NEA Jazz Master and GRAMMY® winning alto and soprano saxophonist Kenny Garrett announces the upcoming release of Who Killed AI?, a new album recorded with acclaimed electronic producer Svoy. As his first electronic album, the record presents a radical meshing of Garrett’s post-bop composition and performance skills with electronic beats and digital soundscapes.
“My palette is open to all kinds of music,” says Garrett. “I don’t think a lot of people really understand my history, so this project might be a surprise to some..” Sharing his thoughts on the meaning behind “Ascendence,” Garrett notes that “Artificial Intelligence is in its nascent period and is rapidly advancing. In a short period of time, it has demonstrated its superiority to human beings in some areas.”
Among the most compelling improvisers, composers and bandleaders in jazz, Garrett broke through as a crucial late-career collaborator to Miles Davis, whose influence permeates the new electronic LP.
Who Killed AI? arrives during a fascinating time for the intersection of jazz and pop culture, when improvised music and spiritual jazz are covered by tastemaking publications and finding new, young audiences raised on hip-hop and indie rock. The most headline-worthy example of this moment, André 3000’s experimental, ambient flute project New Blue Sun, recently excited Garrett’s wide-open mind. “André’s doing his thing,” Garrett writes, “and I think the way he thinks about music falls in with the way I think about Who Killed AI?: I want the people to hear this as one piece of music, even though they’re different songs. I want them to take a journey.”
Throughout Who Killed AI? Svoy’s tracks demonstrate a mastery akin to Garrett’s on his saxophones: technically brilliant but fun and accessible, with a rare ability to pay homage to music history on his own terms. In Svoy’s case that means evoking everything from Giorgio Moroder’s eurodisco to Jan Hammer’s electronic soundtracks to ’90s electronica and today’s stadium-packing EDM.
Over the past four decades, Kenny Garrett has applied his brush to an impossibly rich range of music — from jazz icons like Miles Davis, Art Blakey, Freddie Hubbard and Chick Corea through work with Guru, Q-Tip, Peter Gabriel, Sting, Bruce Springsteen and Meshell Ndegeocello. In any situation, whether drum-and-bass, fusion or Bruce Hornsby, “I can always hear myself on any genre,” Garrett explains. “I can hear my voice.” On record or on stage, that voice is frequently stunning — elegant and lyrical and capable of Coltrane-indebted power. “Like, when I heard Miles do ‘Human Nature’ for the first time,” he continues, “I knew exactly what I was going to play.”
“I think my fans will find this interesting,” he continues. “They forget that my teacher was Miles Davis. So for me, it’s not that I have to do something different. It is something that I just do. All you have to do is present the music and let them take the journey.”
