Over the past decade, saxophonist Shabaka Hutchings has established himself as one of the most powerful voices in British improvised music. Powerful not just by virtue of his status playing with a number of the country’s best-known jazz groups, such as the Mercury prize-nominated Sons of Kemet, but because he blows a louder and more physical sound through his tenor sax than almost anyone else playing the instrument today. Using circular breathing techniques, Hutchings produces a coruscating stream of sound capable of punctuating even the most heady rhythm sections.
The Comet Is Coming, with keyboardist Dan Leavers and drummer Max Hallett, is perhaps his most mighty outfit. Locking into Hallett’s thundering rhythms and Leavers’s expansive, bone-rattling synth sounds, since the Comet Is Coming’s 2016 debut release, Channel the Spirits, the trio have been a vehicle for Hutchings’s sharply dynamic playing to be untethered from formal restraints. With only two instruments as backing, here he can soar freely through genres as varied as psychedelic rock, earthy dub and undulating swing.
Beginning their UK tour in Hutchings’s childhood home, Birmingham, the trio produce 90 minutes of breathless improvisations, screeching and squealing to the packed crowd, their bass frequencies reverberating across the warehouse venue’s iron beams. After an opening salvo of cymbal flutters and trilling keys, the band set a lively tone for the evening by launching into Code, a single from their latest, fourth album, 2022’s Hyper-Dimensional Expansion Beam. Leavers expertly commands his dual-synth setup, producing otherworldly, sludgy vibrations to anchor Hutchings as he performs a machine-gun scatter of percussive melody. The lights, meanwhile, strobe relentlessly like the pulse of a late-night rave.
The club parallels continue as Technicolour provokes higher-register melodies from Hutchings’s saxophone, while Hallett coolly lays down a half-time shuffle and Leavers lets his chords ring out like the wobbling bass on a dubstep tune. As the song nears its end, those chords are held for longer periods, the vibrations expanding seemingly infinitely, as if producing a form of sonic cleanse for the crowd. Standing amid those bass tones, you are struck by the sheer loudness of this group – three unassuming, bearded men in sunglasses producing a music of such feeling you can sense it shaking your organs.
If that sounds a little too intense, there’s respite in the joyous dance of their most popular track to date, Summon the Fire, from 2019’s Trust in the Lifeforce of the Deep Mystery. Here, the crowd wordlessly chant along to Hutchings’s yearning refrain as Hallett’s beats chug to the pace of a vigorous head-nod, while Unity sees a hip-swaying groove on the toms play polyrhythmically with Afrobeat-inspired saxophone melodies.
More than just a display of herculean stamina, there is a deep musicality in the machinations of a Comet Is Coming live show. This is most obvious when each member takes the time to solo. Leavers’s solo, for instance, channels everything from prog-rock mysticism to the squelchy sounds of 808 acid synths, igniting 90s dancefloor nostalgia, while Hallett’s drum break cascades through the toms, cymbals and snare while always coming back to the anchoring stability of his punchy groove. The highlight is Hutchings’s fantastic minute in the spotlight, switching octaves on his sax from moment to moment and wrestling his squealing horn into submission. He evokes the guttural free jazz of Albert Ayler as much as Charlie Parker’s fast-paced bebop dexterity.
Intensity is where these players truly gel as a group, though, and the set soon builds pace again towards its climax, from the doom-laden, grunge-referencing synths of Blood of the Past to March of the Rising Sun, which trades phrases between Hutchings’s sheets of sound and Hallett’s cymbal washes. The back and forth is so energetic that sections of the crowd break out into bouncing mini-moshpits.
The band stop to address the crowd directly only once, with Leavers, “a man of few words”, quickly introducing the players before the four-to-the-floor dancefloor focus of closing number Pyramids. The Comet Is Coming’s performance is often relentless, yet its irrepressible energy has a vitality that feels infectious. With Hutchings recently announcing that he will take a break from playing the saxophone after the end of this year, this is one of the last chances to catch a group and a horn player with fire in their veins – a trio not interested in overthinking harmonic changes, but in blowing the paint off the walls.
