Black To The Future

Before listening to Black to the Future, Sons of Kemet's fourth album, reading the track list first is recommended. Bandleader Shabaka Hutchings sequenced it as a poetic statement to accurately and aesthetically foreshadow the record's narrative, thereby framing the context for its music. Sons of Kemet remains a quartet with Hutchings on reeds and woodwinds, Theon Cross on tuba, and Edward Wakili-Hick and Tom Skinner on drums and percussion; they are joined here by a slew of vocal and instrumental guests. Black to the Future carries the torch of musical polemic from Max Roach's We Insist! Freedom Now Suite, Archie Shepp's Attica Blues, and Gil Scott-Heron and Brian Jackson's It's Your World to Linton Kwesi Johnson's Bass Culture, Rip Rig & Panic's Attitude, and Public Enemy's It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back. Sons of Kemet address the Black experience from colonial slavery to Black Lives Matter's international ascendancy amid the struggle for self-determination while erasing artificial boundaries between jazz, dub, highlife, Afrobeat, calypso, rap, funk, and soul, without sterile posturing. "Field Negus" commences with moaning tenor saxes, roiling snares, and kick drums. Joshua Idehen's urgent, narration was recorded during the BLM protests after George Floyd's death. The collective erases historical time between past and present: They're angry; they know oppression never sleeps. The interplay between Hutchings and guest saxist Steve Williamson blurs skronk and post-bop. "Pick Up Your Burning Cross" features Angel Bat Dawid and Moor Mother trading vocal lines as clattering Afrobeat meets Latin funk inside post-bop. On "Hustle," Kojey Radical and Lianne La Havas entwine rap and honeyed soul over Hutchings' layered woodwinds and reeds and Cross' unruly tuba solo as the drummers trade syncopated fours. In "For the Culture," Hutchings' instruments frame grime emcee D Double E's rap in Middle Eastern modalism, while Cross adds slinky rhythmic pulses and harmonic invention atop a massive Afrobeat groove. "To Never Forget the Source" is a fingerpopping meld of calypso, rhumba, and South African township jazz, rife with call-and-response between brass and reeds. "In Remembrance of Those Fallen"'s lilting whistles and flutes join tenor saxophone and tuba amid zigzagging Latin and Brazilian rhythms, while cumbia meets son jarocho, and skittering Afrobeat as Hutchings sings and screams through his horn amid a rhythmic dirge and dissonant tuba. "Imagine Yourself Levitating" intersects dub reggae, out jazz, and spidery funk. Idehen returns on closer "Black," delivering a prophetic screed as the band chaotically runs through the album's preceding catalog of styles and sounds. He stridently asserts that "Black is tired," while the band bristles. He delves into Black history's record of oppression for proof, but emerges with the hopeful realization that, "This Black praise is dance! This Black struggle is dance! This Black pain is dance!" Black to the Future jams is a staggering achievement. Musically and culturally, Sons of Kemet not only holistically conceive of a future, they begin to create one right now. ~ Thom Jurek