The Youngest Genius, Immanuel Wilkins Holds the Vanguard Stage
A Brooklyn saxophonist wins a MacArthur and goes straight back to work in the West Village basement
On Tuesday the MacArthur Foundation announced its new class of fellows. That same night one of them was booked to open a week of shows at 178 Seventh Avenue South. Immanuel Wilkins, a 29 year old alto saxophonist the foundation lists as based in Brooklyn, is in the middle of a six night run at the Village Vanguard. The timing could not be better if a publicist had planned it.
Wilkins is the youngest of the 20 people named this year, according to NPR. The fellowship is the award people call the genius grant. It comes with $800,000 and no strings attached. A network of scouts working for the foundation does the choosing.
His quartet is booked at the Vanguard from September 29 through October 4, with Micah Thomas on piano, Ryoma Takenaga on bass and Kweku Sumbry on drums. The club, by its own account, is widely regarded as the oldest jazz club in New York. The club says just about every giant of jazz has walked down its stairs to play there. This week the newest MacArthur fellow in jazz is the one on the bandstand.
From South Philly to Seventh Avenue
Wilkins grew up in the Philadelphia area. As a young teenager he came up through the Settlement Music School and the Philadelphia Clef Club of Jazz and Performing Arts, where he studied under the educator Lovett Hines. The Philadelphia station WRTI, which has followed him since he was a kid, first filmed him in its studio in 2011. Seven years later he came back as a Juilliard student with a new quartet of his own.
That band is still the core of his sound. Thomas and Sumbry were there at the start. Blue Note signed him, and his debut, Omega, came out in 2020. The pandemic stopped him from touring it. His second album, The 7th Hand, is the one that carried him out into the world. In 2024 he released Blues Blood, an album that grew out of a performance piece he had been shaping for years. He has since put out a three volume recording made live at the Vanguard.
I want to create moments for encounter, and I want those encounters to be beautiful.
The Village Vanguard record makes sense. Wilkins is a player who treats the room as part of the music. NPR's write up of the new fellows singles out live performances of Blues Blood that put a chef onstage beside the band, with the kitchen noise folded into the music. In NPR's telling, he makes a concert hall something you take in with more than your ears.
Care, Mystery and a Little Subversion
The foundation released a video interview with each fellow, and WRTI's Nate Chinen, who spent years as a jazz critic at The New York Times, pulled out a few of Wilkins's lines. "I'm writing music about how humans interact with each other," Wilkins says in the video. Chinen points out that the sentence sells the work short. It is still a fair summary of what makes his sets feel different.
He talks about the avant garde in unusual terms. In the same interview he describes something in abstraction that is "rooted in care," along with "a certain level of mystery and subversiveness." That is a useful key for anyone walking into the Vanguard this week without a map. The music can be loose and searching. It is also warm.
His circle reaches well past his own band. He has played with the Philadelphia tenor saxophonist Odean Pope, one of his elders from home. This past weekend, WRTI reports, his quartet was joined by the bassist William Parker and the drummer Jeff "Tain" Watts for a John Coltrane tribute that stretched into a single collective improvisation of more than 90 minutes. It was part of Ars Nova Workshop's Coltrane 100 Festival. Earlier this year he and Pope made RECESS, a site specific piece at the Power Market in North Philadelphia.
The rest of the 2026 class is a wide spread of disciplines. NPR's list includes a Buffalo sociologist who studies the ethics and politics of climate policy, the artist Christine Sun Kim and the novelist Bryan Washington. Wilkins is the youngest name on it.
The Room Downstairs
The Vanguard's house rules are simple. Its website asks that the audience silence their phones and keep conversation to a minimum. For a musician whose big idea is encounter, the people in the seats count as much as the people on the stand. Wilkins said as much in the MacArthur video. He hopes people will find beauty in the notes, in the way the band plays together and in the audience itself.
The club's history is thick with records made live in that room. Wilkins already has his. What the grant changes is freedom. Money with no strings means time to write, to try the stranger ideas and to keep the band together.
For now, the shows go on as booked. The run ends Sunday. Anyone who wants to hear what the foundation heard can still get downstairs before then. If this kind of long night in a small room is your idea of New York, it sits in the same spirit as the house band that never left Second Avenue. The difference this week is the news that walked in with the band.
