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Shabaka Hutchings At Barbican Hall
by Chris May
Shabaka Hutchings Barbican HallPerceive Its Beauty, Acknowledge Its GraceLondon May 9, 2024 Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes ... London's Shabaka Hutchings has become best known for his incendiary open-the-gates work on tenor saxophone with Sons Of Kemet, The Comet Is Coming and the South African-based Shabaka & The Ancestors. But his April 2024 album, Perceive Its Beauty, Acknowledge Its Grace (Impulse!), performed for the first time at the Barbican, marks the start of a ...
Continue ReadingShabaka Hutchings: Perceive Its Beauty, Acknowledge Its Grace
by Chris May
Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes ... Since signing with with Impulse! in 2018, Shabaka Hutchings has become best known for his incendiary work on tenor saxophone with Sons Of Kemet, The Comet Is Coming and Shabaka & The Ancestors. Perceive Its Beauty, Acknowledge Its Grace marks the start of a gentler, more instrospective phase in his music making. The trigger came during the pandemic, when Hutchings fell in love with the Japanese shakuhachi flute. The quietly spoken instrument first edged itself ...
Continue ReadingShabaka: This Is The Moment To Make Patient Music
by Leo Sidran
Shabaka Hutchings grew up between the UK and Barbados. He started playing clarinet as a young boy in Barbados and eventually moved back to England to go to music school in the early 2000s.After college he began a period of working furiously on a kaleidoscopic range of projects and became an icon of the new sound of London jazz, which integrated African rhythms and modes, Caribbean and Middle eastern sounds and was largely danceable.Shabaka himself has ...
Continue Reading2024 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. ...
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