For the last three years, Shabaka Hutchings has been shedding old skin. He announced on social media that he would stop playing the saxophone—the backbone of his work with Sons of Kemet and The Comet Is Coming—in favor of the flute. He also announced that, after 2023, both bands would cease. That same process informed the creation of his record label, Native Rebel Recordings, the idea being that transformation requires sacrifice. “As an artist, you’ve got to do the thing that activates you the most,” Hutchings says. “It might not even make sense in the short term. But at some stage, in the grand scheme of things, it will make complete sense.”
When Hutchings launched Native Rebel Recordings, he considered his own experiences in the recording studio as well as with labels like Naim and Impulse!—the things he enjoyed most and the things he might do differently. While drawing inspiration from an affinity for ECM and its founder Manfred Eicher, specifically the “idea that a label could have an overriding aesthetic,” Hutchings also put some of his own parameters in place. Notably, every album released by Native Rebel is to be recorded over a three-day period, with rehearsals incorporated into the recording process rather than being held ahead of time, preserving the vital energy that occurs when players encounter the music for the first time. Hutchings also attends the recording sessions. “I’m in the room,” he says, “And I’m making sure that, in these liminal zones at the beginning and end of tunes, where the band can sometimes stop—I’m there to make sure that they keep going. For me, that’s where a lot of the heat is.”
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The artists he’s worked with agree. Saxophonist Chelsea Carmichael credits Hutchings’s guidance with transforming her apprehension and anxiety about stepping into the studio for The River Deosn’t Like Strangers into “the most relaxed session I’ve ever done.” Native Rebel, she says, is built on care, patience, and transparency; all things she’d been told were hard to find in a label. Confucius MC of UK hip-hop duo CoN & KwAkE says that his impulse is to heavily prepare for sessions, bringing along a folder of rhymes and rough sketches. But working with Hutchings, the process became instinctual. “You’ve gotta make quick decisions about what you’re doing and react more to what’s happening—you don’t get the chance to overthink,” Con says. ”I don’t think it ever felt like we were against the clock. Everyone was so on point, and everything flowed very naturally.”
Even when Hutchings can’t be physically in the room, he still finds ways to participate. For $/he Who Feeds You...Owns You from Johannesburg-based artist The Brother Moves On, Hutchings requested several songs be rerecorded, this time with friends and family in the studio. As a result, gospel-inspired closing track “Itumeleng Revisited” was lifted to a higher spiritual plane. “There’s this element of the South African musical tradition of having these male vocal choirs,” Hutchings says. “It’s an energetic difference. There’s just a difference if there’s an audience there.”
Ultimately, Hutchings hopes Native Rebel can be a place of boundless creativity. “If that’s something I’m capable of doing on an inspirational level,” Hutchings says, “then we’ll see how it goes.”
Here’s a sampling of Native Rebel’s releases to date.
Chelsea Carmichael
The River Doesn’t Like Strangers
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In 2019, Hutchings was playing a set with Chelsea Carmichael at a gig for South African jazz collective The Brother Moves On at Church of Sound in London when he realized that she should be the first artist signed to Native Rebel Recordings. “She was doing this solo and I was like, ‘Man, this girl is so ready,’” he say. “‘She’s ready. Why is she not in the studio?’” That Carmichael brought what Hutchings calls her “spirit and talent and energy,” is evident throughout the album, in hundreds of little ways. A song like “All We Know” might feel psychedelic, but the washed-out dub guitar never distracts from Carmichael’s horn, which courses throughout the album.
Kofi Flexxx
Flowers In The Dark
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With compositions built from intense, meditative performances by a collective of drummers, cellists, pianists, saxophonists, flutists, poets, singers, and rappers, it would take a sharply trained ear to identify the collaborators behind the mesmerizing, mysterious Flowers In The Dark. “We went into the studio with not a single piece of musical information, and Flexx was summoned,” Hutchings says. “Out of that three-day period we had a lot of music.” Are all the players signed to Native Rebel and is Flowers In The Dark is Hutchings’s way of reinventing the label sampler? Hutchings himself will only admit that he was one of many people “in the room and under the possession of the spirit Kofi Flexxx.”
CoN & KwAkE
Eyes In The Tower
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In 2021 Hutchings, looking to improve his knowledge of electronic programming, took up Ableton, the MPC, and the SP-404. Whenever he felt stuck, he’d reach out to London beatmaker Kwake, whom Hutchings describes as a “master teacher of all things electronic.” Which makes it all the more surprising that no one had ever released a proper album by the duo, something Hutchings sought to correct with Eyes in the Tower. Confucius MC says that accepting the invitation was a no-brainer, but that Hutchings’s concept for the project—a jazz-rap exploration of our current surveillance state—was tough to grasp until they were in the studio. “Producing something so special in such a short space of time felt like a real achievement,” Con says.
The Brother Moves On
$/he Who Feeds You… Owns You
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The South African ensemble The Brother Moves On, who got their distinctive moniker when one of their members misheard the name of The Wire character Brother Mouzone, has been helmed by actual brothers Nkululeko and Siyabonga Mthembu since forming in 2008. Known for their fusion of jazz past and future, The Brother Moves On’s debut for Native Rebel is mixed to sound crisp and clear, fully balancing the group’s moving parts to create a gripping protest record. Dubbing themselves “transitional music for a transitional generation” the group effortlessly moves through soft jazz (“Puleng”), spiritual jazz (“Itumeleng Revisited”), and ethereal music (“Mazel”), never betraying their roots as musicians in a post-apartheid country. Case in point: the group intentionally switches to singing in English on “Mazel” to declare: “We are suffering…and after 20 or so years, I can’t say I am happy about what we have done…we are suffering, rainbow child.”
Sons of Kemet
Burn (10-Year Anniversary Reissue)
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On the 10-year anniversary of Sons of Kemet’s debut Burn (originally released on NAIM), the rights to the record reverted back to Hutchings, who commemorated the event with a reissue on Native Rebel. A decade later, Hutchings remains impressed by the album’s compositional variety, but also by the fact that the group refused to compromise on the final mix. Hutchings says that the label they were in talks with before signing to NAIM thought the mix was “too cavernous and washy,” but they “stuck to their guns in adhering to the sonic space that we thought was most appropriate for the vibe.” Ten years on, that refusal to bend is another factor in the record’s endurance.
Ganavya
like the sky I’ve been too quiet
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Ganavya’s music follows a spiritual poetry tradition known as ahbangs, which translates to “songs without end;” 12-hour performances are common. But after concluding the mandated three-day studio work for a Native Rebel release, Hutchings suggested they head to a nearby underpass to record further. Thus the aptly titled “we made it to the underpass” and “we’re still at the underpass” possess the wave-like ambiance of passing cars and the tunnel echo of Ganavya alone with her instrument. While the album’s title came from a poem by Kaveh Akbar, Ganavya says that each song title “was taken from something that was said or read during those three days.” Hutchings had quietly taken notes on all of it.
