Sons of Kemet
Your Queen Is a Reptile
(Impulse!)

IN THE sleeve notes to this powerful praise-song album, London-born and Caribbean-bred saxophonist Shabaka Hutchings reflects upon the reality and symbolism of Windsor royalty while proudly affirming the remarkable and heroic women of his own black heritage.

He asserts: “We the immigrants, we the children of immigrants, we the diaspora, we the descendants of the colonised, we claim the right to question your obsolete systems, your racist symbols ... your monuments to genocide.

“We who built your palaces, we who paid blood into your banks, we who died in mines so your crown jewels may have the biggest diamonds, we claim our place at the table. And we say: 'Your history is not pure, your empire is not whole, your conscience is not clean, your money was printed in blood … Your queen is not our queen. She does not see us as human’.”

In their first album for the Impulse! label, which produced the epochal 1960s albums of John Coltrane, Archie Shepp, Pharaoh Sanders and the Liberation Music Orchestra, the British quartet Sons of Kemet — Hutchings, tuba virtuoso Theon Cross and drummers Tom Skinner and Seb Rochford — have created a revolutionary jazz attestation of history with a now-times political message, through music of dramatic and unique merit stretching through the Americas, Africa and London.

The very singular instrumentation of the band and its fierce palaver of brass, wind and drums raises its sonic standard during opener My Queen Is Ada Eastman, dedicated to Hutchings's Barbadian great-grandmother, which illustrates his dictum, “Our queens are just like us and we are human.”

The two drummers create a unifying and pulverising beat alongside Cross's relentless pulse of breath and Hutchings's simple Albert Ayler-like riffs and melodies, while the dub and spoken-word voices of Congo Natty and Joshua Idehen take the music to new places beyond category.

Teaching and learning, as much as listening and grooving, is at the heart of this record. My Queen Is Yaa Asantewaa celebrates the struggle of the Asante people of Ghana against British imperial rule in 1900 when Yaa Asantewaa led the Asante insurgents. For three months they laid siege to the colonial fort of Kumasi, after which, in the final phase of Queen Victoria's reign, the British troops attacked villages and killed their people, while exiling Yaa Asantewaa to the Seychelles until her death in 1920.

The drums sound martial, with the tuba pounding like a brass timpani and Nuby Garcia blowing an extra saxophone and the music's narrative relives history and bravery on a continent once home.

African-American pioneer stalwarts have their chapters too. My Queen Is Mamie Phipps Clark remembers the groundbreaking social psychologist and civil rights campaigner from Hot Springs, Arkansas, and there are anthems to Harriet Tubman, founder of the Underground Railway to Canada and freedom, and Anna Julia Cooper, sociologist, educator and black liberation activist of Raleigh, North Carolina.

The album's apex is My Queen Is Angela Davis, a metaphorical salute for a titanic woman for whom being a queen would never be a wish. Hutchings's horn rampages, Cross's tuba is breathless and the drums rock and surge below them both.

Then comes the sudden melodic beauty of My Queen Is Nanny of the Maroons, the great rebel leader of the escaped slave community of Jamaica's Cockpit Country. Hutchings's lyricism tells her story of Caribbean audacity and fortitude.

South Africa and My Queen Is Albertina Sisulu, a homage to the anti-apartheid militant and revolutionary midwife (1918 - 2011), follows. Eddie Hick comes in on drums and Hutchings's jaunty, dancing theme resonates with joy as his saxophone strikes a higher pitch in his colloquy with Cross's deep, deep tuba phrases and the drummer's snares crackle.

London is the location of the album's final offering, with the recording made in Stoke Newington. It was there that black youth Michael Ferreira was killed in 1978 in a racist knife attack, but this track salutes the stamina, campaigning energy and tenacity of Doreen Lawrence, mother of Stephen, killed by a racist gang in Eltham, South London in April 1993.

The unstoppable pounding drums, Cross's guffawing notes and Hutchings's riffing horn join with Idehen's indignant and determined words. “Wanna take my country forward!” he declares and that's exactly what this outstanding record in its entirety commits itself to doing.