Immanuel Wilkins Quartet

Please join Ars Nova Workshop for a special live performance by saxophonist Immanuel Wilkins in celebration of The 7th Hand, his latest release on Blue Note Records, at PhilaMOCA in Philadelphia on January 27, 2022 at 8:00PM.

Commemorating the release of this much-anticipated sophomore outing, Wilkins and his stellar quartet — pianist Micah Thomas, bassist Daryl Johns, and drummer Kweku Sumbry — will premiere music from the new album’s seven-part suite during this homecoming performance.

In 2020, Brooklyn-based, Philadelphia-raised saxophonist and composer Immanuel Wilkins released Omega, his Jason Moran-produced Blue Note debut, to great critical accolades. The New York Times named Omega best jazz album of the year, praising Wilkins’ quartet for “gliding and diving with a telepathic synergy through tunes that he composed with the nation’s racial ills in mind, and that thrive thanks to a buoyant, up-to-date sense of swing,” while JazzTimes referred to the album as “the most important debut jazz recording in years.”

Immanuel Wilkins’ music is filled with empathy and conviction, bonding arcs of melody and lamentation to pluming gestures of space and breath. The 7th Hand explores relationships between presence and nothingness across an hour-long suite comprising seven movements. “I wanted to write a preparatory piece for my quartet to become vessels by the end of the piece, fully,” says Wilkins. The album’s title is derived from a question steeped in Biblical symbolism: If the number 6 represents the extent of human possibility, Wilkins wondered what it would mean — how it would sound — to invoke divine intervention and allow that seventh element to possess his quartet.