TALKING to Soweto Kinch, a burning saxophonist, composer and rapper, and an outstanding musician who I’ve been hearing regularly over the last 25 years, I had to pinch myself to realise that he is almost a jazz veteran.

Born in 1978 in Ladbroke Grove, west London, two years after the heroic South African young people’s resistance that bears his name, he spent his childhood in Wandsworth, south London, with his parents — the Barbadian dramatist Don Kinch and his English/Jamaican Shakespearian actor mother, Yvette Harris. As a youth he moved to Birmingham, the setting of his superbly narrative early album, A Life in the Day of B19: Tales of the Tower Block.

He remembers well when his father took him with his theatre company to the Edinburgh Festival to perform his play, Foxtrot in the Sand. With him were formidable veteran jazz griots, the Guyanese percussionist Frank Holder and the Detroit tap dancer, Will Gaines. “They were like uncles to me. They helped demystify jazz, which until then, seemed a little remote.”

He studied history at Hertford College, Oxford, but it was meeting US jazzmen like Wynton Marsalis in 1991 — “He was a sage, and treated me warmly, like an elder cousin” — and the pathfinding drummer Max Roach, whose music had emblazoned the US civil rights struggle, that brought the young Soweto fully into jazz.

“I played some very basic saxophone with Max,” says Kinch, “and he asked me about my heritage. I said it was Barbados, and he said he could recognise it in my speech, because many Barbadian slaves had been brought to the Southern US to work on the plantations. ‘I’m from North Carolina, you’re from Barbados,’ he said. ‘Listen! We did it, you can do it too’!”

He certainly has done, and continues to do so. On November 14 at the Barbican, along with the London Symphony Orchestra, he will be performing the third part of his history-telling trilogy following The Black Peril (2020) and White Juju (2021), called Soundtrack of the Apocalypse.

“I’m using the word ‘apocalypse’ in its true meaning,” he says, “revelation, uncovering, unveiling. I’m trying not to make the stitching of its narrative too obvious, but to give listeners the space to reflect and understand. The disjunct between what we are conditioned to hear by Musk and Trump and their corporate power, and the reality we see around us is profound. Mass demonstrations in support of Palestine are derisively dismissed as hate marches when hundreds and thousands are marching to expose that Gazan babies and children are being slaughtered.”

When I said that I believe the multitudes on those marches are the real England of the future — multiracial, multireligious, Asian, African, African-Caribbean, white, Jewish — all of us, the many not the few, he agrees with me.

“But the opposing interconnectedness between genocide, weapons manufacture, environmental disaster, Netanyahu’s settler colonial violence, Musk’s empire of lies and Trump’s white supremacist expansion of corporate power is also the truth for us all to see. Yet many people stare at this truth, internalise it, retreat into themselves and blame those who are suffering the most. The billionaire class nexus has never been more powerful and rampant.”

In the sleeve notes of White Juju Soweto writes about the upsurge of anti-racist activism across the world following the racist police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. Prophetically, he wrote that this “may only be momentary” and that “toxic nationalism” would soon re-exert its reactionary power. He was right — Trump’s militarisation of US cities, Musk’s alliances with European neonazis, and Tommy Robinson in his Maccabi Tel Aviv shirt.

But Soweto is a prime historian and a unique musical chronicler which he demonstrated with great multisonic and multimedia dexterity in The Black Peril, the story of the 1919 — 21 black resistance throughout postwar Britain. He wants an “intercultural, intergenerational dialogue between all of us” to emerge from his Soundtrack. “It shouldn’t leave us in despair,” he adds. “I want us to realise what it feels like, viscerally, to be in receipt of the truth. I want it to inspire listeners to write their own stories. Stories are malleable, they give us a million ways of delivering the truth.”

He used a new word for me, although as a teacher I realised that I had been doing it all my working life. When I call it “The Pedagogy of Story,” he declares: “We need to narratavise, to put our specifics, our stories, into a world framework so that we can share them, learn from them, empathise with them.”

What about his choice of musical ensemble? Why a symphony orchestra rather than a more common jazz unit like a quartet, a sextet, a tentet or a big band?

“It’s such a beautiful opportunity to play with the London Symphony Orchestra,” he replies. “I started out small-scale with Soundtrack of the Apocalypse with the beat of a drum machine. Then it was recorded in a studio setting with a septet. Now the Barbican concert completes the cycle with a symphony orchestra.

“Every note was conceived from my imagination. For centuries the implications of class and race have told black people that such orchestras are not for them, and that has held the music back. If they don’t see race, why do we keep being erased? There’s still a huge amount of work to be done, but now we have a symphony orchestra!”

The marvellous Max Roach would have shared his thoughts immediately and instinctively. Soweto is “doing it” and nothing will stop him. As he told me: “It’s time to rip the chains off!”

Soundtrack Of The Apocalypse will be performed with the London Symphony Orchestra at the Barbican on November 13. For tickets and more information see: barbican.org.uk.