HEARING the Birmingham-born tenor saxophonist Xhosa Cole playing in a trio context at the Vortex in Dalston, with the precise, ever-inventive and complex rhythmic drumming of Mark Sanders and bassist Neil Charles’s deep power and bow artistry, every listener understood the swinging verve of his horn, his circles of sound and his ability to combine familiar melody with new pathways of improvisation, as the Vortex opened its doors and the trio drew human fire and inspiration from the cosmos of humanity outside.

“I was born in Birmingham, at City Hospital in 1996. My mum was a youth worker and my dad a young people’s African storyteller,” he told me. “I liked all sorts of music as a teenager. One of my older brothers was a dancer, the other a musician. They exposed me to many different types of black contemporary music.

“I started learning saxophone at Andy Hamilton’s Ladywood Community Music School at 11 and played a little keyboard before that. My teacher was Wizzard's keyboard player, who taught around Birmingham and was featured on I Wish It Could Be Christmas Every Day.

“My first and strongest jazz inspiration is Sonny Rollins, primarily because of our mutual Caribbean connection. I resonate with his music, and his rhythmic and melodic language.”

I asked him: is there a Birmingham “sound,” as so many powerful musicians have been bred there such as altoist Soweto Kinch, who guests on Xhosa’s album K(no)w Them, K(no)w Us.

“Birmingham has a very specific sound. So many communities live in the same location, and because it's outside of London, it operates and develops in an incubator-style environment. I love playing with people around me in Birmingham, notably Soweto Kinch,” he said.

Xhosa’s album includes tunes by Monk, Ornette, Tadd Dameron and Lee Morgan. Does he feel a part of the mainstream jazz tradition? “I feel part of the community, the history and family tree of great musicians who form part of this jazz tradition.”

His powerful urge to improvise was fully manifest at the Vortex, playing with Charles and Sanders. I asked what it is about playing with them that fires up his musical imagination and artistry?

“Both Mark and Neil are very childlike players but who have many, many years of experience and maturity, which helps me develop as a young player. Both coming from Afro backgrounds, there’s a mutual connection in our relationship to black music and black rhythms that brings out a particular element of free improvisation which is a big part of the music we make as a trio.”

To me, Xhosa has a unity within his artistry that reminds of his great Caribbean forebear, Joe Harriott, who played everything: free, with compositions, in the tradition and everything else too.

He told me: “I think there are no contradictions in different forms of improvised music. The different expressions are different angles of the same thing we are trying to get close to: to the dualities of human and divine expression — similar to looking at a statue from different positions giving you varied two-dimensional images.”

Why the title of his album? “K(no)w Them, K(no)w Us, is an expansion of the Dizzy Gillespie quote about Louis Armstrong — ‘Know Him, Know Me’ — referring to the fact that we exist within a long lineage of amazing excellence of black music across the globe. This was a homage to the forefathers and foremothers who helped develop this music that I'm now learning so much through.”

What about future plans? “Mark, Neil and I are hoping to make an album soon, definitely! I've also got the Ibeji album coming out, featuring seven duets with different percussionists from across the African diaspora, one of which is Mark. We explore themes of ancestors, masks, duality, rituals, codes and brotherhood.”

In the mean time, go and hear the soaring Xhosa sound when it blows your way, and get hold of K(no)w Them, K(no)w Us.

K(no)w Them, K(no)w Us is released by Stoney Lane Records.