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Immanuel Wilkins is upholding NYC's jazz history. He's also dreaming up its future.
By
Sonia Rao
Published Sep 29, 2026
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By
Sonia Rao
Published Sep 29, 2026
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The first thing Immanuel Wilkins did upon moving to Brooklyn about five years ago was make nice with his new neighbors. An accomplished alto saxophonist and composer, he gifted each of the residents in his building one of his jazz records and asked for their blessing to practice the instrument in his studio apartment.
“I’ve been pushing my luck, playing pretty late at night,” Wilkins recently said. “But I’m pretty courteous. I’ve never gotten a knock, nothing. Fingers crossed.”
His neighbors might think of the music as a treat. On Tuesday, Wilkins was named one of the 20 scholars and artists to receive an $800,000 fellowship grant from the MacArthur Foundation, more commonly known as a “genius grant.” At 29 years old, he is the youngest recipient this year.
This is only the latest accolade for Wilkins, who grew up near Philadelphia and has lived in New York City since attending the Juilliard School. He has released a total of six solo albums with the prestigious jazz label Blue Note Records; the New York Times ranked his 2020 debut, “Omega,” as the best jazz album of that year.
This past spring, Wilkins released a trio of albums called “Live at the Village Vanguard.” He will return to the historic venue this week, performing two sets a night from September 28th to October 4th. As of Tuesday afternoon, all of the shows have sold out.
Wilkins recently swung by the WNYC and Gothamist studios to chat with culture reporter Sonia Rao and editor Matthew Schnipper about his music and career ambitions. Part of the conversation aired on WNYC’s podcast “NYC Now,” which you can stream online. Here’s more from it.
Matthew Schnipper: You said in a recent interview that jazz changes every 10 years, and you’ve been a professional jazz musician in New York City for just over 10 years. In that context, has the city changed? Has jazz changed? And how have you changed?
I moved here when I was 18, and I think the city changing is synonymous with my view of the city changing. In terms of the jazz scene, things have changed a lot post-covid because of how social it’s supposed to be. Jazz music is such a social music and it’s an activity you have to do with others. There used to be more spontaneity in the scene. There used to be club-hopping. People would go to Smalls Jazz Club and then hit Mezzrow and then go to the Vanguard and then to Blue Note, you know?
What was the third one? I forget.
MS: How have you changed? You’re a different artist in a lot of ways, from your debut album “Omega” to now. How is that tied up to your time in New York?
I feel more adult now. Part of that was moving to Brooklyn. There’s something about living on the island of Manhattan that makes me feel like I’m still doing whatever I want, you know what I mean? Being a young person living in the city, my proximity to places was not separated by a body of water. So I was out way more. I was hanging, I was partying, I was playing jam sessions at like 2 or 3 in the morning.
Upon moving to Brooklyn, I became a person who really values a slow life. I’m going to the spa now. I’m cooking, I’m going on walks, I’m chilling at the park. I love a soft life, you know? [I am also] growing older in the realm of the sonic. I actually value a more refined version of myself now in the way I play. Or even in the way I’m composing music. I’m distilling what I have always felt compositionally down to much simpler terms. I’m able to say things and a lot more with less information and less complexity.
Sonia Rao: You’ve also said in past interviews that you see performance as a vessel. A vessel for what? And has that changed as you live a calmer life?
I’ve always found purpose in being a vessel for God. My spiritual practice has helped me find some direction in terms of why I’m playing. I think of music as an altar.
There’s also this experience I have often, but not often enough, of feeling like I’m not the one making the music. It’s this experience of emptying, where you feel like you’re behind yourself and almost becoming a witness to what’s happening to you. Disorientation is almost like the destination. You can practice yourself into a stupor where you actually transcend the work you’re making. Your rigor actually takes you outside of yourself.
Throughout my work and my young life still, I’m thinking about all the different ways we become these immaterial archives for ourselves. I’m always thinking about ancestry. I’m thinking about stories and people in my community, and how these are now things that we reappropriate and recreate and distribute out into the world.
That’s how I feel about being a vessel now.
MS: One of the things you’re talking about is time. You put out a triple album earlier this year, and you’re inviting people to spend all of that time with you. How much did you think about that duration when you put the music together?
When we recorded, I was open-minded. I was like, “Look, we’ll try to get what we can, see how much information is going to be good and then see how much we want to release.” That could have been 40 minutes of material. It could have been an hour of material. And it turned out to be three hours’ worth of material.
That’s the position of power that an artist is in. We get to do something to the audience for this hour to 90 minutes that they have bought a ticket to sit there, and that is an incredible privilege and an honor — and something to be treated with utmost care.
