King Khan Pays Tribute to Influences on First-Ever Jazz Album

Indie rocker King Khan will release his first-ever jazz album,The Infinite Ones (due October 30, 2020 via Khannibalism/Ernest Jenning Record Co.), and just issued album opener, “Wait Till The Stars Burn.” The album features contributions from Marshall Allen and Knoel Scott (Sun Ra Arkestra) and John Convertino and Martin Wenk (Calexico), among many others.

“Sometimes, a work of art comes unintentionally from a place from deep within the soul,” says Khan in a press release. “It meanders and flops onto a table and sits and waits for its birth.”

The album begins with “Wait Till The Stars Burn,” a “planetary ode” to the Sun. The second track, “Tribute to the Pharaohs Den,” offers a requiem for Danny Ray Thompson (R.I.P.) of the Sun Ra Arkestra. Both tracks feature Marshall Allen and Knoel Scott (of the Sun Ra Arkestra). The album ends with a requiem for Hal Willner (R.I.P.) whose devotion to “celebrating the weird and insane was like an insatiable thirst leading to deep introspection and joy in harmony and sonic dissidence.”

“These compositions have all come from this place inside my bipolar, seroquil ridden mind,” says Khan. “It is as much a tribute to the great composers who have inspired me; Alice Coltrane, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Philip Kelan Cohran, Bernard Herrmann, Ennio Morricone, Miles Davis, Sun Ra, John Carpenter, Quincy Jones, Old Bollywood, film noir, to name just a few.”

Khan says film, in particular, has inspired him over his 23-year career.

“I have had the great opportunity to score several films all of which never got any commercial fame,” he says. “These films were made from the blood and sweat of film directors and their crews who tirelessly made incredible documents that were ultimately ignored by humanity. But that never stopped them nor will it stop me. These tracks are from the infinite celluloid that runs deep in my mind, body and soul. In my lifetime, I never thought I would see the deaths of ‘celluloid’ or ‘analog recording.’ I refuse to accept the coroner reports on said fatalities, so here is my offering to the canon of cinematic overtures and analog self-preservation, for the films in our heads yet to be made.”