Shabaka Hutchings trades his saxophone for flute in Australian tour

Master sax player Shabaka Hutchings has taken to the ancient, end-blown Japanese bamboo shakuhachi flute to lead his new band, Shabaka.

Shabaka Hutchings plays saxophone with Shabaka and the Ancestors at City Recital Hall Angel Place at the 2018 Sydney Festival. Picture: Jamie Williams.

Shabaka Hutchings last toured Australia in the spring of 2022, whipping packed crowds into frenzies as the tenor-wielding frontman of cosmic jazz trio the Comet is Coming.

Eyes squeezed shut, biceps straining, his rangy frame doubled over his “big metal horn”, he’d improvise feverish passages of energy, working with musicians on synths and drums, he has said, to affect minds and change realities.

“The way I was chugging the saxophone was hyping me up and inspiring that intensity,” Hutchings, 40, says when we meet in a hipster hotel cafe-lounge at King’s Cross, central London, at the tail end of 2024.

“The sax was invented for military marching bands, so that blowing the thing creates a huge sound vibration. You don’t need much core strength to make it resonate.

“Now that I’ve detached from it,” he says, his short dreads tucked under a Rasta tam hat, his gaze steady behind wire-rimmed glasses, “I can really say that playing the sax is easy.”

It’s a bold statement, given the London-born, Barbados-reared Hutchings is widely regarded as one of the leading saxophonists of his generation and in the vanguard of the current British jazz explosion. But having disbanded his hyperactive, horn-heavy, Mercury Music Prize-nominated jazz quartet Sons of Kemet and after announcing (on New Year’s Day 2023) that he’d be laying down the instrument with which he is most identified, he then set about winding up sax-led projects including Shabaka and the Ancestors, his alliance with several noted South African musicians.

He put similarly Mercury-nominated the Comet is Coming on an extended break. “We will return when the stars align and the planet needs us,” the group declared on Instagram.

His last official gig on saxophone was in December 2023, performing John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme at Hackney Church in east London. This writer was there, experiencing Hutchings’ take on the spiritual jazz classic as dynamic, tender, free and often thrillingly complex.

If playing the sax became too effortless, ultim­ately too unsatisfying, for the musician, bandleader and composer, this has much to do with his questing spirit, his commitment to facilitating change, garnering self-knowledge.

“You’ve got to keep moving with music and follow your heart,” says Hutchings, the only child of a single mother, an English teacher, and a dub poet and graphic designer father with whom he reconnected in his teens.

“That’s what typifies the heroes of the music that I really respect. And if that means changing instruments, then that’s how it goes.”

So when Hutchings returns to Australia in March, playing dates including the WOMADelaide festival, which runs March 7-10, it will be in a fresh new guise.

Presenting simply as Shabaka, he’ll lead a band of American musicians on drums, trombone, piano and harp – the same line-up that featured across his six-night residency at Blue Note New York in September 2024, not the British-based outfit with which he has just finished touring China – to deliver tunes from his acclaimed debut solo album, Perceive Its Beauty, Acknowledge Its Grace.

His main instrument? The ancient, end-blown Japanese bamboo shakuhachi flute. As career shifts go, this one is as surreal and as serendipitous as they come.

“The pandemic was a big factor in changing people’s directions,” Hutchings says. “I had a lot of time at home to reflect on what it means to progress. I’d bought a shakuhachi in Japan and would go to Richmond Park” – the largest, wildest park in Greater London – “to just sit, make sounds and understand dynamic rationality. I’d play the same notes for hours, creating a pressurised environment for my body and the smallest opening in my mouth for the pressure to be released,” he adds, embarking on a long monologue that takes in Zen Buddhism, the sonics of bamboo and the breathing techniques of his sax hero Sonny Rollins, who was at peak fame when he stepped back to hone his craft in the 1950s.

Hutchings immersed himself in the musical cultures of Japan, Morocco and South America, learning an array of traditional flutes including the Andean quena, the Brazilian pifano and the shakuhachi, three of which he made after harvesting bamboo from a forest outside Fukuoka in western Japan.

Shabaka Hutchings with his Japanese bamboo shakuhachi flute. Picture: David Corio/Redferns.

While Hutchings was steadily cultivating the prowess that would allow him to craft Perceive Its Beauty, Acknowledge Its Grace in ways introspective and collaborative, spacious and poetic (“The tools change, the vision evolves, and one of our finest musicians might just have achieved a higher state of artistic consciousness,” as one reviewer wrote in popular music magazine Mojo), Andre 3000 of Atlanta hip-hop legends Outkast was working towards his own flute-forward album of instrumentals, 2023’s New Blue Sun. Coincidence? Synchronicity? The zeitgeist?

