Kenny Garrett and Svoy Release New Single “Ascendence”

Kenny Garrett and Svoy
Release New Single “Ascendence”
From Upcoming Album Who Killed AI?

Audacious Collaboration with Electronic Producer Svoy

CD & Digital Out April 12th | Limited Edition Vinyl Out April 20 Exclusively with Record Store Day via Mack Avenue Records

March 1, 2024: Today, NEA Jazz Master and GRAMMY® winning alto and soprano saxophonist Kenny Garrett shared the new track “Ascendence” from 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. Who Killed AI? will be released on April 12th via Mack Avenue Records, and is currently available for preorder here. The album will also be available on vinyl as a Record Store Day exclusive.

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.

On “Ascendence,” the saxophonist notes, “I’m thinking about Miles … playing more of the chromatic melodies” that Garrett would have performed between the time he joined the trumpeter’s band in 1987 and Miles’ final concert, at the Hollywood Bowl in 1991. The track also features Garrett doing his hilariously accurate impression of Miles’ raspy speaking voice. “Miles used to count this strange way, where he would say, ‘Kenny — 10teen, 11teen, 12teen, 13teen.’ And I’m like, ‘What!? What is that?’” Garrett laughs.

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.”

Missing Piece Group