About

Immanuel Wilkins is a saxophonist, composer, and multidisciplinary artist working at the intersection of sound, performance, and visual composition. Born in Philadelphia, Wilkins moved to New York in 2015 to attend The Juilliard School. In 2017, he formed his longstanding quartet with Micah Thomas (piano), Daryl Johns (bass), and Kweku Sumbry (drums), which has since become a central vehicle for his exploration of improvisation, memory, and the lineage of jazz.

Wilkins’ debut recording, Omega (Blue Note, 2020), was named the #1 Jazz Album of the Year by The New York Times and was nominated for an NAACP Image Award. His follow-up, The 7th Hand (Blue Note, 2022), was also listed among The New York Times’ Best Jazz Albums of the Year. His most recent work, Blues Blood, was nominated for a GRAMMY award, and continues to expand his investigation of the vessel, exploring how music can function as an immaterial archive for ancestry. Over the past eight years, Wilkins has developed his quartet with the goal of reaching a state of disorientation on the bandstand, using harmonic and rhythmic intensity to alter the ways listeners experience time, emotion, and history.

Wilkins’ performance practice is deeply rooted in the idea of the vessel. Improvisation is a way of navigating structure and generating new conditions, a practice of witnessing in which one feels no longer in control. The score in jazz music remains central to his work—a set of conditions, suggested instructions, and evidence that is both precursor and excess, often shaped in real time through performance.

In addition to his musical practice, Wilkins works with bronze sculptures, large-scale megaphones, public sculptural playgrounds, and works on paper that examine the graphic score. These scores extend the language of music into materiality—charting and graphing the immaterial while exploring how sonic abstraction can act as a code generator and a form of care.

Some of the numerous awards Wilkins has received includes the 2023 Creative Capital Award, 2023 Pew Fellowship, 2024 and 2025 Alto Saxophonist of the Year in Downbeat Critics Poll, and a 2025 Civitella Ranieri Fellowship. He teaches at both New York University and The New School. He has collaborated with musicians including Solange Knowles, Leon Bridges, Jason Moran, Wynton Marsalis, Joel Ross, The Sun Ra Arkestra, and Meshell Ndegeocello, as well as visual artists Theaster Gates, Leslie Hewitt, Cauleen Smith, Ming Smith, Torkwase Dyson, and Ja’Tovia Gary.

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