Love Supreme Jazz Festival
Glynde Place, Sussex

ESTABLISHED in 2013, Love Supreme was Britain’s first outdoor jazz and soul festival, and is now one of the largest in Europe.

One highlight was Indo-jazz clarinettist Arun Ghosh. The rhythm section, combining pounding breakbeats with gutsy, visceral basslines, produce a gorgeously relentless lo-fi funk that feels at times like the missing bridge between the Velvet Underground and De La Soul.

Guitarist Freddie Moon’s guitar is in the same spirit, his licks reminiscent of both Lou Reed and Gabor Szabo, while Rosie’s one-note bass solo is pure grunge-jazz perfection.

On this foundation soar Ghosh’s joyous and searching motifs with the mysterious and haunting saxophone of Idris Rahman. The result is a unique and original sound that also seems, to my novice ear, to incorporate English folk influences. The title of the penultimate track aptly sums up the crowd’s conclusion — Hanji, we are told, translates as an ultra-emphatic YES!

One of the festival’s many hidden gems – and certainly the most original that I saw – was south London saxophonist and producer XVNGO. A genuine polymath, his music is bursting with ideas on all fronts.

In form, this genre – Jazz Drill – combines gritty, skittering, deep electronic breaks with soulful, punchy sax ruminations, often layered and looped on top of one another. Yet there is also a classical influence, producing a complexity of arrangement and composition that is reflected in the conceptual themes of the music, which vary from contemporary science (Karl Friston’s Free Energy principle) to philosophical idealism (Schopenhauer and Kant) and epic mythology (Faust) and way more besides. Refreshing and brilliant.

In a festival of music that is often smooth and soothing, Sons of Kemet are the diametrically opposed counterpoint. Led by Shabaka Hutchings and joined tonight by special guest Nubya Garcia, it is clear that this coming together of two pioneering saxophonists of the new wave of contemporary British jazz is going to be An Event.

Yet it is not for the fainthearted. The band’s uncompromising sound, based purely around horns and three drummers (with the exception of a double bass player, replacing Theon Cross’s tuba for tonight) is a full frontal assault that strips jazz right back to its African rhythmic roots.

Even Hutchings’s sax playing is often percussive as much as it is melodic, and he has said that it is influenced as much by the phrasing of Tupac Shakur as that of John Coltrane.

Except for brief moments, this is not entertainment. This is a cathartic howl of rage, hurled at the audience with all the urgent intensity of our present moment, and with all the force of the orishas behind them. It is an appropriate conclusion to the festival –and a forceful reminder of the continuing centrality of the African/ African-diasporan in the cultural production.