Sons of Kemet
Your Queen Is A Reptile
Verve Records
MERCURY-NOMINATED saxophonist Shabaka Hutchings and his band Sons Of Kemet are used to acclaim, and while their latest record may be their first on a major label, make no mistake: there's no compromise here. This is bristling, unapologetic jazz with a punk attitude, drawing in dub, reggae, Dixieland, Afropunk and spoken word on its way. And like the legends of the impulse! imprint in years past (Coltrane, Rollins and Mingus to name just a few), the four-piece manages to be both radical and uncompromising, yet perfectly in step with its time. Every track on Your Queen Is A Reptile rejects Britain's monarch and celebrates an alternative Queen drawn from black history - figures as diverse in time and place as Harriet Tubman, Yaa Asantewaa and Baroness Lawrence, but all who, in Hutchings' words, "led by action, by example" and "made bright futures out of cruel and unfair pasts".
British jazz at large may be at its most nascent period in decades, and with a record this thrillingly vital, Sons Of Kemet look to have pushed themselves to the crest of that new wave.
Stephen Jones
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