Credit: NYT
Ah, Barbados. Palm trees, turquoise lagoons, flying fish, Rihanna. “Yeah, all that,” says Shabaka Hutchings. The sun is sinking on another perfect day on the tiny, easternmost Caribbean Island. But when the British-born musician appears via his phone, it’s not beachside with a rum cocktail but inside with blinds drawn, lightly tapping a wooden tube on his palm.
“Oh, this? This is a flute,” he says, suddenly more animated when the tropical paradise cliches make way for business. “This was made by a Brazilian maker called Mestre Gama who I met via Carlos Malta, who used to play flute and saxophone with Hermeto Pascoal …”
His enthusiasm for the instrument extends from its origins in the bamboo forests of the interior of Brazil to the mathematics of its construction. “The distance between the holes is dictated by a formula” which made the finished flute too big for Mestre Gama’s hands. “So he decided to send it to me,” Hutchings says with a grin.
For an artist who made his name manipulating the more complex mechanics of the saxophone, the love affair with such an ostensibly primitive instrument is new. Shabaka’s previous ensembles, most notably Sons of Kemet and The Comet Is Coming, have tended towards the more dynamic range of Afrofuturist jazz.
Perceive Its Beauty, Acknowledge Its Grace, the debut solo album that leads him back to Australia, is a relatively meditative affair: a change of emphasis to a less brash and more breathy ambience he signposted in a series of Instagram posts these last two years.
On January 1, 2023, he announced his final year of public performance on “the big metal horn”. “I take my role in being a custodian of energy that rouses the spirit seriously,” he elaborated. His waning passion for the sax was, he decided, a call from a higher power to reassess the tools of his artistic purpose.
Today, having retreated to his mother’s island home for a couple of months’ uninterrupted practice, he’s more prosaic. “More than anything, it’s a journey in learning how to play wind instruments. I don’t see it so much as moving from sax to flute. I see it as focusing my study.
“How do you make this tube resonate?” he asks, studying the instrument. “How do I make a great sound and articulate myself on this instrument that’s more effective and efficient at doing it than the saxophone? I think it has a wider range of possibilities once you actually crack how to do it ... The flute is much, much older than the saxophone. The flute is fundamental.”
Born in London and raised in Barbados, Shabaka’s single-minded dedication to his craft has mixed roots. “It’s a slower pace here, obviously, than London, but there’s a lot of great musicians,” he says, “and there’s a lot of music in schools.
Shabaka on stage with The Comet is Coming at Coachella Festival in 2023.Credit: Getty
“Because it’s so small and there’s not a [commercial] music scene as such, it means that you don’t necessarily hear about the old musicians outside of the island, but in terms of musicians that are really dedicated to practicing music and playing in different ensembles, there’s a lot of them. It’s got its own thing.”
When he moved back to London to study at Guildhall School of Music and Drama in the early 2000s, “I found the whole situation really slack in terms of what people expected of themselves coming out of high school”, he says. “Barbados really has a lot of high achievers. I think it set me on a really good path.”
Shabaka is no fan of genre labels. He recalls a key early conversation with British multi-instrumentalist Courtney Pine advising him to “go on the course of study that has the longest tradition of teaching in that instrument”. Hence, the European classical canon he embraced on clarinet in his youth, and the jazz scene the sax led him into.
Now, with his arsenal of flutes and appropriately sensitive accompanists on harp, trombone, percussion and hip-hop poetry — Andre 3000, Moses Sumney, Saul Williams, ELUCID and more appear on the new album — “New Age” is the label he finds himself avoiding.
“I can see how you gotta call it something, but you know, it doesn’t really mean anything, especially in the context of an album that has a lot of different moods and atmospheres,” he says. “There are elements of a new sonic palette in my music that wasn’t at the forefront before, but it doesn’t exclude all the other stuff I played.”
The parameters of his world are perhaps better described by the titles on his own cottage record label, Native Rebel Recordings. Among them is the extraordinary Song of the Motherland: a dub-reggae/spoken-word manifesto by AnkAnum, aka Anum Iyapo: Hutchings’ Jamaican-born father.
TAKE 7: THE ANSWERS ACCORDING TO SHABAKA
- Worst habit? When I’m creating stuff, just isolating myself and not picking up my phone and not interacting with anyone and then at some point later thinking: ‘Oh yeah, there’s a world out there,’ and tons of emails have gone unanswered.
- Greatest fear? Becoming worse as a musician but everyone’s still applauding me.
- The line that stayed with you? I spent quite a bit of time with Wayne Shorter in the year before he passed. This is actually a line Art Blakey told him: ‘Gentlemen, you can’t hide behind your horn forever.‘
- Biggest regret? That I didn’t practice more fundamentals when I was younger; actually do the things my teachers were telling me to do for years, like playing scales really slowly and quietly … rather than trying to be fast or exert myself within the music.
- Favourite book? The Book of Embraces by Eduardo Galeano.
- The artwork or song that you wish was yours? O Great Earth We Greet You by Caribbean artist Chief Ifa’ Oje’ Won Yomi Abiodun.
- If you could time travel, where would you choose to go? Back to the Kemetic civilisation [circa 5000 to 30BC] in Egypt or Ethiopia, when it was the dominant civilisation on Earth. Then get out of there before the Romans show up.
“I knew he’d made an album in the mid ’70s. It was on SoundCloud, a really bad format, and I knew that the record label that originally had put it out didn’t exist any more, so I just went to him and said, ‘Where are the actual tapes?’ And it’s the classic story: they were just in his loft, gathering dust.”
Shabaka playing a shakuhachi, a Japanese bamboo flute.Credit: NYT
Iyapo published several books of poetry, designed dub album covers and made some impact as a black British community activist, but “that’s the only record he did, as far as I know … It would have been a real shame if it had just been lost to time.” On Shabaka’s new album, father and son appear together in a newly recorded version of the title track, Song of the Motherland.
“My record label, unlike a regular label that exists to put out people’s records, is more of a personal project to me,” he says. “It’s really just a journey with the artists that I’ve come across, and we think we should work together. If I’ve got a personal journey with someone, and it leads us to having this body of work that needs a home, then that’s the home for it.”
The fingers on Shabaka’s Brazilian bamboo flute are tapping. There’s another album to be coaxed from its mathematically spaced holes and the infinite nuances of breath and imagination. All genres aside, does he feel the escalating noise of modern life might be better served by more of the meditative stuff?
“Yeah, I do think so. The pace of the world is getting faster, even in terms of the pace of individual flickers of information as we scroll on social media; the amount of stimulation our brains are getting in short bursts …
“I think what is needed is more long-form music, actually: music that takes its time and develops organically, not just necessarily slowly. And there’s always got to be music that expresses the times that we are in; music that expresses the fast-pacedness. I think you need both,” he says. “The yin to the yang.”
Shabaka performs at Northcote Theatre, March 6, Princess Theatre, Brisbane, March 7, City Recital Hall, Sydney, March 8, Womadelaide, March 10, and Fremantle Arts Centre, Perth, March 12.