It is December 2023, and Shabaka Hutchings has just played a gig at Saint John at Hackney church, London, performing John Coltrane’s 1964 album A Love Supreme. It was rapturously received, despite – or perhaps because of – Hutchings’ unorthodox approach to playing this revered text, the very cornerstone of spiritual jazz. There was no collective rehearsal – instead, Hutchings wrote “a really deep, long email” to his bandmates, ruminating on the meaning of the term spiritual jazz. “People say ‘spiritual jazz, spiritual jazz’, but no one goes: what is spirit?” he frowns. “To me, it’s simple – in the English language, to be spirited is to have a force that brings you up, that animates you out of inertia. The opposite of spirit is, I guess, depression, when you think: I can’t move forward.”
And then he goes into a lengthy but fascinating digression, which variously touches on non-western spiritual practices, the “orientation of energy”, how watching “trashy TV” can affect your vitality, and how making yourself uncomfortable on stage reflects the discomfort “we all have to navigate because of society”.
“So,” he says, “this is jazz that’s concerned with raising, or at least putting to the forefront of the endeavour, that energy, that spiritual vitality. How we do that isn’t by rehearsing it really hard and getting it tight. It’s by having a personal relationship to what we’re doing, and then coming together and making some music that lifts things. There’s no framework – we’re just going to go into the future for an hour with no anchor, no nothing. And that,” he smiles, “was the gig.”
The meaning of spirit, the orientation of energy, the relationship between improvisation and society: this is not the first or last time that our conversation strikes out on an intriguing tangent that space precludes reproducing in full here. As we sit in an office around the corner from Dalston’s Vortex jazz club, almost everything I ask Shabaka Hutchings – one of the most significant musicians in the UK’s wildly fertile jazz scene – is answered with a torrent of wide-ranging ideas and thoughts. At one point, what I thought was a pretty straightforward question about the progression of his career leads him to start musing on artistic integrity, “dynamic reciprocity”, the circularity of nature and the story of Adam and Eve. Talking to him is simultaneously absorbing, inspiring and a bit overwhelming. I don’t think I’ve ever met a musician who seems to have spent so much time thinking quite so deeply about … well, being a musician as Shabaka Hutchings.
That mindset has led him to some unlikely conclusions: the Love Supreme concert is to be his last show as a saxophonist. He is setting aside the instrument on which his formidable reputation has been built, in order to concentrate on the flute, most specifically the shakuhachi, a Japanese end-blown bamboo flute that dates back to the 16th century, and which, Hutchings notes “takes six months to a year to get a sound out of, and then seven to eight years to develop enough technique to play the repertoire”. You might recognise the shakuhachi’s sound from film soundtracks and you’ll definitely know the synthesised emulation of it – a ubiquitous sound in 80s pop, used on Peter Gabriel’s Sledgehammer among umpteen other hits – but it has little footprint in the world of jazz.
Hutchings seems intent on changing that. His first “flute-forward” album, Perceive Its Beauty, Acknowledge Its Grace is about to be released. It’s exceptionally beautiful, a little mysterious (its oblique track titles are supposed to be read as a poem) and boasts an impressively stellar lineup of guest artists, among them Floating Points, Lianne La Havas, ambient legend Laraaji and André 3000 – Hutchings cropped up, playing the shakuhachi, on the former Outkast star’s own recent album of flute instrumentals, New Blue Sun.
It also represents a dramatic left turn in a career that’s taken Hutchings from fabled British jazz education program Tomorrow’s Warriors to his current lofty position in the scene. He’s been a member or leader of a succession of lauded bands, often concurrently – Melt Yourself Down, Sons of Kemet, the Comet Is Coming, Shabaka and the Ancestors – all of which he has either departed or have now split up or, in the case of the Comet Is Coming, have announced a hiatus “until the stars align and the planet needs us”.
I ask about the reaction to his decision to put down the saxophone. “To people that aren’t musicians that I told, there was a sense of bemusement: ‘You’ve got to be crazy to give that all up.’ But the only way to keep that spark that made you successful in the first place is to follow your artistic intuition as soon as it suggests a particular direction. Even though those bands are successful” – Sons of Kemet and the Comet Is Coming were both Mercury prize-nominated – “and the music we’re creating is really great and satisfying, if I don’t follow that intuition … at some point, the music will become stale. I don’t want to be that kind of legacy performer where people come to me to hear the remnants of what used to be really exciting – for them to remember how they were partying in 2018, you know?”
