The Third Story Podcast With Leo Sidran

Shabaka Hutchings grew up between the UK and Barbados. He started playing clarinet as a young boy in Barbados and eventually moved back to England to go to music school in the early 2000s.  After college he began a period of working furiously on a kaleidoscopic range of projects and became an icon of the new sound of London jazz, which integrated African rhythms and modes, Caribbean and Middle eastern sounds and was largely danceable. Shabaka himself has never fully embraced the jazz label. While the music is highly improvised, and it owes much to the American jazz tradition, his influences are very broad. Over the course of the past decade, the majority of his touring and recorded work has been with three bands: Sons of Kemet, The Comet is Coming and Shabaka and the Ancestors. In these formations he displayed a fundamental approach to creative practice in different contexts spanning Afro-Caribbean fusion, London dance music club culture and the South African jazz tradition.   Part of his signature on