New Single from Shabaka is an Earnest and Moody Contemplation of the Gloomier Gradients of Spiritual Jazz 

The latest from UK reeds-player Shabaka is a continuation of his low-key search for conveying a higher knowledge expressed through music.

Categorizations are unavoidable, yet a cursory understanding of the cadre of musicians that the 40-year-old Shabaka Hutchings has aligned himself with—Sun Ra Arkestra, André 3000, Esperanza Spalding, Floating Points, Polar Bear, and Shabaka’s own outfits, Sons of Kemet and The Comet Is Coming, to name but a few—sets him nicely into a spiritual jazz aggregate that is wired simultaneously into technology and a kind of improvisation-as-animism.

While Shabaka first came to prominence as a saxophonist, in recent years he began to explore various indigenous flutes. On “End of Innocence,” the opening track from his forthcoming full-length Perceive its Beauty, Acknowledge its Grace, Shabaka splits the difference between his arsenal of wooden flutes and the density of brass instruments and performs on clarinet and is joined by pianist Jason Moran, drummer Nasheet Waits and percussionist Carlos Niño. Opening with a dirge-like tempo from Moran and surrounded by the faintest accompaniment from Waits and Niño that amounts to cymbal washes, Shabaka seems to play around and through Moran’s languid underpinning of the song’s chordal structure, the clarinet line dipping down, around and through with melody, that sounds like it is rising up from a dream of grief, only to be pulled back into the nullifying undertow.

There is enough wordless earnestness embedded in the interplay between Shabaka and his band to leave the listener with the sense that the “End of Innocence” is pointing to an uncertain yet hopeful new beginning.

Shabaka’s debut solo album, Perceive its Beauty, Acknowledge its Grace, is out April 12 on Impulse! Pre-order here. Stream “End of Innocence” here.