Shabaka Hutchings has announced his debut solo LP under the mononym Shabaka. Perceive Its Beauty, Acknowledge Its Grace, the follow-up to 2022’s Afrikan Culture EP, is due for release on April 12 via Impulse!. It finds Hutchings focusing primarily on flutes and softer woodwinds, with contributions from André 3000, Esperanza Spalding, Moses Sumney, Brandee Younger, Floating Points, Laraaji, Miguel Atwood-Ferguson, Saul Williams, Elucid, and more. To accompany the announcement, Hutchings has shared a Phoebe Boswell-directed video for lead single ‘End of Innocence’, which you can check out below.
‘End of Innocence’, and the album more broadly, “really signifies a departure for me, a departure from the bands that I’ve become known for playing in, and the arrival of the flutes in general,” Hutchkings explained. “I bring a lot of flutes to the album and explore different kind of sonic terrains, although for this track in particular, it’s not actually the flute, it’s the clarinet. It’s my first instrument, the instrument that I consider to be my primary instrument, so it’s really going back to what I feel most comfortable with.”
Opening up about the collaborative process behind the LP, Hutchings shared: “I invited a bunch of musicians I’ve met and admired over the past few years of touring throughout the United States to collaborate and everyone said yes, which I constantly find breathtaking,” he disclosed. The musicians gathered at Rudy Van Gelder’s historic studios, which “informed the sound of so many seminal jazz albums that have shaped my musical aptitude. We played with no headphones or separation in the room so we could capture the atmosphere of simply playing together in the space without a technological intermediary.”
Hutchings added: “Around the release of the Shabaka and the Ancestors album We Are Sent Here by History, I coined the term ‘sonic poems’ to express how I’m intending the listener to relate to the words associated with the sounds contained on the disc. Each title on this disc was extracted from a longer poem written specifically for the album which only achieved its full meaning in the presence of the music.”
Perceive its Beauty, Acknowledge its Grace Cover Artwork:
Perceive its Beauty, Acknowledge its Grace Tracklist:
1. End of Innocence
2. As the Planets and the Stars Collapse
3. Insecurities
4. Managing My Breath, What Fear Had Become
5. The Wounded Need to Be Replenished
6. Body to Inhabit
7. I’ll Do Whatever You Want
8. Living
9. Breathing
10. Kiss Me Before I Forget
11. Song of the Motherland
