Jazz breaking news: Sons of Kemet get the Vortex Burning

Half of the Vortex’s cafe tables were removed to encourage participation in the music’s striking dance qualities, and the standing audience was soon an entranced, swaying mass. Apart from the fact that this obscured the band from the back half of the room, leaving only the 6’6” Shabaka Hutchings‘ head visible, it lent the gig an intriguingly schizophrenic atmosphere, as if it wasn’t sure whether it wanted to be cerebral art music or a rave.

This kind of rich generic ambiguity is at the heart of the band’s originality and appeal. In the current (September) issue of Jazzwise, Kevin Le Gendre described the band’s ‘raison d’etre’ as ‘an acknowledgement of the progressive philosophies of ancient black Egypt and an exploration of the west Africa-West Indies-New Orleans musical continuum’. The name ‘Shabaka‘ is shared with the last Nubian, ie black African, king of Egypt; ‘Kemet‘ is the name for black Egypt; and this generic playfulness is founded on some serious ethnomusicalogical research, as Hutchings explains in this month’s Kemet feature. It’s easy to forget, until the band starts playing, just how many different musical styles that elegant formulation includes.

Hutchings, alternating between clarinet and tenor sax, offered everything from flirtatiously jinking Middle-Eastern clarinet melody to cascades of jagged, Colemanesque free jazz, with some forceful sax rhythm in support of Marshall’s melodies. Marshall, meanwhile, carrying both the bass line and the brass sound, offers an unrivalled combination of technical and interpretative mastery. There are identifiable influences, like New Orleans, both the traditional band and newer sounds like bounce, though for the most part his playing is too fluidly abstract to be attributed with any certainty. At one point I began making a list of all of his sounds, but gave up after filling a page with animal noises and a range of mechanical malfunctions. He is too original a player for comparisons to heating pipes, a hippopotamus roar or a Harley Davidson to be helpful, though if you listened carefully they were all there.

Having two drummers enables a rhythmical conversation to take place, and with Seb Rochford and Tom Skinner on drums, it’s a very sophisticated debate. They were so perfectly integrated they were impossible to distinguish, as the beat shifted subtly and continuously, from many varieties of traditional African polyrhythm, via – like Marshall’s tuba – the marching band, to a brief history of the electronic beat. Just as remarkable was the way they controlled the tempo, which surged and fell back with a kind of organic, muscular lightness of touch.

A couple of the longer tracks began to drift a little, as the intensity of the improvisation flagged. But when you have four virtuosi soloing more or less continuously, that’s forgivable. Little has been made of the band’s political focus, but it was noticeable that between pieces, in the little speeches most artists use to coyly ask the audience to buy a CD, Hutchings would always say something political, in his soft, Midlands, Benjamin Zephaniahesque lilt. Then he’d ask them to buy a CD. It was refreshing to find a musician as closely in touch with the political roots of jazz as he is with its musical origins.

Despite the odd scratchy patch, this is music of stunning originality, which combines visceral engagement and intellectual fascination in equal measure. Any group that can sell out a club with young jazz fans on a Monday and Tuesday deserves at least a MOBO nomination.

– Matthew Wright