SHABAKA

Shabaka Hutchings has an exceedingly rare artistic trait for the modern music industry: the ability to step away from projects and even entire instruments when he believes he is done with them. During the last decade, Hutchings became an inarguable linchpin of London’s modern jazz boom, working in a wild and wide variety of contexts. With his saxophone, he anchored the heavy-hitting brass band Sons of Kemet and the ecstatic electro-explorers The Comet Is Coming. He recorded with Makaya McCraven, Angélique Kidjo, and Alexander Hawkins and built a band of South African players, The Ancestors. As the pandemic crashed down in 2020, Hutchings was scheduled to practice Aaron Copland pieces for a performance with a British orchestra. “And in the naked light of free time,” he told The Guardian, “I realized: I don’t want to practice these etudes at all.” 

Hutchings instead devoted himself to learning the shakuhachi flute that he’d purchased in Japan a year earlier. He spent months learning the fundamentals and, in the process, became so attracted to the challenge that he opted to put the saxophone away after paying tribute to John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme in December 2023. Alongside the likes of André 3000, Jason Moran, Moses Sumney, and Brandee Younger, Hutchings cut the spellbinding and audacious PerceiveIts Beauty, Acknowledge Its Grace with his new instrument. He left London, too, shuttling around the world to places where he could study local flute music. “To keep that spark that made you successful in the first place,” he has said, “is to follow your artistic intuition as soon as it suggests a particular direction.” Hutchings follows his enthusiasm and ardor back to Big Ears 2026.