On an unseasonably warm evening in December, just at the opening break of Omicron and yet another shift in everyone’s lives, alto saxophonist/composer Immanuel Wilkins is busy in his new Brooklyn home. Cooking. A lot.
Calm in the face of a just-canceled show at the Village Vanguard while readying The 7th Hand—his second Blue Note album with his longtime quartet (pianist Micah Thomas, bassist Daryl Johns, drummer Kweku Sumbry)—Wilkins passionately runs through cuisine-related minutiae as if he were tightening his ligature or wetting his reeds.
Preparing braised short ribs with more tinkling and crashing than you might hear from his drummer’s cymbals at a gig, Wilkins laughs as he discusses the joy of cooking. “I had spent so much money on exorbitant dinners before COVID that I didn’t want to suddenly start having sad meals while stuck at home,” he says of having hooked himself up with quality chef tools to prepare his favorites. “My easy go-to is salmon, but I can cook a mean duck breast. I can also do vegan. Both ends of the spectrum.”
Having moved during the pandemic from the Philadelphia area’s Upper Darby Township, where he was born and raised, Wilkins has made many recent changes beyond honing his culinary skills. The most immediately noticeable one for those familiar with his debut album—August 2020’s raw, sometimes mournful, sometimes incendiary , which got him a Best New Artist nod in this magazine’s Critics’ Poll last year—is in the production department. Whereas was produced by pianist Jason Moran, Wilkins has taken the reins himself.
