Typical: you wait ages for a flute album from a musician famous for other things, and then two come along almost at once. Hot on the exhale of rapper André 3000’s New Blue Sun, released last November, comes another exploratory redefinition, this time from British sax phenomenon Shabaka Hutchings. André 3000 guests here.
Hutchings stepped away from the saxophone at the end of 2023. Since the pandemic, this maven of the London jazz renaissance has been reassessing, exploring the gentler timbres of the shakuhachi, a Japanese bamboo flute whose breathwork takes time to master.
This 11-track release features Hutchings on flutes and reeds, with added dilatory instrumentation and appearances by luminaries such as Floating Points, co-author of Promises (2021) with the LSO and Pharoah Sanders, a team-up that I’ll Do Whatever You Want inevitably recalls. On the video for End of Innocence, Hutchings mimes playing the clarinet underwater, the freedom of his rebirth echoed in his balletic submersion.
The emphatic playing of Hutchings’ more exhortatory bands (chiefly Sons of Kemet) has given way to a more impressionistic delicacy. Fear, courage and the power of breathwork are underlying narratives, as well as the flute as proxy for both birdsong and the human voice, as when Moses Sumney duets with Hutchings’ flute on the lovely Insecurities.
