With 2019's The Black Peril, saxophonist, rapper, composer and former history student Soweto Kinch further stretched the list of cultural references, artform hybrids, genre fusions from ragtime to hip hop, and experiments with instrumentation that had been blossoming in his work for a decade. Now comes White Juju, recorded live at the 2021 EFG London Jazz Festival with a powerful transatlantic jazz quartet framed by the London Symphony Orchestra's chamber ensemble, and themes reflecting a world jolted out of habit by lockdown, Black Lives Matter, crises of policing, and much more. But, Kinch being Kinch, the musicality and improvisational urgency of this huge enterprise are never submerged by the weight of its themes. His writing and arranging for the orchestral parts (assisted by LSO conductor/arranger Lee Reynolds) is agile, responsive, vivaciously informed by techniques from Bach's to Stravinsky's, and the jazz quartet's spontaneous role and his own rapping segue in and out of the written structures in ways that are sometimes seamless, sometimes jaggedly and resonantly dissonant. Free-sax figures squirm through the rumble and churn of bass and drums before Boris Johnson's voice issues its belated pandemic warnings; birdsong ushers in ‘Dawn’ before restless orchestral countermelodies precede a Kinch rap on the pandemic's contrasting meanings for the privileged and the poor, and ‘The Old Normal’, ‘The Natural Order’ and ‘Tall Tales of Yesteryore’ cannily parody the musical roles of orderly baroque stability, patriotic fanfares, and folksy nostalgia as props to ruling orthodoxies. But through it all surges Kinch's passionate urgency as a brilliant jazz improviser and contemporary musical poet.