The podcast

The Cutting Contest

Every episode puts a modern player across the table from an all-time great. Two musicians, one city or one lineage between them, and a conversation about what they share.

Episode 1

The Saint and the Kid from Upper Darby

Immanuel Wilkins meets John Coltrane, born one hundred years ago this September. Two church kids from the same city, seventy years apart. This episode traces that thread: the churches that trained them both, and the sound each one built out of it.

Subscribe anywhere: RSS feed. Spotify and Apple Podcasts listings coming as they approve the feed.

Thelonious Monk, Howard McGhee, Roy Eldridge, and Teddy Hill outside Minton's Playhouse, 1947 — Thelonious Monk with Howard McGhee, Roy Eldridge, and Teddy Hill at Minton's Playhouse, New York, 1947. Episode 1 visits Monk's 1957 classroom, the Five Spot. Photograph by William P. Gottlieb, Library of Congress, public domain.

How we make it

The Cutting Contest is produced with AI voice performance, built on scripts we write and fact-check ourselves. The score is original, composed in-house for the show; no copyrighted recordings appear anywhere in the series. Every factual claim in every episode is independently fact-checked before release. Where a story is a legend rather than a documented fact, we say so on air, plainly, in the moment. Read the full AI disclosure.

Coming soon

Episode 2: Samara Joy meets Sarah Vaughan

Coming soon.