What happened to The Comet is Coming? The UK jazz trailblazers are splitting up at the end of 2023, but Shabaka Hutchings giving up the saxophone isn’t the whole story …
- The Comet is Coming are among the most exciting acts to emerge from the recent ‘UK jazz explosion’ – a fiery cosmic brew of Betamax’s club beats, Shabaka’s soaring sax, and Danalouge’s psych synths
- But the trio are spacing out ‘potentially forever’ after a swansong gig at Hong Kong’s Freespace Jazz Festival … so what happened? Style got the full story from leader/keyboardist, Dan Leavers
The Comet has been Coming for some time now. In fact, to those paying any attention, The Comet Arrived years ago, blasting through the stratosphere with the 2016 release of Mercury Prize-nominated debut album Channel the Spirits. Crashing against the earth’s surface three years later with major-label debut Trust in the Lifeforce of the Deep Mystery. Sparking sonic shock waves with last year’s swansong Hyper-Dimensional Expansion Beam …
And now The Comet is speeding off again to another dimension. Not one we’ll ever likely get to experience, mind. “They, comets, do tend to come back around,” says keyboardist, producer and musical mastermind Danalogue, wistfully conceding the band’s imminent dissolution is “potentially forever”. That’s right. A decade after they first gathered for a one-off jam that would help spark an entire musical movement, the trio is going their own ways. “Basically I think we all want to do some different stuff,” he adds, “and I think that’s fine.”
The dissolution became official back in May, with a bombshell post announcing an indefinite hiatus (until “the stars align and the planet needs us”) at the end of the trio’s current world tour – at the time of writing (and talking) there are just two gigs left, with the penultimate date at Hong Kong’s Freespace Jazz Festival on October 6. Bittersweet much? “It’s kind of a relief at this point that we’re at the end of the tour,” admits the keyboardist, who goes by the more mundane Dan Leavers when not on duty.
So why did The Comet is Coming break up?
For fans, it’s heartbreaking. Sounding like nothing quite on earth, The Comet is Coming are – or were, if you’re reading this after October 20 – a larger-than-life, otherworldly super-trio. An explosive chain reaction of Danalogue’s psychedelic synth fissions, Betamax’s primal club rhythms and King Shabaka’s stratosphere-soaring, spiritual exorcisms and machine-gun sax attacks.
But many more observant listeners might have seen the writing on the wall when the horn player born Shabaka Hutchings announced, on January 1, his intention to give up his instrument at the end of the year, roughly six months after calling time on his other world-touring musical behemoth Sons of Kemet. (He’ll bow out in true majesty, performing John Coltrane’s genre-defining masterpiece A Love Supreme in London on December 7.)
Did Leavers get a heads up? None whatsoever. “Yeah, well, that’s the nature of social media and constructing a narrative around yourself,” he muses.