Shabaka Hutchings: I feel really positive about the future - there is always a fraught tension before things change

"People think that history is finite, but it is something that needs to be explored constantly; it needs to be challenged and sometimes set alight, so we don’t continue to make the same mistakes... For there to be a change, there needs to be the end of what we want changed" - the great saxophone player Shabaka Hutchings told the Guardian ahead of the new album by Shabaka and His Ancestors 'We Are Sent Here by History (out March 13, check 'Go My heart, Go to Heaven' below). But, he sees himself as an optimist - “I feel really positive about the future... Because there is always a fraught tension before things change – things really do have to get worse before they get better”; and that optimism can be heard in his music by Ancestors, and his two other prominent bands, Sons of Kemet and The Comet Is Coming. And another interesting thought - "when you look at our obsessions with class and national identity recently, so much of it is linked back to a crisis in masculinity; to the fact that boys aren’t told to be vulnerable or don’t really have any role models to learn from".