Shabaka Hutchings interview: “You’ve gotta keep it moving with music, and that’s what typifies all the heroes of the music that I really respect”

A large, chameleonic country stretching out across 3.5 million square miles, Brazil has a dizzying array of music drawn from African, Amerindian and European ancestries. As one might expect, there is an abundance of instruments to bring to life the countless rhythms and melodies that have been created over centuries. The North East state of Pernambuco, which Shabaka Hutchings is currently visiting, is a case in point. He has travelled to its capital city Recife for good reason. He is on a mission to listen.

“In this region, there's a lot of flute being played,” says Hutchings, appearing on an iPhone screen with his short dreads, round glasses and green t-shirt bathed in the kind of light rarely seen in Britain in early February.

“So it's important for me, in learning the flute, to actually be in a place where it is played in general. Just going around you’re hearing flute being played all over the place at a really high level. There's the traditional flute called the pifano, a six-hole flute, and there are more kind of indigenous instruments, but the pifano is the main flute in terms of traditional music.”

Hutchings was familiar with the Western concert flute through both his classical training and involvement in jazz since his youth, but was not especially attracted to it. Part of the appeal of the pifano is the fact that it does not have any of the levers, pads or springs of the aforementioned and requires a considerable amount of focused physical engagement to produce a comparable range of nuance in performance.

Shabaka Hutchings (photo: Atibaphoto)

The Brazil trip is the latest leg in a journey of discovery that started in Japan, where Hutchings started to learn the shakuhachi, a flute whose warm, low, muffle featured on his 2023 album Afrikan Culture. If that instrument is emblematic of the Far East, then it could be seen as part of a vast global flute family that has members – all with specific designs and tonal properties – that would take any interested sound seeker to the heart of Armenian, Indian, Native American and Mayan music. The size and shape of a duduk, bansuri or ocarina may well catch the eye as well as ear, so distinctive are the materials (apricot wood, bamboo, clay or ceramic) needed to create these devices. There is also time-consuming craftsmanship to appreciate. Hutchings has been conscientiously hands on in his relationship with the shakuhachi.

“When I went to Japan a year ago, I harvested wood from a bamboo forest with a maker that I'm kind of involved with over there, did the process of burning it, left it for a year to cure,” says the 40 year-old, who was born in London and raised in Barbados, the country of origin of his parents. “And then I went back last December, and made my first three shakuhachis. When you've been through the stage of taking a piece of plant material from the ground and fashioning it into an instrument, there is an actual connection that you have to the instrument itself, that for me at this stage that I'm at, reflects itself mainly in how I feel holding long notes, and just sitting with the instrument. How I feel, on a very fundamental level, while blowing single tones…there's something that feels rich and satisfying about it in a way I don't necessarily get with metal so much.

"With wood you’re dealing with a living element, and also a particular density of substance that resonates with you in a certain way.”

This embrace of the shakuhachi, wood and, recently, copper flutes marks a distinct new phase in the career of Hutchings, who is known first and foremost as a saxophonist-clarinetist and leader of the groups Sons Of Kemet, The Comet Is Coming and Shabaka & The Ancestors. Between them, the three outfits were largely emblematic of British jazz in the 2010s, during which time Hutchings fulfilled the clear potential he showed after emerging from the Tomorrow’s Warriors camp. He formed the collaborative trio Zed-U, with bassist Neil Charles and drummer Tom Skinner, and also became a member of ensembles led by notable talents of several generations, namely Courtney Pine, Pete Wareham and Alexander Hawkins.

But Hutchings, a former BBC Radio 3 New Generation artist, also stood out as an individual with ideas of cultural and political magnitude, as heard on albums such as Burn, a comment on the climate crisis and Your Queen Is A Reptile, a celebration of African and black diasporan female artists and activists. So it should come as no great surprise that he has chosen to focus on a new instrument as a result of his own personal resolve, regardless of any expectations on the part of either media or music industry.

If Sonny Rollins withdrew from public appearances to hone his craft at the height of his fame in the late 1950s; and Ornette Coleman threw a curveball by taking up trumpet and violin; then Hutchings, who cites both of the aforesaid saxophone legends as major sources of inspiration, is keen to rationalise his own decision to put down the tenor and clarinet in simple terms. It is a question of what really holds his interest.

“I just felt that at a certain point, you've got to specialise in it, and dedicate yourself to it… the flute,” Hutchings argues before stating very pointedly: “I'm not a session musician, so I don’t want a situation where I’m playing sax just to satisfy a job or to do a gig. It’s got to be something that’s specifically personal with me. You’ve gotta keep it moving with music, and that’s what typifies all the heroes of the music that I really respect. They follow where their heart tells them to go in terms of the direction the music takes. And if that means changing instrument, then that’s how it goes.”

Shabaka Hutchings (photo: Atibaphoto)

Hutchings’s new release Perceive Its Beauty, Acknowledge Its Grace, which can be seen as a thematic rejoinder to Afrikan Culture, underlines the commitment he has to not just the flute but to the art of composing and performing specifically to its unique character and capacities. Featuring an international cast of A-list players, including pianists Jason Moran and Nduduzo Makathini, bassists Esperanza Spalding and Tom Herbert, drummers Nasheet Waits and Marcus Gilmore, harpist Brandee Younger, guitarist Dave Okumu, and singers Moses Sumney, Eska, and Lianne La Havas, the album is an intricate tapestry of sounds that sometimes prod and peek through silence. The hard, dry saxophone roar of old is replaced by the flute’s warm, breathy whispers.

