Xhosa Cole interview: “Monk was unapologetically himself… in Monk’s time the whole thing was like, how do I sound different?”

Xhosa Cole isn’t interested in following the mainstream. The 27-year-old saxophonist is a deep thinker. He doesn’t take shortcuts or give simple answers. Recently, he’s been teaching at Trinity College of Music, where he once studied. He enjoys asking students “naughty” questions like “is jazz dead?” When I ask why he plays jazz (a big question, I admit) he starts by considering what the genre is before puzzling to a conclusion.

“It’s the improvisation and the innovation,” he decides. “The freedom the music offers, to those playing it and hopefully to those listening to it, is something I identify heavily with. And I love that [jazz] has this great history of study. It’s important to me to be part of that community that has very deeply studied the music and hopefully to embody the continuation of it.”

You can hear that in Cole’s playing. It’s wildly inventive and free, but reflects a deep love for jazz tradition. When he won BBC Young Jazz Musician back in 2018, he impressed the judges with the maturity and emotional depth of his ballad playing, in particular.

“Maybe what people were seeing is my passion to take care of the music,” he says, thinking back. “A ballad is a sacred thing. If I’m playing a ballad I’m trying to take care of it.”

Three years later, when a lot of young musicians in the UK were blending jazz with hip hop and Afrobeat, Cole went the opposite way. His 2021 debut K​(​no​)​w Them, K​(​no​)​w Us was about honouring his jazz forebears, among them Ornette Coleman and Woody Shaw, with creative takes on favourite tunes. It turned heads on both sides of the Atlantic and secured his reputation as one of the most exciting young saxophonists around.

“It was part study, part statement,” Cole says. “We were just trying to play bop very, very well. And from what I was seeing in the community at the time, I was thinking, this is innovative because people aren’t doing this. People are avoiding it because it’s so hard. So let me try.”

L-R: Steve Saunders, Nathan England Jones, Xhosa Cole and Josh Vadiveloo (photo: Stoney Lane Records)

Cole’s second record, 2022’s Ibeji ('Twin'), was an album of duets and conversations with percussionists from the African diaspora, including Mark Sanders and Lekan Babalola, which explored identity and heritage. It stemmed from Cole’s interest in mentorship and his view of percussionists as the real 'custodians' of musical tradition.

“Whenever I’m on projects, I’m always cornering the percussionists and trying to get them to divulge their secrets,” he says.

Cole’s latest album, On A Modern Genius (Vol.1), is a fresh look at the music of a kindred spirit – and one of jazz’s true originals – Thelonious Sphere Monk. Recorded live at Birmingham’s 1000 Trades after weeks on the road with his quartet, Cole’s interpretations of Monk’s tunes are freewheeling, playful and full of joy. His solos are thrilling and unpredictable.

It’s easy to see why Cole is drawn to Monk. In the 1940s and 50s, Monk was an outlier. He chose to play slowly and awkwardly when the fashion was for playing fast. His tunes were hesitant and angular, littered with 'weird' chords and jarring articulations, brilliant corners, icy ripples, pitches scattered like handfuls of gravel. People said he couldn’t play and record stores refused to stock him. “The piano ain’t got no wrong notes.” Monk famously replied. Today he’s the second most-recorded composer in jazz after Duke Ellington.

“Monk was unapologetically himself,” Cole says. “Now, there’s a big part of the community that celebrates a shared reference point, or sounding like this person. But in Monk’s time the whole thing was like, how do I sound different?”

He adores Monk’s compositions. “They’re just completely perfect,” he says. "Almost untouchable.” He remembers an interviewer asking Monk which of his tunes is his favourite.

“And he just doesn’t get the question,” Cole says. “He’s obviously a 'neurodivergent' person, but he doesn’t get the question because in his mind all his compositions are perfect. They’re all his adopted children who he’s spent time nurturing. I don’t know any other composers that worked in such a diligent way. [Monk’s output], it’s only 72 compositions. But he spent hours and hours and days and days in that manic-depressive-obsessive way, working on this music. It’s such an honour to be able to play and reinterpret something that has had so much care and craft put into it.”

Cole’s affinity with Monk goes beyond the notes. You can see similarities in their style of dress – a blend of traditional and progressive that reflects the way they play. They both wear sharp suits. Monk accessorised his with statement glasses and a beret. Cole prefers a flash of blue lipstick.

As Xhosa points out, they share a connection to Caribbean culture. Monk was raised in a neighbourhood of Manhattan called San Juan Hill, which had a big Afro-Caribbean population. It was one of the cradles of jazz, home to James P Johnson and the Jungle Cafe. Cole grew up in Handsworth, a culturally rich neighbourhood of Birmingham that gave us Benjamin Zephaniah and Joan Armatrading. Cole’s father was Jamaican and used to play a lot of dub, ska, reggae and rocksteady in the house. “Our dad was quite an eccentric person and somehow he procured these two monitor speakers and a subwoofer and he’d just play these rocksteady tunes with the treble speakers completely off,” he laughs. “So we’d just have these basslines shaking the washing up!”

