The last decade has seen the jazz world reignited as a force for musical exploration. While stateside names like Kamasi Washington and Thundercat have been turning on a new generation of listeners, London has found itself home to one of the most boundary-pushing jazz scenes to emerge in some time. The crop of young musicians seem to be actively working to dissolve the boundaries that routinely separate jazz from the rest of the music world while also making music that steers head-first into the cultural conversation rather than away from it. It’s out of this world that The Comet Is Coming emerged, and on March 18th, the trio brought their electronic jazz apocalypse to New York’s Mercury Lounge for a mind-bending, sold out show.
If any group should deem themselves The Comet Is Coming, this is the one. Performing under the aliases King Shabaka (saxophonist Shabaka Hutchings), Danalogue (keyboardist Dan Leavers), and Betamax (drummer Max Hallett), the group’s music, both interstellar and dance-floor ready. would be a fitting soundtrack to impending cosmic extinction. Celebrating the release of their new album, Trust in the Lifeforce of the Deep Mystery, they arrived on the Mercury Lounge stage to rapturous applause and quickly launched into “Because the End Is Really the Beginning”, the record’s cinematically eerie opening track. Leavers’ synth layers took shape into rolling waves upon which Hutchings’ saxophone smoothly ascended into space with ever-growing tension. It didn’t take long for that tension to explode open as the band rocketed into a trio of high-energy numbers that concluded with …Deep Mystery’s lead single, the EDM-inspired “Summon Fire.” Hutchings played his sax with such frenetic energy you’d think he was fighting off a horde of demons and the other two weren’t far behind; with Hallett’s ripping into his drums at breakneck speeds and Leavers’ heavy bass synth vibrating the room.
At the top of the show Leavers noted that their mission for the night was to “explore what the deep mystery really is”, and they certainly made achieved their goal. Even their danciest tunes ended up jetting off into heady jams that gave Hutchings ample opportunity to light the room up with his fiery playing as the group worked their hardest to open up a hole in time and space. And just when things would ascend into cacophony they’d come back down to Earth and sync up for one deadly groove after another. After the heavy, maelstrom energy that characterized the first half of the set – capped off by a frenzied intergalactic rave-up on “Lightyears” – the band loosened up songs like “Final Eclipse” and “March Of The Rising Sun”, both off 2017 EP Death To The Planet, into free-wheeling musical ruminations.
Any band that can get a NYC crowd dancing on a cold Monday night deserves a mountain of credit, but for a band as out-there as The Comet Is Coming it speaks to something bigger. Their dance-floor moments evoke more menace than euphoria, their jams forego straight virtuosity in favor of full-on existential freak-out, and all three members play with full awareness of the power music can have. This isn’t a party band, but they do bring the party, because what else can we do when the comet is coming but dance into oblivion?
