When Shabaka Hutchings said he was stepping away from the saxophone back in January 2023, he mentioned the physical grind and a weird feeling that his live shows were just becoming a product. Or maybe he just felt boxed in. It’s hard to ignore the symbolic weight of that instrument, and honestly, you have to wonder if he was feeling the pressure of those expectations. By September, he was doing that high-profile performance of ‘Promises’—the Pharoah Sanders and Floating Points piece—and then in December, he was at the Institute of Contemporary Arts playing John Coltrane’s ‘A Love Supreme’. Those are big stages. Maybe that’s exactly what pushed him to finally look for something else, something entirely his own.
He wanted a break from the past, so he just… stopped playing the thing that made him famous. He picked up flutes and all these other wind instruments from around the world instead. It’s been quite the pivot. He released an album, ‘Perceive Its Beauty, Acknowledge Its Grace,’ and an EP called ‘Possession’—lots of collaborative energy there, working with folks like billy woods, Brandee Younger, and André 3000. It felt like he was really leaning into that spiritual jazz-meets-new-age vibe that’s been huge lately.
But the restlessness is still there, I guess. Actually, he just couldn’t stay in that lane.
Now there’s his new record, ‘Of the Earth.’ It’s a solo album in the most literal sense. Shabaka did all the writing, producing, and mixing himself. There’s a specific smell of incense and stale studio air that comes to mind when you think about someone spending that much time locked away with their own loops and edits, obsessing over the sound. Jazz is usually about the interaction, the sweat, the people in the room, but this is different. It’s internal.
The foundation here is the loop. Rhythms tumble out of the silence, just spinning in place, and when he hits on something that clicks, he lets it breathe. The tension isn’t coming from another player; it’s coming from how those repeating patterns interact with his wind parts. It sounds thick, honestly. Sometimes it reminds me of that weird, experimental electro-acoustic jazz from the ’80s where the traditional frontline was still there, but the rhythm section had been totally swapped out for machines.
On a track like ‘Those of the Sky,’ you’ve got these reeds and flutes circling each other—it’s intricate. Your ear sort of darts around, trying to catch the melody before it unravels. And then there’s ‘Step Lightly.’ The opening pulse could have easily turned into some generic synth-pop track, but he pulls it back. He stacks these dissonant flute lines together until this programmed soca beat kicks in with a metallic chime. It’s a lot to take in. It’s definitely designed for people who like to sit there and actively untangle the layers. Is it the jazz we expected? Maybe not. But it’s where he is right now.