London jazz wizard Shabaka Hutchings: Sons of Kemet / The Comet Is Coming / Shabaka & the Ancestors

I guess you’re not gonna fly to New Orleans and catch a brass band with a tuba in a second line parade either. Oh well.

I'll have to be the contrarian here; Theon Cross's tuba annoys me on both his album, and on the Sons Of Kemet. Perhaps I just don't like tubas.

― mike t-diva

xp - oh God, don't get me started on Hot 8!

utter savagery!

i like tubas

more jazz tubas please

Yeah, you anti-tuba people are insane.

tubas are great, though I can't deny that they, like harps, have accumulated some unfortunate cultural baggage

where are people hearing the Kokoroko album? doesn't seem to be out here in Canada yet

It comes out on Friday 3/8. I got a promo. One track is streaming on Bandcamp:

https://kokoroko.bandcamp.com/

yeah I've heard that track (plus Abusey Junction ofc), just seemed liked people were praising the whole ep--maybe more of you are critics than I realized

or nabbed it on SLSK 😈

Two tracks of the EP Re on Apple Music.

The other track I’ve really liked from this scene is Pineapple by Blue Lab Beats featuring Moses Boyd. Delightful melting pot of house, afrobeat, high life and jazz.

I will defend the honor of tubas against all challengers

I won’t say that jazz bands lead by bass instrument players are always better, but they often are.

I saw Oscar Jerome live in Hackney last week; he plays guitar in Kokoroko, but mainly releases stuff under his own name (w/Joe Armon-Jones, Moses Boyd etc). Reminds me a lot of "One World" era John Martyn - that jazzy, dubby, spacey vibe. Great stuff, and he looks about 16.

I could take or leave the tuba on Fyah, love the saxophone player

https://www.npr.org/2019/03/07/700510300/first-listen-the-comet-is-coming-trust-in-the-lifeforce-of-the-deep-mystery

I thought I should post this here as well for UK headz: Shabaka Hutchings "Vangelis/Spiritual Jazz" project, full album streaming on NPR.

N had CBeebies on the other day and it was a program called Band Jam all about music, and both the tuba players who’ve been in SoK were on! Which was unexpected but cool. N was not impressed that I have records by them and have seen them live.

Full astral flying album is now on iTunes. It definitely has its moments but there is some pretty ropey drumming in places.

I interviewed all 3 members of The Comet Is Coming for Tidal:

http://read.tidal.com/article/comet-is-coming-afro-futurism-2

Some of the Comet album is kinda ragged but damn when it flies. It's a fool's game to summon Ayler but there he is and The Universe Wakes Up damn near makes the top of my head come off.

I'm seeing them in NYC tomorrow night - looking forward to it.

I am envious. Great interview too, cheers.

Is that show sold out do you know?

The club's website says it is, but who knows? You might get in if you just walk up. They're also playing Philadelphia on Wednesday, if that's accessible to you.

Thanks. Monday nights not usually good for me and friend who was interested in going has something else but maybe I’ll just call an audible tomorrow and walk up if I feel like it.

Anyway I just went to website and it seemed to say SOLD OUT. Looking forward to your report later in the week;)

The moment when Super Zodiac peaks is incredible.

Love the new Comet album, even (especially?) when it is very corny.

Nearest gig to me is in japan but too early for me to be in Japan. I would like to see them live.

Gig last night was great. Dan Leavers (keyboardist) took a very long, Alice Coltrane-ish (in devotional mode) unaccompanied solo at one point; by contrast, when Hutchings was playing unaccompanied, he basically repeated one phrase with more and more energy until people's heads were on the brink of exploding. Bliss vs. mania, basically.

In DC Thursday.

^^going.

I was there. I liked em when Shabaka was loud and the drummer and keyboardist were playing fast rhythms. I liked them less when the keyboardist was doing fusion prog spacey sounds and gesturing to the audience to cheer louder

oh man

lol

i really dug it. those deep crunchy sythns sounded so good

As promised, I wrote up the show for my Stereogum column.

Shabaka Hutchings is very tall. I’m gonna guess at least 6’5″ and maybe 6’6″. I’m 6’2″, and he loomed over me when we met last year. On Monday night, I saw him perform with The Comet Is Coming at New York’s Mercury Lounge, and he towered over his two bandmates, keyboardist Dan “Danalogue” Leavers and drummer Max “Betamax” Hallett, too. (With TCIC, he calls himself King Shabaka.)

