Shabaka Hutchings has announced his debut full-length album as Shabaka, Perceive Its Beauty, Acknowledge Its Grace, following 2022’s Afrikan Culture EP. It arrives April 12 via Impulse! (pre-order). As on Afrikan Culture, Shabaka plays woodwinds on this album, and it features André 3000, whose own recent woodwinds-based solo album is cut from a similar cloth as Shabaka’s solo material.
Other collaborators on the album are Moses Sumney, Esperanza Spalding, Floating Points, ELUCID (of Armand Hammer), Brandee Younger, Laraaji, Miguel Atwood-Ferguson, Saul Williams, and more. First single “End of Innocence” features fellow André 3000 collaborator Carlos Niño on percussion, Jason Moran on piano, and Nasheet Waits on drums. It comes with a video directed by Phoebe Boswell, and you can check that out below.
“I invited a bunch of musicians I’ve met and admired over the past few years of touring throughout the United States to collaborate and everyone said yes, which I constantly find breathtaking,” he says. The musicians all came together at Rudy Van Gelder’s storied studio, which “informed the sound of so many seminal jazz albums that have shaped my musical aptitude,” Shabaka says. “We played with no headphones or separation in the room so we could capture the atmosphere of simply playing together in the space without a technological intermediary.”
Shabaka began picking up various flutes in 2020 during the pandemic, and he says, “Since then, it has slowly changed the scope of my musical inner landscape and drawn me towards a multitude of other instruments in the flute family. As more flutes have been added to my arsenal including Mayan Teotihuacan drone flutes, Brazilian Pifanos, Native American flutes and South American Quenas, I’ve started to appreciate the underlying principles that cause these instruments to resonate most fully and use this understanding to form a concept allowing me to freely move between instruments.”
About the song titles, he adds, “Each title on this disc was extracted from a longer poem written specifically for the album which only achieved its full meaning in the presence of the music.” Check out the full tracklist below.
Shabaka (and André 3000 and Armand Hammer and Laraaji) play Big Ears Festival in March, and after that, he plays Brooklyn’s National Sawdust on April 23. That show goes on sale Friday (3/1) at 10 AM with a presale beginning today at 10 AM. All upcoming dates are listed below.
Tracklist
1. End Of Innocence
2. As The Planets And the Stars Collapse
3. Insecurities
4. Managing My Breath, What Fear Had Become
5. The Wounded Need To Be Replenished
6. Body To Inhabit
7. I’ll Do Whatever You Want
8. Living
9. Breathing
10. Kiss Me Before I Forget
11. Song Of The Motherland
Shabaka — 2024 Tour Dates
Sat. March 23 – Knoxville, TN @ Big Ears Festival
Tue. April 23 – Brooklyn, NY @ National Sawdust
Fri. May 3 – Amsterdam, NL @ Bimhaus
Sat. May 4 – Brussels, BE @ Trocadero
Mon. May 6 – Paris, FR @ New Morning
Wed. May 8 – Berlin, DE @ Emmauskirche
Thu. May 9 – London, UK @ Barbican
Thu. May 30 – Sat. June 1 – Barcelona, ES @ Primavera Sound
Wed. June 12 – Santa Cruz, CA @ Kuumbwa Jazz Center
Thu. June 13 – San Francisco, CA @ SFJAZZ