Immanuel Wilkins Quartet: Live At The Village Vanguard Announced Across Three Volumes

GRAMMY-nominated alto saxophonist Immanuel Wilkins has announced his first-ever live album, Immanuel Wilkins Quartet: Live At The Village Vanguard, a searing three-volume document capturing his acclaimed quartet in full flight at the legendary Village Vanguard. Volume 1 arrives March 20 on LP, CD, and digital formats, followed by the digital release of Volume 2 on April 17 and Volume 3 on May 15.

Recorded in the storied basement club in New York City, the album documents Wilkins’ working quartet—Micah Thomas on piano, Ryoma Takenaga on bass, and Kweku Sumbry on drums—navigating expansive interpretations of Wilkins’ original compositions in a room synonymous with the living history of jazz. With this release, Wilkins adds his name to the lineage of artists who have made definitive statements within these walls, joining a pantheon that includes John Coltrane, Sonny Rollins, Bill Evans, Elvin Jones, Dizzy Gillespie, and Dexter Gordon.

The project is introduced with a stirring live performance of “CHARANAM,” the devotional composition by Alice Coltrane originally featured on her 1981 recording Turiya Sings. In Wilkins’ hands, the piece becomes both invocation and declaration—an offering that bridges spiritual jazz lineage and contemporary improvisational urgency.

In the album’s liner notes, scholar and writer Tina M. Campt reflects on the weight and resonance of the venue itself. The Village Vanguard, she writes, “makes you feel the presence of so many performances that are still very much alive in the room.” For Wilkins, the recording becomes a deliberate sono-spatial experiment—an effort to channel and reactivate the accumulated sonic memory embedded in the club’s walls, floorboards, and ceiling. Live At The Village Vanguard, Campt continues, is “a bold endeavor to summon the Vanguard’s sonic history and make it audible,” framing the performance as a practice of improvisational sounding, congregational listening, and devotional ritual.

Across its three volumes, the album presents a sweeping portrait of Wilkins’ compositional and improvisational language. Volume 1 features “WARRIORS,” “COMPOSITION II,” “CHARANAM,” and “ETERNAL,” establishing the quartet’s dynamic range—from meditative lyricism to surging collective momentum. Volume 2 expands the terrain with “THE BIG COUNTRY,” “WAITING PT. 1,” “CITRINE,” “GRACE AND MERCY,” and “GO ‘HEAD GET DOWN,” while Volume 3 concludes the arc with “RING SHOUT,” “COMPOSITION IX,” “DOLLA$,” and “PUT 100 ON THE BLUE CHAIN,” underscoring Wilkins’ ability to fuse structural rigor, spiritual depth, and rhythmic fire.

At the heart of the recording is the chemistry of a band that has grown together through years of performance. Thomas’ harmonic imagination and crystalline touch, Takenaga’s grounded yet elastic bass lines, and Sumbry’s textural, propulsive drumming create a framework that allows Wilkins to soar—probing, testifying, and conversing with the room itself. The result is not merely a live album, but a document of presence: four musicians engaging the moment with intensity and purpose in one of jazz’s most sacred spaces.

With Immanuel Wilkins Quartet: Live At The Village Vanguard, Wilkins stakes a bold claim within a tradition that reveres both history and forward motion. It is a statement of arrival and evolution, honoring the echoes of the past while carving new resonances into the Vanguard’s enduring sonic archive.