FM
History
Sons of Kemet was a British jazz group formed in 2011 by Shabaka Hutchings, Oren Marshall, Seb Rochford, and Tom Skinner. Theon Cross replaced Marshall on tuba after the first album, and Eddie Hick replaced Rochford on drums after the third. The band disbanded in 2022. The group used saxophone and clarinet (Hutchings), tuba (Cross), and two drummers (Skinner & Rochford or Hick) to make their music and played a mixture of jazz, rock, Caribbean folk, and African music. The band released four albums during its lifetime and won Best Jazz Act at the 2013 MOBO Awards.
These collaborative players have previously won major praise in celebrated acts such as Polar Bear, Hello Skinny, Melt Yourself Down, Mulatu Astatke and the Heliocentrics, and Sun Ra’s Arkestra. Yet there’s still nothing quite like the ‘supergroup’ sound of Sons Of Kemet: eloquent, fierce, explosively funky – and thrillingly out-there.
