Sons of Kemet: Your Queen Is A Reptile
impulse!

Shabaka Hutchings is hardly your typical UK-based saxophonist. Born in 1984 in London, he lived from six to sixteen in Barbados, during which he took up clarinet and developed an interest in classical and calypso bands—but not jazz: “When I was in the Caribbean,” he's said, “kids my age saw jazz as music for old people or rich people.” That stance would undergo radical revision back in Birmingham when, having befriended alto saxist/MC Soweto Kinch at weekly live jams, Hutchings realized jazz, as a form, was considerably more malleable than he'd first thought. In his own case, that meant allowing all of his own Caribbean influences to seep into his playing, in fact so thoroughly that labeling him a jazz artist is somewhat misleading—even if his jazz cred is substantial: in addition to jazz-related nominations and awards, he's performed with Jack DeJohnette, Evan Parker, the Sun Ra Arkestra, Courtney Pine's Jazz Warriors, and Charlie Haden's Liberation Music Orchestra.

Though Hutchings' group projects include The Comet Is Coming and Shabaka & The Ancestors, the primary one is Sons of Kemet, a tight tenor sax, tuba, and double drums unit that since its 2011 formation has forged a reputation for on-fire live sets. The quartet's debut, Burn, appeared in 2013, its follow-up two years later, and now three years on from that we have Your Queen Is A Reptile. As the title intimates, there's a political dimension in play, one in this case one involving the British monarchy, whose lifestyle in his view perpetuates class divisions and race discrimination in Great Britain. On the group's third studio album, Hutchings presents an alternate reality that sees the attention given the British Queen re-distributed to more worthy candidates, among them Ada Eastman (Hutchings' great-grandmother), Harriet Tubman (the famous ‘conductor' on the Underground Railroad who risked her life to lead hundreds of family members and other slaves to freedom), and Angela Davis (the influential American political activist, academic, and author). If a name's unfamiliar, a search quickly fills in the blanks, but the message is clear: for Hutchings, these are the real queens, brave souls who fought to effect change and, in his words, “made bright futures out of cruel and unfair pasts.”

Now as important as theme and ideology are to the album, much of that takes a back seat once the needle drops, as one can't help but be immediately swept up by the roiling grooves. The group's polyglot blend of jazz, dub, calypso, spoken word, et al. is fever-inducing, and hits even harder when the leader, drummers Tom Skinner and Seb Rochford (Eddie Hick and Moses Boyd also make ferocious contributions), and tuba player Theon Cross are supplemented by vocalists Congo Natty and Joshua Idehen and saxophonists Pete Wareham and Nubya Garcia. For his part, Hutchings' soulful attack will likely have you thinking of Saxa and Maceo Parker as much as your standard jazz tenor, while his playing on “My Queen is Nanny of The Maroons” doesn't sound light years removed from Jan Garbarek's, surprisingly. Cross's agile playing is a constant source of amazement (look no further than his jaw-dropping performance on the Angela Davis cut), while the lockstep grooves the drummers stoke are infectious in the extreme. The group itself can't help at times sounding like a pocket-sized version of Henry Threadgill's Very Very Circus, given the overlap in instrumentation, though Sons of Kemet's playing also variously calls to mind New Orleans brass bands and skanking dub units.

June 2018