Nowadays Cole lives on a narrowboat with his partner, the poet and movement artist Shaun Hill. Together they’re puttering along the canals around Birmingham. Boat life is “wonderful” he says, but the signal isn’t the best. When he first joins our chat, a blurred image slopes across the screen. His distorted apology arrives five seconds late (it's as if Thelonious Monk designed Zoom calls), so we give up and I ring him on the phone. He clatters around the galley kitchen getting breakfast together as we talk. It’s November and he’s enjoying the late autumn colours and the fields sparkling with frost. He’s been cooking and collecting firewood.

“It’s a lot more hands on,” he says. “But to be honest with you, it’s kind of a deception, living in what’s considered the conventional way now in the West. Everything is an illusion of the fact that anything’s happening. The buttons are the interface between us and some life-sustaining processes. So being on the boat, recognising what it actually takes to keep human beings alive, is a really interesting and humbling experience. And also it’s beautiful, this autonomy, this space that you have.”

With the Monk project, Cole has been thinking a lot about autonomy and choice, while rereading Marshall Rosenberg’s book Nonviolent Communication. “Sometimes we do things because we think we have to do them,” he says. “Monk was one of those people who did what he wanted to do.”

He tells me a story about Monk getting out of a car and walking miles through a blizzard because he didn’t like the vibe of an industry suit he was riding with. “Maybe that gives an insight into how Monk was also approaching his music in an uncompromising way,” Cole says. “And jazz, in some ways, can be all about compromise. That’s the challenge of jazz at the moment: we love compromising in order to connect. Sometimes people don’t have the knowledge that we can also do very radical things.”

A little while back Cole decided he was no longer interested in playing music 'verbatim'. He even turned down an offer of a European tour with trumpet great Eddie Henderson because it didn’t feel right: “People would probably say: ‘what are you thinking?’ But I said no to that in the end. Going back to Monk and the choice thing, no decision is already made before you make it.”

You’ve got to go with your gut, I say.

“Yeah. Which is very hard to do, even in the small moments, you know, with being British. Those moments where in your head you’re thinking ‘this is an absolute no’, but you’ve just said yes!”

One of the boldest, and best choices, on the new album is the inclusion of tap dancer Liberty Styles, who trades phrases with the band, drawing them into fascinating rhythmic conversations. When they first collaborated, Cole realised Styles was tapping the rhythms he was hearing in his head: “I was like, oh my gosh, this person was moving in ways I’m familiar with because of the West African tradition. But also musically what they were saying was my language, the bebop language.”

For much of jazz history, music and dance were inseparable. Nowadays they’re often kept apart. Working with Styles made Cole think. “Maybe I’m relating to music in a vastly different way to the people around me,” he muses. “And maybe that’s because I have a sense of the movement within it – the dance within the sound.”

Cole has a background in dance and recently he’s felt a pull in that direction. His oldest brother Rudi is a dancer and his middle brother Azizi (one of the percussionists featured on Ibeji) writes music for dance. Last year the three brothers shot a video of them dancing to Cole’s track ‘All Roads’ underneath Birmingham’s Spaghetti Junction. Growing up, they all attended Brimingham youth organisation ACE Dance And Music (ACE stands for African Cultural Exchange). Cole is wearing the hoodie as we speak. It was like a family, he says. The director, percussionist Ian Parmel, saw him take his first steps as a baby. Parmel also features on Ibeji and Cole credits him as an important early mentor.

“He had this saying: I want you to see the music and hear the dance,” Cole remembers.

By way of an example, he thinks back to a time playing with the band Balimaya Project in Senegal, finding his way through a maze of polyrhythms by watching the dancers, who were marking the downbeat with their movements. It reminds him of another of his mentors, saxophonist Mike Williams.

“He said, if you want to play an Afro-Cuban rhythm or anything in that vein, get yourself to a dance class. All you need to do is get to that embodiment stage of it. And it’s so true. Dance and music are different sides of the same coin. A lot of the great drummers were also tap dancers – Roy Haynes, Jack DeJohnette. And most of the people we consider the great musicians, you’d better believe they were getting down in the clubs. Monk is a perfect example.”

One of Monk’s eccentric habits was getting up to dance during his bandmates solos.

“Often you’ll hear that there’s no piano for about five minutes and that’s because he’s off!” Cole laughs. “Some people say it’s more of a trance-like thing, like dervishes. Some people say he’s conducting from the back of the band. Musicians often say if Monk starts dancing you know you’re doing something right – you’re in the pocket.”

Volume two of the Monk project, provisionally titled Free Monk, is currently in the works. Cole’s been touring with a shifting lineup that includes pianist Pat Thomas, someone else he looks up to: “Tyshawn Sorey called Pat Thomas ‘one of the great pianists of our time’ and he is without question. He’s full of life and love and laughter. And he’s embodied Monk’s music to a degree where he’s able to distil it down to the gesture and to abstract and collage. So we’re basically collaging the melodies. We all love and know his music so well. Sometimes you only need to play three notes of a Monk tune to know where you are.”

Cole has had so many mentors he describes himself as “the opposite of self-taught”. At Trinity he’s passing on his revisionist approach, encouraging students to ask questions and to follow their own path. He’s been thinking about the state of the music industry in the wake of the pandemic: we’re all drunk on nostalgia, happy to be sold repackaged music from the past.

“I posed the same question to the Trinity students,” Cole says. “It’s like, what are we doing here? If music is trying to look at something with a new perspective, I think there’s something in that.”

Xhosa Cole’s On A Modern Genius (Vol.1) is out on Stoney Lane records