Kinetic Earth: Will Boyd & Kevin Spears

There is an instrument at the center of Kevin Spears' music that most people have never heard played this way, and may never hear played this way again. The kalimba, a traditional African folk instrument, becomes in Spears' hands something he has spent a lifetime reimagining: not a curiosity, not a novelty, but a complete sonic world. As a young and quiet child, Kevin began applying his musical abilities and heart expression to speak through the kalimba, a range of emotions, dreams, and visions he found difficult to verbally communicate. Over time it became his loyal companion and refuge. The instrument didn't choose him so much as recognize him.

With a lifelong fascination with electronics and science fiction, it was perhaps inevitable that Spears would incorporate these passions in an Afrofuturistic way, weaving horns, bass, violins, synths, drums, and world percussion into a one-man folk-world-funk ensemble that feels less like a performance and more like a transmission. He builds some of his own instruments. He plays kalimba through guitar effects and modern electronics, bending the ancient and the futuristic into a single continuous voice.

AfroPop Worldwide has said that Spears "utilizes the traditional African instrument and tweaks it to create a soulful, funky sound," and the musical director of Cirque du Soleil has described his performances as drawing audiences "into his unique yet universal world." He has shared stages with Victor Wooten, India.Arie, Karen Briggs, Roy "Futureman" Wooten, Rising Appalachia, and Toubab Krewe, among many others. He has been featured at TED-X, Musikmesse in Frankfurt, Music China in Shanghai, The NAMM Show, and the Jazz Funk Africa Festival in Yokohama, Japan.

The house in Orangeburg, South Carolina, was a frequency spectrum unto itself. The Isley Brothers and the Manhattan Transfer and Dolly Parton and Mozart — all of it moving through the same rooms, all of it landing in the ears of a kid from Queens, New York, who had been transplanted to the Lowcountry and was trying to figure out which signal to lock onto. His mother had graduated from Jamaica High School of the Performing Arts, and she made sure Will and his siblings sang. Gospel was the foundation — Yolanda Adams, the Clark Sisters — but Aretha Franklin and James Brown and Prince were never far from the turntable. Then one day he watched Gerald Albright's video on a Johnny Gill single, and the saxophone chose him the way weather chooses a landscape: completely, irreversibly, with no interest in negotiation.

Boyd was playing in professional R&B bands before he turned eighteen. He enrolled at South Carolina State University, where the jazz ensemble's alumni roll reads like a dispatch from the center of American music — Houston Person, Ron Westray from Lincoln Center, Charlton Singleton of Ranky Tanky, baritone man Johnny Williams from the Count Basie Orchestra. He marched in the Marching 101. He earned a BA in Music Business. He was inducted into the university's jazz hall of fame in 1997. And he met Kelle Jolly, a vocalist and music educator who would become his wife, his musical partner, and eventually the host of WUOT's Jazz Jam radio show and the founder of the Knoxville Women in Jazz Jam Festival. They married at a jazz festival in Japan, which tells you everything you need to know about how music and life operate in the Boyd household.

After Columbia, South Carolina — where he worked the fusion and funk circuit alongside drummer John Blackwell, who would go on to play for Prince, and trombonist Fred Wesley, the architect of James Brown's horn sound — a chance encounter with saxophonist Patrick Langham pulled Boyd to Knoxville. He enrolled in the University of Tennessee's jazz studies program and found himself studying under three musicians who represented entirely different philosophies of what a horn can do: Jerry Coker, the legendary educator whose Woody Herman credentials and pedagogical texts had shaped generations of improvisers; Zim Ngqawana, the South African free jazz visionary; and Donald Brown, the pianist and composer who had held down the keys in Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers. Coker later called Boyd a modern musician steeped in tradition, which is about as precise a six-word summary as anyone has managed.

Brown became Boyd's producer, guiding three albums — Live at the Red Piano Lounge, Freedom Soul Jazz, and Soulful Noise — that document a musician whose soprano, alto, tenor, baritone, bass clarinet, and flute all serve the same central impulse: soul. Not soul as a genre but soul as a method, the conviction that technique without feeling is expensive noise and that the deepest jazz has always kept one foot in the church. His Freedom Soul Jazz took the spirituals — "Go Down Moses," "Every Time I Feel the Spirit," "We Shall Overcome" — and gave them the harmonic weight of modern jazz without stripping them of their original devotional power. He played the premiere of Shadow Light, an opera celebrating the life of painter Beauford Delaney, with the Marble City Opera. He appeared on the PBS documentary soundtrack for the same painter. He joined the Knoxville Jazz Orchestra. He and Kelle toured Japan multiple times, performed on cruise ships, appeared on national television, staged musical theater productions, and were honored with the MLK Award for the Arts. In 2021, the City of Knoxville proclaimed July 21st "Kelle Jolly and Will Boyd Day."

Along the way, the list of musicians who have called on Boyd grew into something that looks less like a résumé and more like a map of modern American music: Leslie Odom Jr., Doc Severinsen, Wycliffe Gordon, Regina Carter, Jeff Coffin, the Four Tops, John Beasley's Monk'estra, the Jimmy Dorsey Orchestra, the Harry James big band. He has appeared on recordings with Nicholas Payton, Chris Potter, Jeremy Pelt, Eric Reed, Russell Gunn. He played Big Ears in Knoxville and Peter Barakan's It's Magic in Tokyo. He added the EWI — the electronic wind instrument — to his arsenal, not as a replacement for the acoustic horns but as an extension of them, another voice in a conversation that keeps expanding.

Boyd now teaches at UNC Asheville and Warren Wilson College, directs the Contemporary Jazz Ensemble of Asheville, and performs weekly at Little Jumbo in the Jay Sanders Quartet. He carries multiple instruments to every gig the way some people carry multiple languages — not to show range but because each one says something the others can't. The soprano sax, which he has called the most difficult and sweetest of the reeds, remains the one closest to his center. It is the voice that sounds most like the house in Orangeburg: every frequency at once, all of it moving through the same room, all of it landing exactly where it needs to.