Shabaka Hutchings official site

Shabaka Hutchings, a saxophonist, band leader and composer, is a significant force in the next generation of young innovative musicians and thriving improvising scene in London.

Hutchings has three primary projects – Shabaka and the Ancestors, Sons of Kemet and Comet is Coming. Between them, Hutchings has gathered a substantial number of awards and nominations, including winning the 2013 MOBO ‘Jazz Act of the Year’, 2013 Parliamentary Jazz Awards nomination for ‘Jazz Musician of the Year’, winner of the 2014 Paul Hamlyn Composer Award, 2015 Jazz FM Awards ‘Instrumentalist of the Year’, 2016 Mercury Music Prize nomination, 2017 Jazz FM Awards ‘UK Jazz Act of the Year’.

Shabaka continues to sit outside the box, interested in the undefinable gaps and going beyond jazz. To date, Hutchings has released to critical aclaim 4 studio albums and 2 EPs, alongside featuring on several other albums with highly respected artists. New albums expected in 2018.

Bassist and singer Esperanza Spalding is a Grammy-winning performer with an ambitiously cross-pollinated approach to contemporary jazz. Hailed as a prodigy in her teens, she garnered wider attention in the 2000s with the release of her debut, Junjo, and its follow-up, Esperanza, the latter of which topped the contemporary jazz charts. In 2010, she won Best New Artist at the Grammys, an accolade that helped propel her third album, Chamber Music Society, into the Billboard Top 40 as the best-selling contemporary jazz album that year. At the same time, Spalding won respect as a teacher, becoming the youngest faculty member at the Berklee College of Music. She took home a second Grammy for 2012’s Radio Music Society. Spalding has remained a forward-thinking maverick artist, issuing a series of increasingly concept-driven albums, including 2016’s Emily’s D+Evolution, 2019’s Twelve Little Spells, and 2021’s Songwrights Apothecary Lab, all of which found her moving far afield of jazz into art rock, R&B, Afro-Latin styles, neo-prog, and experimental pop. Still, intimate and artfully rendered standards and post-bop jazz remain a core of her musical identity as on her 2023 duo album with Fred Hersch, Alive at the Village Vanguard.

A leading voice of the harp, Brandee Younger recently made history at the 2022 Grammy Awards as the first Black female solo artist nominated in the Best Instrumental Composition category for her song “Beautiful Is Black.” The mesmerizing track is from her 2021 critically well-received major label debut album, Somewhere Different, that also received a 2022 NAACP Image Award nomination for Outstanding Jazz Album – Instrumental. Over her career Ms. Younger has performed and recorded across countless genres with artists including John Legend, The Roots, Lauryn Hill, Common, Pharoah Sanders, Ravi Coltrane, Ron Carter, and Charlie Haden. Additionally her original composition “Hortense” was featured in the Netflix Concert-Documentary, Beyoncé: Homecoming and in 2019 the tireless musician was selected to perform her original music as a featured performer for Quincy Jones and Steve McQueens’ “Soundtrack of America.”

Irreversible Entanglements (IE) is a free-jazz quintet with an experimental punk mentality, that consists of poet/vocalist Camae Ayewa (often known as Moor Mother), bassist Luke Stewart, trumpeter Aquiles Navarro, saxophonist Keir Neuringer, and drummer Tcheser Holmes. It is a community band playing deeply improvised, rhythm music full of love and social commitment. IE came together spontaneously, organically, in April of 2015 at “Musicians Against Police Brutality,” a day of protest sound and discussion in Brooklyn. All were artists and activists of varying degrees: Philadelphia-based Ayewa and Neuringer, and D.C.-based Stewart as veterans of the Mid-Atlantic noise-hardcore-experimental scene, while Holmes and Navarro as recent New England Conservatory grads. Each of the studio albums that followed — 2020’s Who Sent You? and 2021’s Open The Gates — developed this legend further.

A meeting of the minds between respected members of Washington, D.C.’s experimental music and punk rock communities, the Messthetics are an instrumental trio who combine soaring, visionary guitar work with one of the tightest and most powerful rhythm sections in rock. The Messthetics feature bassist Joe Lally and drummer Brendan Canty, members of the iconic punk/indie band Fugazi , marking their first collaboration since the band went on extended hiatus in 2002. Rounding out the trio is guitarist Anthony Pirog , an artist steeped in jazz who is also a major figure on Washington, D.C.’s experimental music scene, as well as working with the groups Janel & Anthony (featuring cellist Janel Leppin ), Skysaw (who also include Smashing Pumpkins drummer Jimmy Chamberlin ), and New Electric . The trio came together in 2017, rehearsing and recording material at Canty’s practice space, and they began playing out late that year. In March 2018, the Messthetics released their self-titled debut album, primarily drawn from their practice space recordings and cut live without overdubs. The LP was released via the well-respected D.C. independent imprint Dischord Records , and a U.S. tour followed in April. In September 2019, the trio brought out a second album, Anthropocosmic Nest. Like the debut, it was cut at the group’s practice space, but having been written and recorded after extensive live performances, it revealed a more seasoned interplay between the musicians, as well as a more muscular attack on the uptempo tracks.

James Brandon Lewis is a New York-based jazz tenor saxophonist, composer, and bandleader. His instrumental voice marries the emotional power of gospel and the grit and groove of blues and R&B to the modal and vanguard influences of Albert Ayler and John Coltrane , and Sonny Rollins ‘ expressive melodic and tonal discipline. Moments, his 2010 debut, was followed by two outings for Sony Masterworks ‘ revived OKeh imprint: Divine Travels in 2014 and the widely celebrated Days of Freeman the following year. After working American stages and clubs, he toured European and Asian festivals. Radiant Imprints, a duo outing with drummer Chad Taylor , appeared in 2018 and was followed by the quintet offering An UnRuly Manifesto a year later. In 2021, after he was selected as the “Rising Star Tenor Saxophonist” in the Downbeat International Critics Poll, Lewis issued The Jesup Wagon, his debut for Tao Forms .