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Jazz Articles about Shabaka Hutchings
2024 Winter JazzFest Marathons: A Survival Guide
by Ludovico Granvassu
Twenty years is a remarkable milestone for any activity, let alone one that comes with the wear and tear of a high-profile jazz festival that every year strives to up its own ante, like the Winter JazzFest. From January 11 to 18, 2024, fans, musicians, promoters and other industry people from around the world will converge to mark this special anniversary and celebrate what has become a cornerstone of New York's cultural architecture. Following the pattern ...
Continue ReadingTom Skinner: Voices Of Bishara
by Chris May
Voices Of Bishara is one of the top three jazz albums of 2022 so far and it would take the second comings of John Coltrane, Charles Mingus, Horace Silver and Lee Morgan to threaten to dislodge it. Before going into the particulars, the backstory.... An epically cross-genre drummer, Skinner has lit up avantist British jazz and related musics for around twenty years. He emerged among the cohort of musicians loosely grouped around the self-help collective F-IRE (Fellowship ...
Continue ReadingJamie Krents: Hardcore Jazz Fan And New President Of Impulse!
by Chris May
For jazz lovers in general, and Impulse! devotees in particular, the future just got brighter, more orange and more black. Jamie Krents, a longtime Impulse! aficionado, has been appointed the label's president. In his previous role as executive vice president, Krents played a determining role in recent signings such as The Comet Is Coming (pictured), The Ancestors and Sons Of Kemet. Credentials do not come any stronger. In his first interview since taking up his new position ...
Continue ReadingThe Comet Is Coming: Hyper-Dimensional Expansion Beam
by Chris May
A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, tenor saxophonist Shabaka Hutchings (King Shabaka), synths maven Dan Leavers (Danalogue) and drummer Max Hallett (Betamax) were students at London's Guildhall School of Music and Drama. As alumni, they formed The Comet Is Coming. To jumble allusions with as much abandon as the band approach cosmic jazz-rock, their continuing mission has been to seek out new soundworlds and to boldly go where no musicians have gone before. ...
Continue ReadingShabaka Hutchings, Warne Marsh, Deanna Witkowski and More
by Jerome Wilson
This is an extremely varied selection of music ranging from spiritual blasts by Shabaka Hutchings and Franklin Kiermyer to sax mastery by Warne Marsh and Tony Malaby and torchy vocals from Dinah Washington and Helen Merrill. Playlist Henry Threadgill Sextett “I Can't Wait Till I Get Home" from The Complete Novus & Columbia Recordings of Henry Threadgill & Air (Mosaic) 00:00 Tony Malaby's Sabino “Corinthian Leather" from The Cave of Winds (Pyroclastic) 00:57 Tony Williams “Tomorrow Afternoon" from ...
Continue ReadingShabaka: Afrikan Culture
by Chris May
It would be easy to mislay one's critical faculties when it comes to Shabaka Hutchings. The tenor saxophonist and clarinetist has since 2015 so invigorated the British jazz scene and, more recently, the international one, while eloquently articulating the potential of Afrikan cosmological thinking to realign the disorders of the modern industrial world, that the gravitational pull is powerful. Hutchings is the centrifugal force in three high-voltage bands: Sons of Kemet, The Comet Is Coming and the ...
Continue ReadingAlexander Hawkins / Mirror Canon: Break A Vase
by Mark Corroto
Pianist and composer Alexander Hawkins sequences the ten tracks of Break A Vase in a seemingly counterintuitive manner. The title track, which is taken from West Indian poet Derek Walcott's Nobel Prize acceptance speech, is not heard until track six; it is a solo piano performance which emulates Walcott's words, “Break a vase, and the love that reassembles the fragments is stronger than that love which took its symmetry for granted when it was whole." Hawkins' solo performance on grand ...
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