Shabaka: ‘If you don't follow the artistic path, you have nothing’

‘It’s the struggle that keeps my music alive,’ says Shabaka Hutchings. He’s been discussing the remarkable decade or so during which the composer/musician has played a crucial role within a 21st century jazz revival showcasing a particularly UK-centric voice and sensibility.

As saxophonist within groups like The Comet Is Coming and Sons Of Kemet, sideman on high-profile collaborative projects, and now a solo musician in his own right, Shabaka (operating mononymously since 2022) has reclaimed jazz from the dusty shelves of history and the morgues to which grumpy critics had prematurely consigned it. In his hands (and from his lips and his lungs) jazz comes alive again, speaking to this moment, musically, culturally and politically. He’s no iconoclast, nor is he casting off almost a century of heritage for the sake of it. But for his music to mean anything – to be alive, as he says – it needs to be true to him. And to keep it alive – well, that’s where the effort comes in.

Born in London and raised in Birmingham, Shabaka moved to Barbados, where his parents hailed from, at the age of six. It was there that he first picked up a woodwind instrument – a recorder, which he swiftly replaced with a clarinet. ‘School band in Barbados has a frontline of two saxophones, three trumpets, a couple trombones, euphonium, and maybe 14 clarinets. So, a lot of clarinets. I got given a crappy school one, but my mum bought me a good student model, and I remember thinking, ‘this is so good – I can see where the joy is’.’

He clung to that joy after his return to Birmingham as a 16-year-old, which was something of a culture shock. ‘I ended up going to King Edward grammar school. It was an all-boys school, and the dudes had already sorted out their peer groups.’ So, Shabaka kept to the practice rooms in the school’s music annexe, ‘playing as loudly as I wanted, with no-one around me. Some of the shock of the change in environment got nullified by being able to get down to business and just practice. Getting dropped into that environment, not having a friend group and not necessarily being the most social person meant I was able to focus on work.’

He maintained that focus through his A-levels and a degree in classical clarinet at Guildhall, before joining Tomorrow’s Warriors, an operation affiliated with the Southbank Centre that’s supported young jazz musicians since the early 1990s. ‘It was, in essence, a chance for musicians to have a steady gig once a week where you play a certain repertoire, followed by a jam session,’ he remembers. Professional musicians would often join the jam session, offering Shabaka and his fellow Warriors a chance to collaborate with more experienced musicians and get a feel for working in a group format. ‘They’d place an older musician in the group as a kind of mentor – ours was Abraham Wilson, a great trumpet player from New Orleans.’

Wilson would prove an important influence on Shabaka, ‘even if he didn’t necessarily like the music I was making outside of the band, or even some of the ways I was playing in the band’. Even this early in his career, Shabaka had found himself drawn to non-traditional paths and being true to his own eclectic roots, outside the traditional American jazz realm. ‘A lot of us grew up not feeling like we needed to play swing rhythms to show we’d learned enough of the American tradition. Because it’s exactly that: the American tradition. But our creativity came from different sources: British and Afro-Caribbean. It’s important to reflect where we’ve actually come from.’

Shabaka had been introduced to jazz by his mother while a kid in Barbados. ‘Mum was very supportive, getting me instruments, lessons and music,’ Shabaka says. ‘She was trying to get me into jazz at an early age, but I didn’t want to hear it. Jazz wasn’t cool or relevant when I was an early teen in the Caribbean; everyone was listening to hip-hop, bashment or soca.’ But Shabaka’s interests were finally piqued after he watched some live jam sessions, and a friend of his mum’s passed him a mixtape containing ‘a bunch of different jazz artists’.

‘Being able to hear different forms of the music was pivotal,’ Shabaka explains. ‘It taught me that jazz isn’t just one thing; it’s more of an approach, a historical lineage.’ This all-embracing eclecticism was hard-wired into Shabaka, and already at the core of his creativity by the time he was playing with the Warriors, many of whom he’d later collaborate with. And Wilson was experienced enough a mentor to ‘listen to what I was playing and let me know the intersection points between what he liked and what I liked. It was all part of figuring out how I could make music that slid between the creases – how I could play in a way that satisfied someone from New Orleans, who was very much part of the American jazz tradition, while also satisfying my own personal take on what the music could be.’

This aesthetic and approach would be central to the music Shabaka made in the years that followed, especially with Sons Of Kemet, whose music – often powered by double drummers – drew heavily upon Afrobeat and Caribbean rhythms, over which Shabaka playing fierce, piercing lead lines, and The Comet Is Coming, who fused spiritual jazz with electronic instruments and 21st century sensibilities. This was jazz that would function as well at a rave as at the conservatory or the concert hall, a restless, ever-moving and insurgent music that took no prisoners in its quest to uplift and illuminate.

‘What’s reflected artistically is always just a part of the personality of the person that’s giving of themselves,’ Shabaka explains, of the unique strain of jazz he was helping coin. ‘That upbeat-ness, that spirit of joyousness or exuberance – the feeling that makes you get up and move – if that’s inside you, it’ll come out in the music. It’s a part of my generation’s personality, that we want a certain jubilation, a certain tempo, a certain atmosphere, and that’s going to be in the music.’

Shabaka’s new album, Of The Earth, features saxophone, but also woodwind instruments and synthesisers and many other elements. Every single one is performed by Shabaka, much of which he recorded while on the road, using an iPad and Garageband. It’s one of his most remarkable records yet, slipping through the porous borders between jazz, new age and ambient music. Shabaka says that recording the album brought him ‘deeper into the music-making process, closer to the music’ than he’d even been before. He even raps on a couple of tracks. ‘It wasn’t something that came easily or naturally,’ he admits. ‘I wanted to steer the listener to the themes of this record more overtly. But I still think what I’m saying is cryptic enough to have multiple meanings, for people to be able to explore it poetically.’

He’s an artist in transition, then, but when was that ever not the case? And when was that ever not the aim? ‘Sons Of Kemet were together for 13 years, The Comet Is Coming about ten,’ he says. ‘We were deeply comfortable, we knew what gets the audience going. Going from that, into a situation where it’s the opposite, where I don’t necessarily know what the music is, but I’ve got to do something, and it’s only through doing something that you can figure out how to move forward from that point… Yeah, it’s tough. But it’s the way it’s got to be. It’s all a journey towards a deeper level of connection to music and the idea of what music is. So, my making a record solo, or with flutes, broadens my attitude to what it is to make music on a fundamental level. Learning the flute for the last year-and-a-half really sharpened my understanding of what it is to make a piece of material resonate. And now, when I pick up the saxophone, I play with a deeper awareness of what I’m doing. And when I next play in a band that tours a lot or is going for years, I’m sure that my playing will be deeper because of this period I’m in right now.’