The trip didn’t only impact the imagery, it reshaped howVenna saw the project. He already had a title in mind, but his detour to the cradle of civilization inspired him to change tack.“The photo didn’t resemble the name I had before, so I decided to self-title it,” he explains. In Arabic, Malik translates as “King” or “Leader.” Looking at his stance in the photo, he saw himself holding court. Even more significantly, the image captured integral facets of his identity. “The water was shaped like the continent of Africa, it had earth tones, it had my red, yellow, and green scarf that I like because I’m Jamaican,” he explains.“It had my saxophone in it and a view—all the components that I like.” In the years since he had arrived on the scene with his 2021 debut EP Venology , Venna had established himself as an outlier within Britain’s flourishing jazz renaissance, appealing to jazz purists, R&B lovers, and U.K. drill enthusiasts alike.Along the way, he’d performed on and contributed to critically acclaimed album projects including Burna Boy’s Grammy-winning Twice asTall , and longtime collaborator Yussef Dayes’s Ivor Novello Award-winning Black Classical Music . “I feel like I’m the fish that can speak many languages,” he says.“I can speak to the proper jazz man, but I can also speak to the pop star, the rapper from L.A., the Rasta, or the Afrobeats star.” As Venna’s first full-length body of work, Malik was a culmination of his growth as a musician, bandleader, and sonic architect up until this point. Parallel to this, he was refining a visual language that would be fully realized with Malik . “The Malik artwork feels like a full-circle moment connecting to Venology, even though that wasn’t the intention. When I made Venology , I wasn’t really traveling like that. Since that project, I’ve been to every continent other than Antarctica. So, it shows a full 360 of how far I’ve come.” The shoot for Venology was, naturally, simpler in scale: its backdrop was a block of flats in Dulwich.That cover was an outlet for Venna’s then-new obsession with Super 8 cameras. “I wanted to shoot on film because that’s when I started falling in love with that form,” he says. “It’s a lot more expensive, but you can’t fake it. You have to be more intentional.” It was an aesthetic in sync with his analog sound. “I’m an old spirit, so even with my music, I record a lot of it to tape, and run it through compressors that are older than me. That’s what gives the music its warmth and texture.” That commitment to the often-painstaking process of distilling a moment or feeling into something timeless ledVenna to explore other forms of visual expression. For the cover of his second EP, 2023’s Equinox , he opted for a painting to illustrate its songs.The choice followed visits to Chicago art galleries with the “Black romanticist” painter, Barka.“He was showing me the art world in a way I’d never really been exposed to,”Venna says.“He opened my mind to seeing it as a medium similar to music but in a physical form.” On one of these expeditions, he remembers being struck by a painting that seemed to articulate issues he was battling, as he
blend into each other. Its songs are at once smoldering, moody, expansive, and rhythmically robust. Adorning its packaging is an evocative photo of the twenty- six-year-old amidst the epic scenery of Fayoum, Egypt, standing majestically at the edge of a dune with his sax, as he gazes out over a body of water. It appears as if the landscape surrounding Venna was painted, or at least heavily edited in post-production. Venna confirms the image is, in fact, a testament to the photography skills of Elliot Hensford, who art-directed the album along with TJ Sawyerr.“That’s literally the shot we took,” he says.“As you can see, I’m literally on the edge. If I went any further, I would have dropped down and hurt myself.” Listening to Malik is like being submerged into a mystic world that pierces through each of the senses. Despite drawing from a broad spectrum of influences, including contemporary R&B, hip- hop, dub, and indie music, it feels like an extension of the spiritual jazz tradition of Don Cherry, Leon Thomas, John Coltrane, and Pharaoh Sanders. Egypt, long associated with spiritual symbolism and ancient cosmology, was a logical backdrop for its visual tapestry. “At that time, it was Ramadan, so the whole country was fasting, and we joined in,”Venna recalls. “It was a good time, a very slow time as well.We just shot when we needed to.” One excursion into the desert evolved into something with more permanence than Venna had intended. “We were meant to go to Egypt just to shoot press shots,” he explains. “TJ and Elliot told me that, [for the same cost of shooting] in a London studio, we could go to Egypt for a week. So, I said,‘Let’s go. Let’s have a moment, let’s have a trip.’” Looking back at the rushes, his eyes alighted on the crowning piece of iconography that would come to define the album. “Seeing the photo for the first time, I thought it was too epic to just be a press shot,” he says.
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