1 night in Kits: Kokoroko tour, Feven Kidane doubleheader

The UK jazz band Kokoroko made a tour stop in Vancouver at Kitsilano's Hollywood Theatre on October 22, 2024, co-presented by Infidels Jazz.

Kokoroko went on to release an EP titled Get The Message on November 1. Some time between the May 29 announcement of the show and the night-of, it sold out; and on September 6, Tim Reinert of Infidels Jazz announced that trumpeter Feven Kidane would lead an unofficial pre-show quartet gig at the Painted Ship, a mere minutes' walk away.

I wrote about Infidels shows at the Painted Ship when they started, but shortly after that, the series seemed to fizzle out. You can't win them all; Infidels has focused on bigger venues in 2024.

Nevertheless, Kidane's show brought a good crowd and gave new light to the West Broadway venue. Indeed, Infidels will present there again on November 23 with percussionist Robin Layne.

Kidane talked to me a couple days after the show. "I felt really good about the Painted Ship gig," she said. "There was a nice number of people there. There was like a festiveness in the air almost, you know?"

In Kidane's quartet was her long-tenured collaborator Todd Stewart on drums "We haven't played with each other in a while," she said of him. "I feel like our musical relationship, especially with him in the rhythm section, we just feed off of what the other person is doing, so it's really easy to just never run out of ideas."

Rounding out the quartet were bassist and rising arts administrator-manager Harmeet Kaur Virdee, somehow playing only her first Infidels show ("Holding it down always", "great rhythmic takes", and "cool like a cucumber", Kidane said about her); and keyboardist Suin Park ("a little space cadet, you know, she was just like all over, exploring").

The repertoire was a bunch of Kidane originals, some of which I heard in previous years, plus tunes like Miles Davis' "E.S.P." An interesting programming note: the venue acted quickly to plug in the bass to the house speakers after the musician's amp malfunctioned. Nice one!

I walked two blocks over to the Hollywood Theatre to hear Kokoroko immediately after the Painted Ship show.

Kokoroko and the band's leader Sheila Maurice-Grey are hardly the only Millennial UK jazz-affiliated acts to have made an impact in Vancouver. Central figure Shabaka played the Chan Centre in late 2023 and his former band Sons of Kemet played the 2018 jazzfest at the Imperial, to take a couple timestamps. "I've been following [Kokoroko] for a couple years, actually, so I don't remember how I found them," Kidane said. "I think it was back in the days when I used to have Spotify, like probably four or five years ago, they just showed up on like a Spotify weekly [playlist] one time."

In early 2018, Brownswood Recordings – a boutique label by impresario Gilles Peterson – released We Out Here, a UK jazz compilation directed by Shabaka. Kokoroko thus burst onto the scene via their track "Abusey Junction", which is the closing track. Yet, with its fingerpicked electric guitar and loping percussion, the track was easily We Out Here's most genteel morsel; the grime music and brass-based tracks from the likes of Theon Cross, Moses Boyd, and Shabaka himself are more why I know the compilation as a harbinger of the hottest UK jazz today.

But that doesn't mean Kokoroko had tension with any of those folks. The subsequent discographies of the We Out Here players tell a community story: for example, multiple members of Kokoroko have played on saxophonist Nubya Garcia's records. Brownswood released a documentary to YouTube called We Out Here: A LDN Story in May 2018, featuring many artists from the compilation talking about what they mean to each other and how their project reflects a progressive vision of what London had become at the end of the 2010s. As "Abusey Junction" plays, Maurice-Grey talks about knowing Theon Cross and others on this scene since their youth.

"Abusey" got traction, which wouldn't surprise anyone familiar with the popularity of lo-fi jazz to study to. Ammar Kalia of The Guardian, in a piece one year later labeling Kokoroko "ones to watch", dubbed the track "the earworm" of We Out Here and wrote that the band's signature was "measured intricacy". When Kokoroko's self-titled EP landed in March 2019, they chafed at this perception right from the first line of the notes, attributed to Maurice-Grey: "This is not idle music!" Ideally for Kokoroko, the accessibility of "Abusey" would draw people in to the social activism and common causes of the scene, but you can feel the band not wanting to be pigeonholed as the easier-listening act of the bunch.

Could We Be More, Kokoroko's first and only full-length album to date, came out on Brownswood in summer 2022. In a move that speaks to both the label's marketing savvy and perhaps the lo-fi beat of the music, Brownswood has the full album uploaded to YouTube as a single video that gets plays. A review at the time by Loud and Quiet magazine identifies Kokoroko as "the last of the class of We Out Here to make an album-length statement" while also calling the album 'the highest-class wallpaper you could hope for". With the album's safeness eliciting mixed coverage, its title feels a bit unfortunate.

As far as Get the Message, it's just a bit funkier and darker but no less lo-fi. The vocal refrains keep it simple and anthemic, the guitar riffs carry the day with the tight drumming, and the short EP leaves you sooner than you expect. The opener "Higher" means we go high, as in not we go low. Track two, "Sweeter Than", is short and sweet in a decidedly West African groove, probably the one I'd put on a playlist. "My Prayer" is almost jazz fusion but luxuriates into its ending trumpet solo. Then track four, the hip-hop and breakbeat-oriented "Three Piece Suit" is all we have. When "We Give Thanks" from Could We Be More started auto-playing on my streaming app after I listened through it, I felt the mood lift up and I took a breath.

Kidane summed up her impression of the band's style as "self-music, music of the self, music of the community."

"I thought that they were strictly just Afrobeat, because that's what their early stuff was, most of the time," she said. "At least, it was Afrobeat, Highlife-adjacent. But it's really nice now, seeing them breaking boundaries and creating their own music, as well as having those influences still in there, and creating their own microgenres if you want to put it that way. They're just grooving. They're bringing themselves as people to the music, and that is the genre."

Kidane made contact with Maurice-Grey en route to the show. "Sheila and I had each other on Instagram for a while, and we had talked about trying to meet up. And then we tried each other's horns, so it was really cute."

Kidane told me that the show lived up to her expectations and made for a fun night out, especially with her friends coming along after her own show. On top of that, she added a meta-observation about the environment at the Hollywood Theatre [with coarse language, too!]:

"It's always really interesting when that kind of music comes to a mostly white audience, though [laughs]. Some people just don't know how to shut up and listen: they always have to have the little commentary. I had friends that were there that, like, we talked about the show later and they were like, I was standing next to these people that were critiquing all these solos."

"And I'm just like, you guys don't even know how to chill out. You don't know how to turn your brain off. You don't know how to leave that [instinct of] almost like a fight-or-flight in a weird way.”

"I feel like a lot of people, when they see bands that aren't local that have a good turnout, they're immediately judging all the time, and they're not even dancing when they judge. That's when I feel bad for them. I'm like, you guys just need to shut the fuck up [...] My advice to the general public is let your feet do the talking, goddamn! But yeah, my time at Kokoroko was so great. Had a great time. Wish they would come back. I miss them. I miss that night."

Kokoroko wasn't just some bigger band flying in and out of our small scene; they were in dialogue with us, and they spoke to something that our vibrant scene feels, one night in Kitsilano just hours after a performance by several stars of our young generation. People are starting to talk about how to get our young artists to open for international ones, saying that we've missed opportunities to do that at festivals and such.

Maybe you don't even need to do it explicitly if you line it up two blocks down the street and let them sort it out. Even so, this Infidels double-header is a kind of pairing I hope we enjoy again soon.