Shabaka Hutchings is lining up a new solo LP for release this April.
Titled Perceive Its Beauty, Acknowledge Its Grace, the 11-track follow-up to 2022’s Afrikan Culture sees the British jazz artist link up with a cast of collaborators that includes André 3000, Floating Points, Laraaji, Moses Sumney, Lianne La Havas, Esperanza Spalding and ELUCID, among others. To mark the album’s announcement, Hutchings has shared a video for lead track ‘End Of Innocence’, which you can watch below.
Perceive Its Beauty, Acknowledge Its Grace is one of the UK artist’s first releases to emerge since he announced he’d be taking a hiatus from playing saxophone publicly beginning in 2024. With that in mind, the new record focuses primarily on the flute, after Hutchings developed a deeper fixation with the instrument in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Speaking about the record, he said: “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 gathered many of them together at Rudy Van Gelder’s historic studios in New Jersey for the recording, and added that the setting “informed the sound of so many seminal jazz albums that have shaped my musical aptitude”.
Hutchings continued: “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.”
Impulse! will release Perceive Its Beauty, Acknowledge Its Grace on April 12, 2024.
