Shabaka Hutchings, active as composer, saxophonist, clarinetist, and flutist, played a central part in establishing England’s 21st-century jazz environment through his work with Courtney Pine’s Jazz Warriors and as a founding member of the Heliocentrics. An agreement with the storied Impulse! imprint allowed him to document his own ensembles, among them the modernist Sons of Kemet, whose albums Your Queen Is a Reptile (2018) and Black to the Future (2021) appeared under that banner. In parallel he directs the South Africa-based jazz collective Shabaka and the Ancestors, while co-leading the electro-acoustic, avant-futurist jazz-rock-dance trio the Comet Is Coming, whose widely praised releases The Afterlife and Trust in the Lifeforce of the Deep Mystery both surfaced in 2019. Stepping away from the saxophone, he issued the flute- and clarinet-focused solo album Perceive Its Beauty, Acknowledge Its Grace in 2024 under the name Shabaka.
Born in London in 1984, Hutchings relocated to Barbados at age six, took up classical clarinet studies at nine, and began saxophone lessons the following year. Upon returning to the United Kingdom he was named a BBC Radio 3 New Generation Artist in 2010, an appointment that supported multiple commissions and numerous radio broadcasts, including those featuring Sons of Kemet. A July 2013 Leasowes Bank Music Festival commission led him to compose a work for clarinet and string quartet, which he performed with the Ligeti String Quartet to enthusiastic notices. Sons of Kemet’s debut album Burn appeared that year and secured the 2013 MOBO Award for Jazz Act of the Year, while Hutchings himself received a nomination for Jazz Musician of the Year at the Parliamentary Jazz Awards. In 2014 Marshall Allen invited him to join the Sun Ra Arkestra; the resulting BBC Radio 3 session preceded Hutchings’s receipt of the Paul Hamlyn Foundation Composer Award.
Early in 2015 he journeyed to South Africa to record with local jazz musicians, accepted a London Sinfonietta commission for a “note to the new government,” and served as Associate Artist for the Spitalfields Summer Festival. September brought the second Sons of Kemet album, Lest We Forget What We Came Here to Do, on NAIM, while October saw the Comet Is Coming—Hutchings alongside Dan Leavers and Max Hallett—issue its debut EP on the Leaf label. The following spring the trio unveiled the full-length Channel the Spirits, which earned both widespread critical praise and a Mercury Prize nomination.
Hutchings formed the core of percussionist/producer Sarathy Korwar’s ensemble on the acclaimed Day to Day, recorded across India and London with the Sidi Troupe of Ratanpur and released on Ninja Tune in summer 2016. Later that year Brownswood, Gilles Peterson’s label, issued Wisdom of Elders by Shabaka and the Ancestors, and during the same South African visit Hutchings contributed to pianist Nduduzo Makhathini’s Icilongo: The African Peace Suite.
Throughout the ensuing seasons he fostered exchanges among musicians of differing disciplines within the London community. In 2017 alone his appearances included Yazz Ahmed’s La Saboteuse, Zara McFarlane’s Arise, Alexander Hawkins Unit(e)’s self-titled recording, and two Heliocentrics projects: World of Masks and the original soundtrack for The Sunshine Makers.
That autumn he entered into an agreement with the historic Impulse! label—once home to John Coltrane, Alice Coltrane, Pharoah Sanders, Archie Shepp, and many others—making his March 2018 debut with the internationally lauded Your Queen Is a Reptile, which he also co-produced. Later that year he joined Nubya Garcia for the London sessions that fed into Makaya McCraven’s Universal Beings, and he participated in the Ogun recording Uplift the People by South African drummer Louis Moholo-Moholo’s Five Blokes.
April 2019 found Hutchings contributing centrally to Angelique Kidjo’s international hit Celia, her tribute to Afro-Cuban vocalist Celia Cruz; it remained his sole session date that year, as he concentrated on the Comet Is Coming’s two releases—Trust in the Lifeforce of the Deep Mystery in March and the six-track The Afterlife—followed by extensive touring. Returning to South Africa in the autumn, he recorded We Are Sent Here by History with the Ancestors, including Makhathini, and issued the set on Impulse! in March 2020, crediting himself as sole producer alongside his compositional and instrumental roles. Additional recordings from this period feature Sibusile Xaba, Moses Sumney, Keleketla!, and Shake Stew. March 2021 brought Sons of Kemet’s African Cosmology EP, pairing “Myth Science” with the twelve-minute “Rites of Passage,” followed in May by the charting album Black to the Future.
Hutchings also figured prominently on Anthony Joseph’s Heavenly Sweetness long-player The Rich Are Only Defeated When Running for Their Lives. Further 2022 activity included Alexander Hawkins Mirror Canon’s Intakt release Break a Vase and the solo EP Afrikan Culture, issued in May. Announcing a saxophone hiatus at the close of 2023, he redirected attention to flute and clarinet, instruments that anchor his 2024 solo debut Perceive Its Beauty, Acknowledge Its Grace, released as Shabaka.
