When Shabaka Hutchings said he’d be stepping away from playing the saxophone onstage in January 2023, he didn’t frame it like a dramatic breakup. Still, the reasons he gave—physical challenges of the instrument, plus that encroaching sense his performances were becoming commodified—land like more than just practicality.
And you also have to wonder about the audience, honestly. How much do expectations push back, even when the artist is trying to move forward? The symbolic weight of the saxophone can be heavy too, and at some point the question becomes whether you’re serving your own search or just repeating a promise people want.
In September 2023, Hutchings took part in a performance of the Pharoah Sanders and Floating Points piece Promises. Then in December, he followed with a gig presenting John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts. It’s not unreasonable to wonder if those prestigious shows lit a kind of fuse—fueling a desire to keep searching for something new.
So instead of treating the past like a finish line, he tried something that sounds almost like an experiment with identity: forgo the instrument with which you made your name, and learn how to make music with new ones. Since then, Shabaka has put out an excellent album (Perceive Its Beauty, Acknowledge Its Grace) and an EP (Possession), where he played flute and assorted wind instruments from around the world in highly collaborative settings. He worked with artists across the genre spectrum—billy woods, Brandee Younger, André 3000, Esperanza Spalding—and seemed poised to keep going down the path of spiritually minded improvisation where jazz meets new age, a sphere of music that’s become increasingly prominent over the past decade.
But restlessness didn’t really go away. He’d landed on an au courant sound when its market was expanding, and then—almost as a counter-move—he decided to try something else. His new LP, Of the Earth, is a solo album in the literal sense, with Shabaka writing, producing, playing, and mixing everything on his own. No shared studio room, no band responses you can’t predict. Jazz musicians find meaning through interaction, and a record built entirely from your own parts pulls composition and editing into the spotlight. It changes the kind of listening you end up doing too.
The structural foundation of Of the Earth is the loop. Rhythms of various shapes and sizes tumble out of silence and whirl in place, and when Shabaka lands on an interesting pattern he’s not afraid to let it play on its own for a few bars. The tension in a given track comes from how those repeating cells support and interact with wind parts, which are melodically rich and thick with harmonies. Sometimes it even feels like an abstracted version of electro-acoustic jazz in the ’80s—frontline instrumentation of traditional jazz still intact, but the tools for rhythm changed completely. I caught myself pausing for a second, like—did I hear that pattern before? Then you realize the track is doing it on purpose, shifting where the ear expects it.
On “Those of the Sky,” flutes and reeds circle each other and spin off into intricate patterns, and the ear darts from one line to the next as the melody builds and then unravels. In another musical world, the opening pulse of “Step Lightly” might lead into a synth-pop tune, but Shabaka assembles a handful of flute lines into a slightly dissonant harmonic arrangement before a programmed soca beat enters alongside a looped metallic chime. Most of these pieces have a lot going on—designed for listeners who take pleasure in guiding their ear through each successive layer. And maybe that’s the point: not just a new instrument, but a new way of letting music keep thinking after you press play.