Shabaka Hutchings’ latest solo album, Perceive Its Beauty, Acknowledge Its Grace, has often been compared to Andre’s gesture in New Blue Sun, both for its approach to new age and its use of flute. The comparison takes some of the credit away from Shabaka, stuck in a kind of combined zeitgeist, rather than affirming someone’s willingness to look for energy elsewhere, in another way. His debut album as Shabaka, alone, without the surname, is a spontaneous reflection on the search for a place that questions sound. The British musician does so through references to spiritual jazz and its various encounters with ambient and minimal music. In other words, he expresses himself as a manifestation of will and less for the purpose of sounding different.
There’s context. Hutchings was tired of delivering his energy elsewhere. Not in the instrument for which he became a renowned jazz musician – the tenor saxophone -, in the various more established projects (Sons Of Kemet, Comet Is Coming or Shabaka And The Ancestors) or even in the extensive collaborations, ranging from Sun Ra’s Arkestra to the Heliocentrics. Nothing specific, but rather the whole, reached that point where he realised that the sound coming out of his saxophone didn’t represent a pure idea of externalising something, that is, it was mainly strength, will, and less energy. Problems of the mainstream. So here’s this new idea, Shabaka puts the saxophone to one side and dedicates himself to different types of flute. You hear something that’s already been tried, whether by Alice Coltrane, Pharoah Sanders, Laraaji, Lloyd McNeill, here with clear notions of an electronic/ambient language, or with ideas from Brian Eno/Harold Budd, Steve Reich or Jon Hassell, but no fourth-world attempts.
No fourth world, but the idea of new worlds. Shabaka is now looking for a sound that breathes inwards rather than outwards, without that thing about inner peace, but about giving time to time. A musician looking for music of infinite truce, where surprise often comes from the sounds that appear in the absence of anything. As if Shabaka were building a void and then filling it without us realising. In other words, he creates channels of music that we thought we didn’t need because we already had them in the past. Here he’s telling us that sound is a continuous process, in progression, and that we just have to find it at the right moment. This is the current state of affairs and I’m glad we found Shabaka here. AS
