Commissioned for the 2019 London Jazz Festival, The Black Peril is arguably one of saxophonist-rapper-composer Kinch’s most ambitious projects to date. Referring to the race riots that took place in Britain, America and Europe in 1919, the music is an in-depth and provocative meditation on the essential question of social unrest and media manipulation of the fear-inducing ‘other/alien’ represented by Africans and Afro-Caribbeans. An avowed student of cultural and musical history, Kinch explicitly taps into the sound of the age; namely American ragtime, and melds it with ancestral Jamaican rhythmic lexicons such as kumina and the modern-day machine-based beats of hip-hop. The result is both dense and exhilarating, particularly as the range of instrumentation, from West African percussion to banjo and tuba, also adds to the sense of time travelling as well as political unpacking. That last element is also emphatically reinforced by Kinch’s incisive rapping and a number of shifting time signatures that convey the disorientation of the period in question, certainly for those classed as ethnic minorities. The LJF gig featured dancers and excellent choreography from Jade Hackett, so, if possible, a DVD to accompany this CD would make sense.