My Queen Is Nanny of the Maroons

Nanny of the Maroons — the 18th-century Jamaican freedom fighter who led communities of escaped enslaved people and resisted British colonial forces for decades — receives a tribute carrying the weight of what her life represented: organized resistance, community protection, unbroken defiance. Sons of Kemet's two-drummer setup creates a polyrhythmic foundation drawing from West African and Caribbean traditions, the very musical inheritance Nanny herself would have carried and protected. Hutchings's saxophone channels something ancestral, the lines borrowing from the blues tradition but reaching back further, connecting to a stream of music that was never separate from survival. The tuba grounds everything in something ancient and authoritative, preventing any drift toward mere prettiness. The emotional register holds pride and sorrow simultaneously — this is honoring someone who had to be extraordinary because ordinary circumstances were designed to destroy her people. The music doesn't sentimentalize this; it meets it directly, with the kind of unflinching honoring that recognizes the full cost of what she did and the full significance of remembering her.