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 bass 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.

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."

As far as Get the Message...