Immanuel Wilkins will release his expansive third studio album Blues Blood on October 11 courtesy of Blue Note Records.
The meditative offering co-produced by Meshell Ndegeocello features his quartet with Micah Thomas on piano, Rick Rosato on bass, and Kweku Sumbry on drums; vocalists Ganavya, June McDoom, and Yaw Agyeman; plus special guest appearances by vocalist Cécile McLorin Salvant, guitarist Marvin Sewell, and drummer Chris Dave.
A multimedia performance about the legacies of our ancestors and the bloodlines connecting us, Blues Blood marks the first time Wilkins has included vocalists on an album, with each of the distinctive voices tapping into different aspects of heritage. The lead single “Afterlife Residence Time” is out now.
Check out the first single below.
The album title culls inspiration from a quote by Daniel Hamm, a member of the Harlem Six, a group of young boys who were falsely accused of murder in 1964 and severely beaten by prison guards while awaiting trial: “I had to, like, open the bruise up and let some of the blues [bruise] blood come out to show them.”
He said this while attempting to seek medical attention for his wounds. The police refused to address Hamm’s injuries because, although they had beaten him themselves, he had no visible blood running across his skin.
Within Hamm’s quote, the mistaken placement of the word ‘blues’ in place of ‘bruise’ when read aloud or silently, lends subtly to a new interpretation of the sentence. “The blues as a feeling has served as a symbol of pleasure in pain for Black folk dating back to work on the plantation,” Wilkins says.
“There is a dichotomy of Black people singing songs about how bad their conditions were, yet the blues is something that feels so good.
“Blood is often a symbol of things ancestral and generational,” he continues. “The history and preparation of most foods across the African Diaspora have been passed down through oral tradition. Mothers teach their children recipes that they learned from their mother, and their mother’s mother, so on and so forth, generating a sensorial and ancestral memory through taste and smell.”
“I don’t even know how to put it in words,” Wilkins says of the album’s sheer potency. “What I do know is that there are alchemical properties in the music. It’s powerful. It’s our calling to take care of this music properly and make sure that it does something to people.”
Order Immanuel Wilkins’ Blues Blood.