An artful blend of Afro-Asian and hard-to-define ethereal sounds, the deeply meditative music produces a powerful emotional heat that simmers rather than boils.

“That’s the fundamental issue that I had with really cracking the code of playing the instrument originally,” says Hutchings of the flute. “How do you generate an energy to give the instrument sound without the tension that comes when you’re trying to blow really hard? And in blowing really hard and having the muscular approach… the muscular approach was actually taking me away from the precision needed to make the instrument resonate most effectively, without having a massive amount of tension.

“Or a different type of intensity,” he continues, his flow unbroken. “The one thing I had to tell all the players, and this is why I didn’t allow us to use any headphones for separation, was that we’ve got to play to the dynamic of the flute. And I didn’t want anyone playing to their own personal dynamic and then just turning the flute up to compensate.

"I wanted us to actually have the uncomfortableness of all having to play to a very quiet instrument. And that changes everything. What normally happens is that with intensity comes volume; we get into it and start to enjoy ourselves.

“It’s not supposed to travel to a place, we’re supposed to be in one area. Or we’re not travelling upwards or downwards, we’re just moving sideways, like we’re in a zone.”

This marks a distinct contrast with the bulk of his previous work, where the rhythmic, raking sound of his tenor was often heard to a BPM count that was anything but low.

Here it is almost as if Hutchings is creating the intriguing paradox of static motion.

“With Sons Of Kemet I was trying to raise the tempo to get more to soca tempo. This album is trying to pull it back and get much lower tempos into the general patterning and see where we go from there without taking it up…. to see where we fit within the seeming uncomfortableness of being slow and sensitive for ages.”

When I mention that there were actually hints of this methodology in previous work he does not disagree. “It’s my reflection on what this project means for my artistic trajectory. I also see elements of it in Comet and Sons Of Kemet records, if you look at Burn… say, ‘Song For Galliano’ or ‘Hour Of Judgment.’ This album feels like something that pulls those moments to the fore as opposed to being on the sidelines.”

Furthermore, the precise construction of this latest project is interesting. Hutchings wrote a wealth of melodies on flute prior to the studio session, but chose not to open his songbook because he wanted to create a context in which he provoked himself into thinking melodically and engaging with any new themes and band improvisations. Hutchings then played his written material to these organically wrought arrangements.

And after hours and hours and hours of recording, he proceeded to edit, to carve the melodies from the lengthy sequences of music, before there was further composition and orchestration.

In other words, Perceive Its Beauty, Acknowledge Its Grace is part of a lineage of albums in which what happens in the ‘live room’ is a creative point of departure rather than final destination, with an obvious precedent being Miles Davis’ landmark 1970 set Bitches Brew, or the adventurous early 2000s collaborations between DJ Spooky, Matthew Shipp and other artists on the Thirsty Ear label. One could also think of recent works by such as Carlos Nino and Makaya McCraven.

All the aforesaid cases are musically different, yet the common denominator is the desire of the artist to treat recordings as raw material to be manipulated, revised and restructured to varying degrees. In shaping and sequencing Davis’ sessions to create highly influential music Teo Macero stretched the role of the producer beyond previous definitions in the field of jazz, where ‘the second pair of ears’ may have advised artists on a set list and musicians, rather than undertaking any active part in deciding how to slice and dice hours of tape and string memorable moments of music made in real time into a coherent whole.

Indeed, the exciting possibilities afforded by contemporary audio software programmes to create several additional layers and details to an improvisation, which is something that also happens ‘on the fly’ with live sampling these days, means that there is a potentially shifting, evolutionary boundary between a recorded song and one that is subsequently released into the marketplace.

Tellingly, Hutchings has been playing the role of producer for several of the artists he has signed to his own label Native Rebel Recordings, whose international roster has the likes of British saxophonist Chelsea Carmichael and compatriots, the hip-hop duo ConN + KwAkE, South Indian-American vocalist-multi-instrumentalist Ganavya and South African combo The Brother Moves On. Hutchings has plenty to say on the term producer, a flexible word that is open to interpretation according to specific circumstances.

What is a producer?

"For me, it means very many different things. It might mean putting something on Ableton or Logic for the music,” he says. “A producer is someone that lends their musical taste, musical ear to material and then has a decision making process about what can make the music achieve its fullest potential. That’s it. The most effective producers are people who can take themselves out of that process, and there are some things that might not need that much input.

“But the production process is understanding what is appropriate, what is needed to make the source material flourish,” he states emphatically. “It’s something I’ve really been thinking a lot about in relation to your archetypal jazz recording. That process of getting into the room and getting inspired performances is one thing and that can be ‘it’, but actually if you take it to the next level of thinking narratively, how do we sequence the performances we have? How do we make them poetic and impactful in a way that the arc is one thing rather than another? It's exciting to be a producer as well as a musician, a player, a composer, because it's a different approach. And it's a skill… it's another skill to be able to produce.”

Shabaka Hutchings headlines the Barbican, London on 9 May: barbican.org.uk

This interview originally appeared in the April 2024 issue of Jazzwise. Never miss an issue – subscribe today