Wind power
Now’s the time when flutes, grime and polemics combine. By Danny Eccleston.
Sons Of Kemet ★★★★
Black To The Future IMPULSE! CD/DL/LP
THAT SONS Of Kemet are the key group at the epicentre of Britain’s new jazz reverberations is unquestionable, but in some ways they are unlikely poster boys. A tuba player, two drummers, and a saxophonist in Shabaka Hutchings inclined to forego lyrical flights in favour of Morse code staccatos: these are quirky characteristics, and despite a live dynamic that appeals to rump-shakers and chinstrokers alike, their albums have been far too idiosyncratic to serve as a template for any who would follow, and Black To
The Future is a reminder that they remain representatives of no one but themselves.
A combination of group performances cut in late 2019 – long jams that unlocked the most telepathic grooves they’ve yet put on record – with lockdown overdubs, most notably stacks of exotic woodwind instruments played by Hutchings (not to mention, on the track Hustle, a conch shell from Martinique played by tubist Theon Cross), that add dreamlike layers, it’s sonically deeper and more emotionally engaging, from start to finish, than any previous SOK release. And while vocal contributions on jazz recordings tend to polarise, SOK have doubled down, with five out of 11 tracks featuring rappers and poets.
Yet Kojey Radical (on
Hustle, against Cross’s sound-system-sized tuba grunt) and foundational grime artist D Double E (on
For The Culture) underline what is already gritty and polemical in the Sons Of Kemet sound, while Moor Mother’s spooked chant on the relentless Pick Up Your Burning Cross is defiance incarnate. Joshua Idehen tops and tails affairs with sceptical, Last Poets-adjacent takes on white liberal empathy in the BLM age. “I do not want your equality,” he states on Field Negus, and more challengingly, over SOK’s free jazz squalls on the closing track, Black: “Leave us alone.”
Other inspired collaborators include neo-spiritual-jazz free radical Angel Bat Dawid and venerated British tenorist Steve Williamson – shiny and fluid against Hutchings’ dark mutterings on Field Negus – but ultimately it’s the voices of SOK themselves that sound most clearly. Drummers Tom Skinner and Edward Wakili-Hick are more meshed, and visceral, than ever (it’s hard to imagine the Seb Rochford-included lineup of SOK’s first two albums coming on so strong) and Cross feels like the guardian of the group’s swing, especially on the calypso-ish Think Of Home.
Meanwhile, Hutchings’ mastery, not only of the saxophone but also in charging largely instrumental music with meaning, seems complete. Combining Caribbean rhythms, Afrocentric flutes and grime (oh, and some ‘jazz’) is not an accidental delineation of the songlines flowing through the African diaspora, or the problems of articulating a way forward, in terms of race and power structures, that will be heard and acted upon. On the album’s standout Let The Circle Be Unbroken his tenor becomes a desperate collage of shouts and gasps until it occurs to you, with a chill of
horror, what’s happening. He’s choking.