I’ve always thought about time as something that can be harnessed. You travel into the Village Vanguard. It’s a basement, it’s dark, it’s small. You’re cozy, you’re rubbing up against the people next to you and it’s like, how do we harness this time and do something interesting with it? Obviously, we’re trying to make music. We’re playing stuff that’s intellectually rigorous and challenging. But I’m also thinking about real tangible ways of manipulating time, which deals with tempos and BPMs, right?
If we’re thinking about the time of life, we operate 60 seconds per minute — so, 60 beats per minute. If you’re playing a faster-paced song at 300 beats per minute, then your orientation to time becomes morphed. It becomes skewed. That’s the reason why you can go to a concert and feel like it was 10 minutes, or you can go to a concert and be like, “Man, that felt like three hours.”
MS: You’re playing again at the Village Vanguard, where your triple album was recorded. Are you imagining your new shows as reflective of what is on those records, or are you going to try to do something new?
It’s such a holy grail to make a record at the Village Vanguard. That’s something every jazz musician wants to do. I caught some of the lightning and bottled it up, you know?
Now I’m feeling so excited to jump off the deep end and try some new stuff. [Maybe] fall flat on our faces. In quantum theory, they say that once you start to observe the atoms, they start acting differently than when you leave them alone. That’s what I’m excited for. We’re going to be able to get to whatever we want to because the red light isn’t on anymore. And it might be even more spectacular.
SR: What does it actually feel like to be there, trying new things? Take us into what it’s like to be in your body on stage — or out of your body, as you say.
The Village Vanguard is a very special place. So many musicians have played there, and there’s something true about it being in the walls and the floorboards. You can feel that this is a well worn-in spot, and it’s conducive to great music being made.
What’s special about the Vanguard is that it has a real listening audience. Some people go there every week to hear whoever is there for their week-long residency. And then other people are tourists who know about the Vanguard and are like, “Yo, these are the hallowed grounds of jazz music.” People know the music and respect the music, and everyone feels like family there. There’s just a sense of community in the New York jazz scene. Because [the Vanguard] is, indeed, the best jazz club in the world.
MS: You’ve also played in more underground venues like Public Records in Brooklyn. Do you think about your audiences in those different places? Which New York arts community do you want to be a part of?
I want to be somewhere in the middle. What I love about the underground scene, the alt scene, is that I feel like the audiences are way more diverse. I’m playing for people who look like me and who don’t look like me — which is fire. I’m very privileged because when I play at the Vanguard, I get a little bit of that audience, too. I think I’ve crossed over a bit and done enough stuff with the cool kids in New York. That’s really helped me out in terms of changing what it looks like to go to the Vanguard and [see] a bunch of old white dudes who have been going there for years. But both audiences are valuable because those cats who have been going to the Vanguard for years and years, they’ve seen Rahsaan Roland Kirk play. They’ve seen Dexter Gordon play. I want to play for those people, too.
In my lifetime, I hope to see a real change in engagement with the younger community because not only will they be around for the entirety of my career, but they’re also radical. They’re a part of what’s going on in the world right now, and they’re the ones who are going to be able to breathe change into the world. Music can make some stuff shake. It’s like, can I have an audience that is willing to take arms up? Can I have an audience that’s young and lit and fire?
MS: Which brings us to something you mentioned earlier: You’re young. And you’re working in a genre that a lot of people think of as an older person’s genre, but you’re breathing new fire into it. Tell us more about that dynamic.
Being a jazz musician, you get typecast immediately. I’ve been in a healthy number of spaces where I’m the only jazz musician and I’m with pop stars, rappers, whatever.
But there’s a real desire for the music, and I don’t think people are closed off to jazz. I think most people love the music and just want it to be cool. I’m in a class of really incredible musicians my age who are making some beautiful music, who are super swaggy, super fly and also deeply rigorous. Those things can live together.
SR: Are there any musical heights you would still like to reach one day?
There are venues I would love to play at. I just want to reach as many people as possible, so I want to play bigger venues, cooler venues, more standing room spots and more seated spots, too. Bigger halls. I believe in the music I’m making and I think it’s doing something for me, so hopefully it’ll do something for other people. Those are my heights. I don’t really have any concrete place. Maybe Carnegie Hall?
MS: That seems within reach.
My mom would be so happy. Like, “Oh, my baby is playing Carnegie Hall.”
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Sonia Rao
Sonia Rao is a culture reporter for WNYC and Gothamist. She previously covered entertainment and breaking news at The Washington Post. Got a tip? Email [email protected].
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