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Bandleader and reed player Hutchings was born in London, but partly raised in Barbados. His new album with Sons of Kemet highlights the criss-crossing trajectories of African musical diasporas.
Bandleader and reed player Hutchings was born in London, but partly raised in Barbados. His new album with Sons of Kemet highlights the criss-crossing trajectories of African musical diasporas.
Shabaka Hutchings (Photo: Hayley Louisa Brown)
Shabaka Hutchings’ music makes fans dance and think. The dual ability to get hips swaying and synapses firing has made him one of the brightest stars in the jazz universe. Based in London and named after an Egyptian pharaoh, the 37-year-old multi-reedist has made waves with three bands, all of which are signed to the Impulse record label: Shabaka And The Ancestors, The Comet Is Coming and Sons of Kemet. In the 2020 DownBeat Critics Poll, Hutchings topped the category Rising Star Jazz Artist of the Year, and Shabaka And The Ancestors won the category Rising Star Jazz Group. Those accolades are the latest evidence that fans far beyond the U.K. are championing his artistic output.
Sons of Kemet’s first release on the legendary jazz imprint Impulse!, 2018’s
Your Queen Is a Reptile, was a scintillating statement of intent. It was a record that weaponised bandleader Shabaka Hutchings’ musical virtuosity and used it to deliver a scathing rebuke of colonialism and the British establishment, while simultaneously serving as a series of paeans to influential black women like Harriet Tubman, Angela Davis and Mamie Phipps Clark. Field Negus, the opening track on follow-up
Black to the Future, appears to be bringing the curtain up on a similarly political work, but to pigeonhole the record that way would be hugely reductive.