The Comet Is Coming have just released their second full-length, Trust In The Lifeforce Of The Deep Mystery, as part of Hutchings’ deal with Impulse! Records. (They put out Your Queen Is A Reptile, by his group Sons Of Kemet, last year, and there’s supposed to be a second album by Shabaka And The Ancestors, on which he collaborates with top-shelf South African jazz players, on the way.) TCIC isn’t Hutchings’ group, though, creatively speaking. They started out as a duo called Soccer96, and Leavers and Hallett still make music under that name. Hutchings saw them live and wanted to collaborate. The combination is astonishing, particularly on the new album. Their earlier material was a little less focused, more about vibe than compositions, but the new stuff is both viscerally exciting—Hallett is a ferocious drummer—and beautiful.

Leavers’ Roland synths and pedal boards are almost defiantly retro; there wasn’t a laptop to be seen anywhere onstage at the Mercury Lounge. He plays it all, live and in the moment. The primary melodies often have a synthwave feel, with some improvisatory flourishes that recall Alice Coltrane’s 1980s devotional music. Hallett, playing a small kit belonging to the club, still managed to create a big, powerful sound, cranking the beat up to at times astonishing tempos.

Hutchings is almost anti-virtuosic in his approach. When I interviewed him last year, he talked about playing what he calls “stupid sax.” He explained it as follows: “You go through college and there’s all these things in the air, in the zeitgeist that says, ‘You need to be better.’ And it’s come from working in the capitalist system. We need to accumulate more jazz chops. We need more information, we need more facility, we need more everything. But what about if we don’t need any more anything? What if we need to go back to a place where we just have our creativity, and a piece of metal? And I call that stupid sax. You take the saxophone and you just get ignorant. I practice — I’ll transcribe and I’ll practice out of étude books, but the real thing is when I’m onstage trying to actually approach the instrument from a point of unknowing, trying to unlearn all that stuff. I really don’t want to sound like Mark Turner or Joe Lovano, cause they just sound too good. They sound like they know what they’re doing. I’d rather be that guy in the corner with people going ‘Uhhh…I guess he can play.'”

He can definitely play. He’s not a big-voiced, resonant player like Coltrane or Rollins or JD Allen, and he doesn’t construct elaborate solos. He goes for a hoarse, crying sound rooted in R&B honking, with a little bit of reverb and distortion from a pedal, and he grabs onto phrases and digs his teeth in, turning them into something mantra-like, driving the audience wild with pure repetition and force. He even did this during an unaccompanied solo passage, grinding a sax riff into the stage until the audience was all but screaming.

There were gentle moments, too, of course. After about twenty minutes of manic fury, Leavers began a version of “Unity,” from the new album, with an extended synth solo that was part prog and part New Age, and the piece itself was quite beautiful, with Hallett playing a rhythm that seemed to owe something to West African music. But the fast, stomping performances of pieces like “Summon The Fire” and “Super Zodiac,” which blended seamlessly together into one long stretch of jackhammer drumming, pulsing synths and fierce sax, were what set the tone for the night. A woman at the lip of the stage was dancing furiously throughout the set, and people throughout the packed room were bouncing around, nodding their heads and jumping in place.

A friend likened the keyboard sound to Pink Floyd...well Pink Floyd do have a (bootleg?) album called In Celebration of The Comet

Yeah drummer Hallet is great and of course integral to the trio

I love that quote about 'Stupid Sax' the anthesis of those Berkley School of Jazz pricks that used to infects Umbria Jazz back when I use to go semi-regularly.

Driftglass by the Seed Ensemble is keeping me entertained today.

Using this thread as more of a general London Jazz thread: last night's Total Refreshment Centre show at the Barbican was pretty epic. Theon Cross, Seed Ensemble, Alabaster DePlume, Emma Jean Thackeray, etc. Boiler Room streamed the whole thing:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CsSEnExiyrU

Was sadly too tired to stay for the DJ sets in the lobby, which went on until 1am.

There were copies of a book about TRC being sold - stuff like that and the We Out Here festival makes me worried the hype might be getting a bit out of hand. Tho TRC *was* founded in 2012 so I guess there's enough material...

https://youtu.be/z_PUqETN2yw

been chilling to these lot today - Mark Kavuma's fine The Banger Factory album.

I also posted this in the main jazz thread - Sons of Kemet live at the Big Ears festival earlier this year:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_a4fgVKpMiw

Perhaps beyond the official remit of this thread but I am loving the Nerija album.

The Somerset House gig was astonishing, they had the Boris Johnson 'flag-waving picaninnies' quote up onstage for the whole thing, the whole thing just seemed to rise and rise in intensity including an astonishing middle section with a succession of MCs over the top. Including D Double E, which as well as being awesome was also kind of heartwarming, the sense of a circle being closed, making explicit what had been apparent since the start.

Sons of Kemet played Brooklyn on Tuesday night with Irreversible Entanglements (Moor Mother fronting an Ayler-esque quartet). I wanted to go but couldn't.

Perhaps beyond the official remit of this thread but I am loving the Nerija album.

https://boomkat.com/products/abstractions-of-reality-past-and-incredible-feathers

will be looking out for this one