n 2013, British jazz group Sons of Kemet released their debut album, Burn. Fronted by the British-Barbardian saxophonist Shabaka Hutchings, the album opens with its fists raised.

The song All Will Surely Burn, which features menacing percussion and a screeching tuba, set the album’s high-paced tone. Half-seance, half-ambush, the album was equal parts musical statement and political declaration: “We have come here to fuck shit up”. 

Seven years after its release, Shabaka Hutchings can see the end of the world ambling into view. 

“It’s a strange time,” says the saxophonist over Skype. “With the global pandemic [Covid-19] especially, no one knows what the world will look like in a few months. I don’t know how the situation is playing out in South Africa, but the response has been pretty pathetic in the UK. But endings aren’t always the worst thing to happen. They signify the birth of something new.”

Hutchings is a purveyor of forward-thinking cosmic jazz. He’s also a man whose artistic output seems to know no end. Though he has no solo album, in the last seven years, he’s released 10 projects through the bands he’s part of: Sons of Kemet, Shabaka and The Ancestors and The Comet is Coming. Shabaka and The Ancestors is a cross-continental octet with South Africa-based jazz musicians Mthunzi Mvubu, Mandla Mlangeni, Siyabonga Mthembu (vocals), Nduduzo Makhathini, Ariel Zamonsky, Gontse Makhene and Tumi Mogorosi. 

Recently, the band released their second album, We Are Sent Here by History. A collection of “sonic poems”, the 12-track album is a meditation on what history has collectively wrought on the body and how it is possible for us to move forward. And like Burn, its thematic precursor released with Sons of Kemet, the answer lies within the fire. 

Read the full article on New Frame.