Shabaka Hutchings via giant steps through a matrix based in the phenomenon placing most of the 7.8 billion of us within 6 or fewer degrees — steps — of each other...
- Steps from Shabaka Hutchings:
I'LL TAKE YOU THERE! ▶
'mātriks / "source" / from "mater", Latin for "mother". We're real mothers for ya!
I'LL TAKE YOU THERE! ▶
- Steps forward by: The Matrix via ↴
Who I Am & Where I Live
- Name: Shabaka Hutchings
- City: London
- Country: United Kingdom
My Life & Work
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Bio:
Over the last half decade, Shabaka Hutchings has established himself as a central figure in the London jazz scene, which is enjoying its greatest creative renaissance since the breakthroughs of Joe Harriott and Evan Parker in the 1960s. Hutchings has a restlessly creative and refreshingly open-minded spirit, playing in a variety of groups—most notably, Sons of Kemet, The Comet Is Coming, and Shabaka & the Ancestors—and embracing influences from the sounds of London’s diverse club culture, including house, grime, jungle, and dub. “The common theme in my career as a jazz musician has been wondering if what I’m doing is the thing that I should be doing,” says Hutchings, who studied classical clarinet at college at London’s prestigious Guildhall School of Music & Drama. “Me learning about jazz, how to play and interpret, was always a case of just trial and error. I think where I’ve come to recently is I’ve stopped trying to think ‘Is what I’m doing valid? or ‘Is what I’m doing part of the jazz tradition?’ and just see myself as a musician.”
Now 33, Hutchings first began garnering attention as a member of Melt Yourself Down, the “Nubian party punk” band led by fellow saxophonist Pete Wareham. Sons of Kemet (“Kemet” being the pronunciation of the ancient name of Egypt) marked his first group as a bandleader, and 2013’s Burn and 2015’s Lest We Forget What We Came Here To Do, both released by the UK label Naim Jazz, received significant acclaim, including a nod from influential DJ Gillles Peterson. Sons of Kemet’s new album, Your Queen Is a Reptile, their first record for Impulse!, is the band’s most fully realized creation yet, powered by Hutchings’ blazing, incendiary saxophone, Theon Cross’ tuba blasts, which sound like funky bass lines, and the high-octane interplay between multiple drummers (a revolving cast that includes Tom Skinner, Seb Rochford, and Eddie Hick).
Born in London, Hutchings moved to Birmingham at age two, then relocated to Barbados at six, remaining there til he was 16 (after which he returned to England). He began to play clarinet in the school band, and the calypso and soca music of Barbados’ Carnival not only provided Hutching’s first musical memories but informs Sons of Kemet’s kinetic intensity. “Everyone comes out on the street and it’s a massive party,” says Hutchings of Carnival, “and in some ways that’s the core feeling that we’re trying to get in Sons of Kemet. As someone from the Caribbean diaspora imagining that feeling, how I remember that feeling as a youngster, I want everyone in the room being so connected to that jubilant feeling of really just enjoying the celebration of music. That’s what I’m trying to get with the performances, the situation where every single person in that room can feel this energy that brings us all together. And once we are together, for me that’s when the transcendence can happen.”
In his teens he was obsessed with reggae and hip-hop, especially Tupac, Bone Thugs-n-Harmony, and E-40 (“he’s the Eric Dolphy of hip-hop,” Hutchings says of the West Coast rapper, “where he’s going is just completely out there”), and still practices by playing his saxophone along to rap albums like the Notorious B.I.G.’s Ready To Die. “What I’m trying to do a lot of times on the saxophone is provide that role of the MC, not from a narrative perspective but from the perspective of someone trying to provide this rhythmic relentlessness,” says Hutchings. “When I step on the stage in Sons of Kemet I’m not trying to be Sonny Rollins or John Coltrane, I’m trying to be someone like Capleton or Anthony B or Sizzla, in terms of just the energy that I’m coming up with: That’s who I want to be. My core vocabulary is jazz, but I’m not trying to have the energy of someone in a suit standing stationary in front of a microphone giving a nice round sound, I’m trying to just spit out fire.”
Hutchings distinguishes one group from another less by the music they make than by the different combination of personalities. While he describes The Comet Is Coming as having an “anarchist approach” to music (“In that we don’t talk about what anyone else is supposed to do,” he says, “we all just play what we think it should be”), with Sons of Kemet he’s the composer of all the tunes. “In some ways, it is my group,” he says of Sons of Kemet. “I can say, ‘No, stop here, this should be a break.’ But even within that, I trust the musicians. If they’ve got a better idea about what should happen then, we’ll try it out and see how it goes.”
Sons of Kemet boasts a somewhat unorthodox lineup—saxophone, tuba, and two drummers—but for Hutchings it’s a natural arrangement. “I’ve never seen it as unconventional,” he says of the group’s instrumentation. “It’s just been that I wanted to play with those two drummers. In some ways it was split between a desire to play with the two individuals and also a desire to take away the function of the drums as being the thing that provides the rhythm. When you’ve got two drummers they converse with each other. It takes the onus off any one particular drummer to provide the beat, because there’s going to be a forward momentum just from them expressing together.”
