When composer and sax player Shabaka Hutchings met his bandmates in Mercury-nominated trio The Comet is Coming it was a match made in jazz heaven, he tells

Gilles Peterson’s Brownswood label next month. There, i n post - punk exoticists Melt Yourself Down, and there, as a sideman with everyone from Heliocentrics, Polar Bear and S u n R a A r ke s t r a — the big band founded by the late jazz jester and Afrofuturism pioneer — to electronic acts Floating Points and Leafcutter John. Not to mention a roll- call of cameos. The man is everywhere.

“It only seems that way,” he tells me. cross-genre ding-dong in Portugal a few hours later.

Two days after that they wowed Shoreditch’s African Street Style Festival — then Hutchings swapped the hooded cape he wears in Kemet for a vest with a peace sign and went to play another European festival with The Comet is Coming.

“It’s fine, I don’t need to sleep any more,” he quips, blowing his nose with a honk. Next week he’s off to play an Ancestors gig in Johannesburg. Having had a South African (now ex) girlfriend, he’s been to-ing and fro-ing to her motherland for several years. “I can see how touring musicians burn out,” he says. “The adrenaline pushes you through these high-energy gigs but then you crash all at once.”

For now, though, Hutchings is thriving on the explosive synergy that comes with t h row i n g jazz, e l e c t ro n i c a , p s yc h e d e l i a , Ca r i b b e a n rhy t h ms, Nigerian Afrobeat, B-movie silliness and highbrow philosophy into the pot.

Critics agree: The Comet is Coming’s debut Channel the Spirits (released on the Leaf label) has been nominated for the Mercury Prize alongside albums by David Bowie and Radiohead. Which, for a record that kicks off with two minutes of brass caterwauling and spacey bleeps from a band without a vocalist and a sax