Jazz
Tomoki Sanders has released “Jazz Is Just a Game”, with Nicholas Payton on trumpet, keyboards and vocals and Mélanie Charles on vocals and flute. It is out on Brownswood Recordings, the second advance from the debut album Gilles Peterson’s label has lined up for this last quarter of the year; the first, “The Third Eye”, came out on 22 June.
Sanders explains the title this way: “’Jazz Is Just a Game’ is my compositional response to a script that Black musicians have been expected to follow for generations: romanticized suffering, financial exploitation, addiction and mental health struggles, premature death, and the idea that an artist somehow becomes more valuable once they are gone.”
Sanders plays tenor and soprano saxophone, lives in New York and is the child of Pharoah Sanders, alongside whom Sanders had performed. European stages have mostly come by way of Kassa Overall’s band, and Sanders appears on “Cream”, the album Overall released in 2025.
Text by Aina Torrents