When Shabaka Hutchings announced he was stepping away from the saxophone back in January 2023, the reasons were grounded in the physical toll of the instrument—and a growing, uneasy feeling that his performances were feeling… well, commodified. You have to wonder how much the audience’s heavy expectations played into that decision. By September, he was performing the Pharoah Sanders and Floating Points piece *Promises*, followed by a December gig featuring John Coltrane’s *A Love Supreme* at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts. Maybe these prestigious, high-pressure shows actually fueled a desire to keep searching, you know? To pivot.
It’s a natural urge to break from the past, especially when you’re known for one specific sound. Why not ditch the instrument that made your name and try something totally different? According to Misryoum reporting, Shabaka has since released an excellent record, *Perceive Its Beauty, Acknowledge Its Grace*, alongside an EP titled *Possession*. He traded the sax for flutes and various wind instruments from all over the world, working with heavy hitters like billy woods, Brandee Younger, and André 3000. It felt like he was locked into that spiritually minded, jazz-meets-new-age groove—a sound that has been blowing up over the last decade. Actually, it’s almost everywhere now.
But the restlessness, it stays.
Having landed on a sound that was perfectly *au courant*—right as the market for it was peaking—he decided to shift gears again. His new LP, *Of the Earth*, is a solo album in the most literal sense possible. He wrote, produced, played, and mixed every single note himself. Now, jazz is usually about that friction between musicians, that live interaction. But when you build a record entirely from your own parts, the process of composition and editing suddenly moves to the front of the stage. The studio air, usually vibrating with a drummer’s sweat, feels different here—more controlled, maybe a bit lonely.
The structural foundation of *Of the Earth* is built on loops. Rhythms of various shapes tumble out of the silence and just whirl in place. When Shabaka hits a pattern that clicks, he isn’t afraid to let it ride for a few bars—or more. The tension in the tracks comes from how those repeating cells interact with his wind parts, which are thick with melody. Sometimes, it feels like an abstraction of ’80s electro-acoustic jazz, back when the traditional frontline was still there but the rhythm tools were changing.
On “Those of the Sky,” flutes and reeds start to circle each other, spinning into these dense, intricate patterns where your ear has to dart from one line to the next. In a different world, the opening pulse of “Step Lightly” could easily lead into a synth-pop track. But Shabaka does something else—he layers flute lines into a dissonant arrangement before a programmed soca beat and a metallic chime kick in. It’s dense. Most of these pieces are designed for listeners who enjoy guiding their own ear through layers, piece by piece, though I’m not sure if the average listener will catch every single thread he’s pulled.