He says the idea first presented itself during lockdown, a period I had assumed would be hugely frustrating for Hutchings, a musician who gives every appearance of thriving from being in constant motion. But, he says, I assumed wrong: his work ethic had more to do with the economics of simply trying to survive as a jazz musician – even a high-profile one – in the 21st century. “Yeah,” he sighs, “this is the misconception. I really don’t thrive on it and it’s been a cause of constant grief for me.” To be able to have a job solely from music, he says, you have to have “a situation where things are stacking one after the other. But I don’t want to be running around; there’s no real rejuvenation for artistic momentum in doing that. I’ve been able to do it just from sheer willpower, but it’s been so tough.
“It’s a paradox, because you enter music thinking what you want is lots of gigs, to be touring, that lifestyle, but when you’re in it, it’s difficult to be absolutely creatively vital, vital enough to be able to change direction. And that’s what I see creativity as being – the ability to actually understand when you need to do something different – but when you’re so tired from constantly touring, it’s difficult to make that call. You’ve got to rely on what other people have to say, and once you’re at a certain level, everyone’s going to say that your music’s great and you’re doing the right thing.” He chuckles. “So you can’t trust anyone!”
He had more projects stacked up when lockdown hit, he says, including a request to play Aaron Copland’s Clarinet Concerto with the Britten Sinfonia, an adventurous chamber orchestra that has previously worked with everyone from Brad Mehldau to These New Puritans. “And in the naked light of free time, I realised: I don’t want to practise these etudes at all. It made me think: ‘What do I want to practise?’ I realised I had this shakuhachi flute that I’d bought the previous year in Japan, and what I actually wanted to do was learn it.”
He describes the process as life-changing, although it sounds agonising: playing single notes for hours on end, learning a technique that Hutchings compares to “spitting rice out of your mouth, one grain at a time”, developing a completely different muscle strength in his mouth. He documented the whole thing on social media, because “that’s what I wished my favourite musicians had done when I was coming up”.
It seems to have left him completely obsessed, not just with the shakuhachi, but with flutes in general. He enthuses about instruments from Africa and the Middle East and flutes from South America made of clay; he talks about growing his own bamboo so he can make flutes from it. He says the practice made him a better sax player, but he does not give the impression of being much beset by second thoughts about his decision – “No! Not even a little bit!” – nor by worries about what his audience will make of it. “The public might say: ‘We pay our money to get the thing that we got before’, but music is not a production, it doesn’t work like that. You might think you’re getting bigger, but all you’re getting is a bigger projection of something that’s actually getting more and more diluted.”
And then he heads off to the Vortex to jam, a bag of flutes slung over his shoulder.
* * *
The next time I see him is in late February, on a Zoom call: he’s sitting outdoors, wreathed in sunshine, in a town called Paraty, 125 miles south of Rio de Janeiro. He’s been in Brazil for a couple of weeks: he spent time in Salvador, played flute in a carnival procession in Recife, visited a flute maker in Maceio.
And Brazil is just his first stop, he says. He’s decided that he wants to “lift off from the sense of having a consistent base in London” and live a completely peripatetic existence instead, travelling with his partner and “about 60 flutes in all these hard cases”.
“I realised that home is … actually, what does constitute home? It’s a place that makes you feel secure or comforted enough that you can relax and replenish yourself. And for me the thing that made me replenished and relaxed was coming home to my instruments, because on tour you can’t have all your instruments, you’ve just got a couple that you can bring. So actually travelling with my instruments means I am travelling with my home.”
His next stop is Barbados, he says. His mum has just moved back there, and he plans to spend time practising: 14 hours a day, for three weeks. After that, he’s thinking about Mauritania – “I’ve become really quite obsessed with the flute music of Mauritania” – then Senegal and Morocco, “then, in about two years’ time, I think I’ll be ready, shakuhachi-wise, to spend more consistent time in Japan, to study with a master player”.
It is, he concedes, an odd thing to do when you have a new album to promote: absconding to the other side of the world, jettisoning his mobile phone so it doesn’t interfere with his practice. But, in another way, it’s straightforward: he’s trying to create somewhere he can be inspired: “You’ve got to mentally struggle to create that environment.”
It’s like life, he says. “With most issues, politically or otherwise, it’s that there needs to be a creative solution to some kind of impasse. But the people that seem to have to rule the way we live, it feels like they’re not concerned with creativity, so they keep doing the same things over and over again and getting into these crises. That’s why the arts are so important – it teaches people about the nature of creativity. Confronted with a problem, you’ve got to step back from it and look at it. You can’t just go at a problem and bash it and bash it and bash it.”
• Perceive Its Beauty, Acknowledge Its Grace is released 12 April by Impulse!