Contact Information
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Management/Booking:
Shabaka Hutchings
Management: Rachel Millar, rachcmillar@gmail.com
Booking Enquiries: Rachel Millar, rachcmillar@gmail.com
Sons of Kemet
Management: Rachel Millar, rachcmillar@gmail.com
Booking agent (Europe + ROW): James Wright, United Talent Agency, james.wright@unitedtalent.com
Booking agent (US + Canada): Andre Guerette (aguerette@paradigmagency.com) and Karl Morse (kmorse@paradigmagency.com)
Shabaka & The Ancestors
Management: Rachel Millar, rachcmillar@gmail.com
Booking agent (Europe + ROW): James Wright, United Talent Agency, james.wright@unitedtalent.com
Booking agent (US + Canada): Andre Guerette (aguerette@paradigmagency.com) and Karl Morse (kmorse@paradigmagency.com)
The Comet is Coming
Management: Kerstan Mackness, kerstan@funkyflymusic.com
Booking agent (UK + Japan):: Rick Morton, rick@blowuplive.com +44 7772 710 034
Booking agent (US + Canada): Andre Guerette (aguerette@paradigmagency.com) and Karl Morse (kmorse@paradigmagency.com)
My Media & Markets
- ▶ Buy My Vinyl: http://shop.shabakahutchings.com
- ▶ Buy My Merch: http://shop.shabakahutchings.com
- ▶ Twitter: shabakah
- ▶ Instagram: shabakahutchings
- ▶ Website: http://www.shabakahutchings.com
- ▶ YouTube Channel: http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCY8dCYvZnJMw5tyQyy0-B0Q
- ▶ YouTube Music: http://music.youtube.com/channel/UCQ5HsPFLAP73lCdXgutnIrA
- ▶ Spotify: http://open.spotify.com/album/6CSenzyruOwRltis2wjmAy
- ▶ Spotify 2: http://open.spotify.com/album/4pxnDGBdoGu88h8ZInX5f5
- ▶ Spotify 3: http://open.spotify.com/album/6gtbrHeqtCg7pk213DAF1T
- ▶ Spotify 4: http://open.spotify.com/album/55Xi3WIyXMIUYPRRVboNQK
- ▶ Spotify 5: http://open.spotify.com/album/4S5MLu2PKU7uElm2V3JphK
- ▶ Spotify 6: http://open.spotify.com/album/1dU66qas6j5H0ym9ZGyJvJ
- ▶ Article: http://www.theguardian.com/music/2020/mar/10/history-needs-to-be-set-alight-shabaka-hutchings-on-the-radical-power-of-jazz
- ▶ Article 2: http://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/11/arts/music/shabaka-and-the-ancestors.html
Clips (more may be added)
The world's artistry via giant steps through a matrix based in the phenomenon placing most of the 7.8 billion of us within 6 or fewer degrees — steps — of each other ...
... a project conceived and built in the fertile, fecund and atavistic ground zero of Bahia, Brazil initially for the discoverability of this singular region's dispossessed genius.
All explained in the window immediately below. Followed — beneath this window — by scores of magnificent artists, each leading to myriads more artists/categories. Inside this window also may be found our Brazilian record store radio, named by British journal The Guardian as one of 10 of the Best Radio Stations Around the World!
IF YOU CAN'T STAND THE HEAT
Brazil is not a European nation. It's not a North American nation. It's not an East Asian nation. It straddles -- jungle and desert and dense urban centers -- both the equator and the Tropic of Capricorn. It absorbed over ten times the number of African slaves taken to the United States of America, and much of its aboriginal population was absorbed into the general population-at-large. Its people have lived under oligarchy, plutocracy, dictatorships and massive corruption, with elements of these still strongly entrenched today.
But!
Brazil has buzz...not the shallow buzz of a fashionable moment...but the deep buzz of a population which in spite of -- or perhaps because of -- the tough slog through life they've been allotted by humanity's dregs-in-fine-linen, have chosen not to simply pull themselves along but to lift their voices in song and their bodies in dance...to eat well and converse well and much and to wring the joy out of the day-to-day happenings and small pleasures of life which are so often set aside or ignored in the European, North American, and East Asian nations.
For this Brazil has a genius perhaps unparalleled in all other countries and societies, a genius which thrives alongside peeling paint and holes in the streets and roads, under bad organization by the powers-that-be, both civil and governmental, under a constant rain of societal indignities...
Which is all to say that if you don't know Brazil and you're expecting any semblance of order, progress and light, you will certainly find the light! And the buzz of a people who for generations have responded to privation at many different levels by somehow rising above it all.
Raimundo Sodré, in a conversation ranging from New Orleans to Harlem and the South Side of Chicago ... through Appalachia and Irish villages and Russian shtetls and the unofficial symbol of Brazil's Bahian-born national music (the pandeiro) almost certainly having arrived in Brazil in the hands of Sephardic Jews (including conversos) fleeing the Inquisition, once remarked: "Where there's misery, there's music!"
A pandeirista on the roof. And it's not just music. And it's not just Brazil.
