Alfa Mist

In the organizer's words:

People like to tell such stories as a bildungsroman. Hip hop and grime producer with a migrant background discovers jazz and global pop in search of interesting samples.

He becomes a fan of Miles Davis' music and then teaches himself to play the piano. In 2017, after two EPs, he released his debut album "Antiphon", which was a verve between a rock and a hard place. The album was not "jazzy" enough for jazz listeners, too soft for the hip-hop posse and too "jazzy" for soul listeners. Although Alfa Sekitoleko made an attractive offer to the London scene (de facto: Robert Glasper in reverse), he remained in the shadow of the hype surrounding Shabaka Hutchings, Nubya Garcia and Moses Boyd. This was only to change with the ambitious fourth album "Bring Backs" (2021), which was conceived as an autobiographical concept album in a way.

In nine rather short tracks, Alfa Mist and his original band (bass clarinet, cello, trumpet, flugelhorn) talk from an Afro-American perspective about how even success is a contradictory experience because it is always accompanied by the uncertainty of falling back into precarity. The music is a very accessible and elegant mixture of jazz, soul and hip-hop, complemented by excerpts from a poem by Hilary Thomas (" ... but change is inevitable. The isms and schisms questionable. (...) Time is a healer, when there's no turning back."), field recordings from the London Underground and a few (self-)reflective raps. The sovereignty with which this mixture is balanced down to the nuances is captivating and makes it a convincing statement with regard to current identity politics.