The Comet Is Coming review

Over the past decade, saxophonist Shabaka Hutchings has established himself as one of the most powerful voices in British improvised music. Powerful not just by virtue of his status playing with a number of the country’s best-known jazz groups, such as the Mercury prize-nominated Sons of Kemet, but because he blows a louder and more physical sound through his tenor sax than almost anyone else playing the instrument today. Using circular breathing techniques, Hutchings produces a coruscating stream of sound capable of punctuating even the most heady rhythm sections.

The Comet Is Coming, with keyboardist Dan Leavers and drummer Max Hallett, is perhaps his most mighty outfit. Locking into Hallett’s thundering rhythms and Leavers’s expansive, bone-rattling synth sounds, since the Comet Is Coming’s 2016 debut release, Channel the Spirits, the trio have been a vehicle for Hutchings’s sharply dynamic playing to be untethered from formal restraints. With only two instruments as backing, here he can soar freely through genres as varied as psychedelic rock, earthy dub and undulating swing.

Read the review in the Observer.

[This review was published on 04/03/23]