Jazz with an AfroBritish accent
As jazz puts down roots in cities around the world, it increasingly takes on a diverse array of musical accents. At the 30th annual San Jose Jazz Summer Fest, Sons of Kemet is just one example on the festival bill showcasing the thriving jazz scene around the globe.
The quartet, led by British-Barbadian tenor saxophonist and bass clarinetist Shabaka Hutchings, reflects the Caribbean heritage of many Afro-Anglo musicians coming out of the United Kingdom. Surging, celebratory and politically charged, the group’s music reflects “growing up listening to sound system culture,” says Kemet tuba player Theon Cross.
Built on the trap set tandem of Tom Skinner and Eddie Hick, the quartet’s latest album, 2018’s “Your Queen Is a Reptile,” has made powerful inroads on both sides of the Atlantic. The release won Album of the Year honors at the U.K.’s JazzFM Awards, and Beyoncé’s recent Netflix concert film/documentary “Home
coming” prominently features the Sons of Kemet track “My Queen Is Harriet Tubman.”
It has also brought Sons of Kemet’s tour to the United States for its second time, with a concert set at SFJazz’s Miner Auditorium on Wednesday, Aug. 7, before wrapping up its U.S. run as headliner on the Jazz Beyond Stage at the Summer Fest on Saturday, Aug. 10.
With a rambunctious, polyphonic group sound that references jazz’s New Orleans brassband roots, Sons of Kemet has honed a dense, percussiondriven rhythmic feel from reggae and carnival — “that West Indian thing that’s always been within jazz,” Cross says.
Cross’ tuba is key to the band’s sound. The instrument was present at jazz’s creation, but by the end of the 1920s the tuba had largely been supplanted by standup bass. Aside from Bill Barber’s contributions to Miles Davis’ “Birth of the Cool” nonet and Ray Draper’s astounding bebop in the 1950s, tuba played almost no role in jazz until the ’70s, when Bob Stewart’s supple work with alto saxophonist Arthur Blythe introduced a gutbucket avantgarde concept that’s been too little explored by other leaders.
While Cross naturally covers the low end, he’s also honed difficult techniques that allow him to play in unison with Hutchings.
“I’ve got to fill a lot of space,” Cross says. “It’s made me lean more toward my upper register, so I’m not so far away from the tenor. We’re incorporating a lot of specific rhythms from soca and reggae, and it gets really fast and really intense.”
In many ways, Sons of Kemet grew out of conceptual seeds planted in the mid1980s, when multiinstrumentalist Courtney Pine and the Jazz Warriors launched an Afrocentric movement in London. Like the Jazz Warriors, Hutchings is steeped in jazz history, but he also has been influenced by contemporary currents in hiphop and club music. He also leads Shabaka and the Ancestors, and plays in the funk and electronica-laced collective trio known as The Comet Is Coming.
And there’s even more interesting music where Sons of Kemet come from.
“I would say there is definitely a mindset in London to be ourselves,” Cross says. “If we were trying to play an American perspective back to them it wouldn’t go down as well. We’re trying to play our own perspective first rather than play back a style that’s not our culture.
“We’re educating in jazz and paying our respects, but we’re not Americans. We’re black British and putting that at the forefront of our expression.”