from Birmingham Jazz he was able to embark on a 24-date odyssey with his quartet through 2019 before going into the studio at the end of the year.

In hindsight it seems fortuitous – any tour planned for 2020 would surely have fallen victim to lockdown – but Cole insists the really important benefit shows in the resulting album K(no)w Them, K(no)w Us: “It was my first major tour. By the third, fourth, fifth date we were really starting to not only push each other but actually support each other into other areas musically. We had all those great moments, all those laughs, we got annoyed at each other at times, we got frustrated, shared meals, shared beds, that kind of thing. By the time we got to the recording studio there was this real trust that we had in each other musically on and off the bandstand, and real empathy levels. We kind of knew what direction musically we were going in, we understood each other’s musical identities and how we could support one another to get to those spaces we wouldn’t normally occupy. I think the album does wholly embody where we were at at the time, and it was a real special time for us musically.”

It would be 18 months, however, before the album’s crackling collection of judiciously picked hard bop numbers would be released, on Birmingham’s Stoney Lane label in July 2021. The critical response was fairly universal – here was an exceptional group recording combining superb musicianship with a genuine understanding of the jazz heritage – as well as slightly awed by the fact that the bandleader was a mere 24 years old when they laid it down.

Cole is gratified by the response, but is essentially phlegmatic: “It’s nice! I’m really chuffed with the reception it’s had and I’m super grateful for the support and how well received it’s been - and that’s from a career perspective. But from an artistic, musical perspective the album represents the musician that I was over a year and a half ago and for me … what’s next, you know? I think it was an appropriate first album to do but would I do another album in the same framework?

“Maybe, I don’t know, maybe 10 years down the line I could, but the next things on the horizon don’t look the same way and I think it’s good that they don’t look exactly the same. Because basically we just played out of the book you know? We had some neatly packaged arrangements and things that worked well and we were happy with playing slick and smooth and all that kind of thing - which is very in keeping with that tradition. But there wasn’t really too much that was completely groundbreaking - other than the fact that not many young musicians in the country at the moment were playing within that style to the level that we were striving to play.”

Perhaps unsurprisingly, as a player very aware of his development, he is more interested in the learning that was involved, not least from his fellow band members for whom he has immense respect.

“Obviously I understand that these people are my seniors musically – I was a proper baby! Jay (Phelps, trumpeter) is a superstar, man; Jim (Bashford, drummer) knows it all; and James (Owston, bass) is amazingly good. I was essentially intimidated by his knowledge and capacity to play. Half of the record is tunes that Jay, Jim and James showed me, as well as technical stuff or musical stuff or ideas or concepts and also just connecting with the great music they know.”

With the exception of London-based Phelps, the band is essentially a Birmingham-rooted project, reflecting Cole’s continuing commitment to the city of his birth. Asked about how he found his way to jazz it is almost as if he absorbed it from the environment around him. “Some people have defining moments - maybe they saw a concert or heard a particular record - but for me it’s been a kind of a cumulative thing. I began by having lessons at Andy Hamilton’s Ladywood Community School for £2.50 on a Thursday evening, then Mondays I started playing music at school so it became two days a week, then three evenings and so on and slowly it became something that was all encompassing. And once I found out about a venue – it might have been the Spotted Dog – and then I heard about the Yardbird, and then I found out that at York’s Café Percy Pursglove plays every week … and so on. I’m still a fiend for going and seeing whatever’s going, all different types of music that’s happening locally.”

One figure loomed large, inevitably, and while fellow Brummie Soweto Kinch was something of a distant role model for the younger Cole he’s become an important support in his burgeoning career, both inviting him onto his own Black Peril album and tour and contributing to K(no)w Them, K(no)w Us.

Multi-instrumentalist Percy Pursglove would also figure through the Jazz Lines summer school he has run in Birmingham with singer Sara Colman, one of Xhosa’s great influences: “I owe her a lot – she’s amazing, a really gifted sense of melody”. He first attended the school in 2012 as a novice 15 year-old and has taken part in every one since, moving on from young learner to chaperone and now, he’s a respected mentor. For him it’s an intrinsic part of the jazz process to be nurturing and giving back to the Birmingham scene that supported him: “It is what it is – a responsibility, like the Tomorrow’s Warriors thing of ‘each one, teach one’. It’s all well and good to strive for your own instrumental thing but the flip side is making sure you’re available to help support the young ones. That’s a big part of why I am still in Birmingham, because I can contribute here.” That commitment extends to his role in weekly jazz nights and teaching in the Legacy Centre of Excellence, Europe’s largest black-owned arts and business centre, where his house band welcomes guests like Heidi Vogel, Art Themen and Rachel Cohen.

But if his immediate heritage has a Birmingham postcode, he is aware that he also has a longer story stretching back through the Caribbean to Africa and his name - he pronounces it 'Zosa' - is a strong reminder. “There’s many of us black British people, especially those of Caribbean heritage, that have African names. Even within the young jazz scene there’s Soweto, Shabaka … it’s an interesting one to get to grips with and understand, not having any immediate personal connection with South Africa. I wear the name with pride and try to do justice to it, hopefully. In my parents’ generation there’s so many Clives and Dennises but then all of their kids are like Edika and these kind of things!”

He is pursuing a greater awareness of this connection with Nigerian musician and cultural worker Lekan Babilola to explore Yoruba history and traditional culture, something that has given him a stronger sense of the importance of collectivity in music making. “There’s this real duality with the music, the internal and the external and how it frames you outside of yourself in a way, you know. The self is really engaged with this music and you’re kind of bringing all elements of who you are to the table but also you’re a really small part of a much bigger thing. For me that’s really healthy because it kind of takes you out of the contemporary context where everything is so ‘me, me, me’ orientated and it brings you into more of a community environment.”

Thanks to funding from the Peter Whittingham Jazz Award, it's a connection that will bear immediate fruit in his next project, a portmanteau album of original duets with seven percussionists from the African diaspora. With star names including Jason Brown, Corey Mwamba, Mark Sanders and Adriano Adewale involved, it’s small wonder the usually unflappable Xhosa is excited. “Any chance to play with Jason's a great blessing, of course! There’s a massive range of styles and aesthetics – some are more experimental, others more on the compositional side and some draw on traditional folkloric Yoruba roots. I’ve spent hours with each one talking and playing and listening and it feels like becoming an epic collection of pieces.”

That album should hopefully appear some time early in 2022 on Stoney Lane, though there’s still plenty of work to be done first. Meanwhile the Young Jazz Musician finally has time to reflect on where his life has taken him: “At the end of the day, this music and its legacy and the great life I found within it has drawn me in and pulled me in to the point where I didn’t know it was happening until now. You turn round and you reflect and you think “Wow - I can’t imagine a world without this music and I can’t imagine what I’d be doing, who I would be, how I would be acting, how I would think. Ultimately it’s about looking forward and having one eye on the future and one eye on the past, relating my story to the story of the pioneers within this music and the influences that informed their music making and their decision making. Corey (Mwamba) puts it really well: ‘you’re working on the individual pieces of the puzzle and slowly you’ll start to piece them all together… but the thing that’s important is that you relate to all of the pieces sincerely.’”

And if there’s one thing that Xhosa Cole certainly has – alongside his phenomenal musical talent and insight – it’s sincerity.

Xhosa Cole opens for Cécile McLorin Salvant at Cadogan Hall, 16 November at the EFG London Jazz festival

This article originally appeared in the November 2021 issue of Jazzwise magazine. Never miss an issue – subscribe today