Shabaka – Perceive Its Beauty, Acknowledge Its Grace
(Impulse!. Album review (from vinyl) by Phil Johnson)

The vinyl edition of Shabaka Hutchings’ album is a thing of beauty. Thick cardboard gatefold sleeve, satisfyingly heavy platter, interesting art work, and that iconic orange Impulse! logo, familiar from LPs by John and Alice Coltrane, Pharoah Sanders et al, and now owned by the Universal Music Group. There’s also a lot of information to unpack even before you get the record onto the turntable, with the cover pics by Gareth Jarvis referencing colonial-era ethnographic photography, the artificially-aged black and white portraits placing Shabaka against a studio backdrop, his eyes meeting the camera in an ambiguous full-on gaze.

Then there’s the inner sleeve credit reading ‘Directions In Music and Arrangements by Shabaka Hutchings’, which echoes the legend on various Miles Davis albums produced by Teo Macero, where the tape was kept rolling on untitled jams that were later edited into a form that never existed prior to the final assembly, as in selections from ‘Bitches Brew’ and ‘In a Silent Way’.

So while all the fuss about the Shabaka album has been about him forsaking his saxophones for the flute, what’s more relevant – and more radical – is that there’s barely a verse or a chorus – a conventional tune, even – to be heard on any of the eleven tracks. In fact, there’s barely any of what most people would recognise as jazz at all, not that that’s necessarily a bad thing. Instead, the music creates a series of sonic atmospheres, with or without the addition of sung or spoken words, and the flute (or flutes plural, as Shabaka plays a number of different ones, and Andre 3000 brings his along for one number too) seems no more important than anything else.

The choice of instruments is very particular, and very sparing: harp, minimal percussion, piano, synth, occasional double bass, voice. The overall effect is pleasantly mesmeric, halfway between Afro-futurism and an imagined tribal village, as in the Art Ensemble slogan “Ancient to the Future”. This is music to grow into rather than groove on, and as with the analogy to Miles, it may be that each track’s essential form and shape was arrived at through post-production rather than pre-planned composition and arrangement, despite the recording venues including the legendary Van Gelder studio, a veritable temple of the jazz tradition and the Impulse! and Blue Note past.

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Whatever the cause, it fits contemporary notions of a chill-out soundtrack very well, that is music to live by rather than hyper-attentively listen to, although the distance between a chill-out and what older listeners might call noodling is often not very far apart. Go on, you can’t help wanting to call out at times during your early exposure to the album, just play a bloomin tune and have done with it. But that’s not going to happen in any conventional way, at least not on this debut recording in what, one hopes, will be a long and fruitful relationship with the label. That said, as greater familiarity with the material begins to grow through repeated listening, the playing does come more into focus, and each track takes on a firmer identity, as does the particular character and virtuosity of Shabaka’s own playing.

As to what the album is about, in so far as music is “about” anything, it’s very much about Blackness, and how that relates to the contemporary world, with all the conflicts and issues such an examination of the topic requires.
The various voices, in rapped, spoken or sung form, by poets and spoken word specialists including Saul Williams and the Barbadian poet and artist Anum Iyapo (Shabaka’s father Orville Hutchings, no less, heard on the entrancing ’Song of the Motherland’, the title of his 1985 album recording), together with the Africa-referencing musical textures of the kora-like harp and the rattling of hand-percussion, suggest an invocation of the griot tradition. This also explains the almost campfire vibe of the album, the gathering of the listener around the flickering flame of often indirect, gently suggestive rather than emphatically declarative musical texts, a context in which the woody hues of the various flutes and the clarinet which Shabaka plays in the wonderful opening number, fit very well.

It also becomes clear that Shabaka is taking on the whole Eurocentric tradition that privileges composition over improvisation, soloist over ensemble, foreground over background and melody over rhythm. Once you get used to this new form of musical address to the listener, and that you’ve got to hunker down and get into it rather than sit back and wait to be entertained, everything is fine. Each of the two LP sides progresses like a mini-suite, one track connecting to the next quite naturally to form a sequential whole that builds in meaning as it goes along. The placing of the various guest musicians is handled in a similarly organic-seeming way, overcoming the familiar and reductive major label tactic of bunging in as many names as possible quite randomly. Thus, the contributions of stars esperanza spalding, Jason Moran, Floating Points and Nasheet Waits all all subsumed within the overall context of the album.

For some listeners – including at times, me – the presence of so much voice – it’s inaccurate to say “vocals” – on the album is distracting rather than enhancing. But that will for many be a principal entry point and a focus for their interests. ‘Perceive its Beauty, Acknowledge its Grace’ is closer to producers and rappers like Flying Lotus and Noname than it is to Roland Kirk or Yusuf Lateef, despite all the flute. And that’s probably as it should be. He plays a fantastic solo on clarinet, too, on the penultimate number, ‘Kiss Me Before I Forget’. All in all, the whole thing is quite an achievement. It deserves listening to again and again to unlock its secrets.

LINK: Purchase Perceive its Beauty..