Sons of Kemet left to right: new member Theon Cross, Seb Rochford, Shabaka Hutchings and Tom Skinner

Playing the Brecon Jazz Festival on 9 August and the Canary Wharf Jazz Festival five days later not long before the release of their new album Lest We Forget What We Came Here To Do there’s change in the air for Sons of Kemet as new tuba player Theon Cross, a member of Moses Boyd’s Exodus, takes the place of Oren Marshall.

“Lest” in the title is the sort of word that you might think is actually never used any more. An archaism more commonly seen on memorials or statues... a warning... the paradox striking that there is nothing obsolescent about Sons of Kemet.

Album opening track ‘In Memory of Samir Awad’ above

Just over four years since forming and quickly winning a MOBO for best jazz act for their fine debut Burn released in 2013 after picking up strong word of mouth for their live club shows, leader reedist Shabaka Hutchings, who earlier this summer picked up a further Jazz FM Award for instrumentalist of the year, has described the new album as “a meditation on the Caribbean diaspora in Britain.”

Title track-less, quite a few of the tunes begin with the drum attack of Skinner and Rochford (e.g. the opener, ‘In the Castle of My Skin’, the quieter ‘Breadfruit’, ‘The Long Night of Octavia E Butler’) while new tuba player Theon Cross often sets the shape of the tune for Hutchings to elaborate upon.

Compared with Burn the writing and original material are even tighter. ‘Play Mass’ has more in common with the earlier album erupting as it does with a passionate energy, while the long ‘Afrofuturism’ has a feverish danceable energy familiar to the best parts of the earlier record.

Hutchings on the band’s debut invoked the inspiration of Count Ossie, Yusuf Lateef, and Mulatu Astatke and their influences are less obvious here although Lateef’s proto world music-friendly sound drifts in somehow hovering like a guardian angel over Hutchings’ solo deep into ‘Mo Wiser’. Seb Rochford has produced the album and it’s not a hugely layered studio affair by any means, the organic appeal of the band easily captured, the snatches of random electronically manipulated sounds sucked in just occasionally blending in to varnish the acoustic power of the instruments provide a recurring element of fascination.