Hutchings smiles and shrugs. “It might be that there’s certain cues in cultural society that will result in a sound or a visual aesthetic that artists pick up on and their work might then take directions that suggest a particular form without realising that other people have taken those same cues,” he says enigmatically.

“We’d have to do some deep digging to understand what those cues could be.”

Andre 3000 features among the clutch of guests (including bassist Esperanza Spalding, singer Lianne La Havas, electronics wiz Sam “Floating Points” Shepherd and Hutching’s father, spoken word artist Anum Iyapo) on Perceive Its Beauty.

He also features on Possession, Hutchings’ new EP, playing Mexican Teotihuacan drone flute on To the Moon, a track through which crickets chirrup, a digital keyboard canters and flutes overlap with vibraphone and guitar.

Other tracks find Hutchings on soft, plaintive clarinet, the instrument he started playing in Barbados aged nine, practising to bars rapped by Tupac and Notorious BIG, and for which he received a classical music degree from London’s Guildhall School of Music.

He was 16 when he moved with his mother to Birmingham, northern England, and began commuting to London to attend workshops hosted by Tomorrow’s Warriors, the multi-award-winning jazz education organisation aimed at young people of colour and girls.

Dozens of Tomorrow’s Warriors alumni from saxophonist Nubya Garcia and trumpeter Sheila Maurice-Grey to Mercury-winning quintet Ezra Collective kick-started and dominated the London jazz renaissance of the mid to late 2010s, jamming in pubs and pop-up clubs, interacting with crowds, smashing fourth walls, folding elements of grime, hip-hop and Afro-Caribbean rhythms into a free jazz template.

Jazz band Shabaka and the Ancestors in 2018.

Hutchings, a former BBC New Generation Artist – a program that supports young musicians at the start of their international careers – and at that time almost ubiquitous as a sideman, was frequently cited as the scene’s unofficial figurehead, despite his outspoken rejection of the jazz label and being a good six to 10 years older than everyone else.

It irked then and still irks, sort of, now.

“There was a whole school of musicians my age and above that got completely sidelined by the London jazz thing, as were (noted avant-garde) bands Polar Bear and Acoustic Ladyland because their references weren’t Afrobeat, Sun Ra or spiritual jazz, whatever that is meant to be.”

Hutchings segues into musing on possible definitions: music that animates. A genre that connects a bunch of music within a particular canon. He cites saxophonist Albert Ayler, for whom spiritual jazz was illogical, healing, heart-level music.

“Anyway,” Hutchings says, coming back to the main topic, the London jazz thing. “It was all very strange.”

Nevertheless, he is determined to be a role model to younger musicians.

“I think it’s important for performers or artists with visibility to make sure the young generation don’t necessarily continue repeating the same cycles,” says Hutchings, who founded a record label, Native Rebel, to ensure acts such as trombonist Chelsea Carmichael, another Warriors alumnus, don’t have to think twice about releasing a record (“I think the thing that psychologically separates me from a few younger musicians is that I think, ‘Why is the album not there? Let’s book a studio, do it tomorrow and put it out!’ ”).

He’s producing these artists, as well as his current work, using portable recording and mixing equipment he keeps on his phone or in his backpack, and learns about via the YouTube videos he watches each day.

This suits his current nomadic lifestyle – home, he has said, is where his flutes are – which takes him and his Moroccan-born partner around the world, to China this month, then Barbados (where his mother is) and Australia after that.

He shows me photos on his phone of the artwork he practises regularly, sometimes on an iPad – the video for To the Moon features one such psychedelic abstract – and which will illustrate the book he has been writing during the past three years.

Letters to a Young Musician, its working title, is a memoir in which Hutchings addresses his youthful self through a collection of thoughts that have struck him as he has toured and that have resonance in his musical life.

He hopes the book will offer inspiration to any younger musician who may be setting off on their own musical journey, who wants to be free to think in ways unrestricted by industry or societal forces. Who wants to get to where he is. Which is just doing his thing.

“I’m also thinking of including some basic art where readers can do their own colouring in,” he says.

Outside the lines? He flashes a grin. “Outside the lines,” he says.

Shabaka will perform in Australia from March 6-12, in Melbourne, Brisbane, Sydney, Adelaide and Fremantle.