Sometimes, it can seem as though we’ve got this whole music thing the wrong way around. To be fair, none of us have much choice in this: we’re presented with tracks, albums and live performances, all the result of a combination of painstaking creative and technical processes, each brought to us in the wrappings and trappings of finished products, ready to be sold in the marketplace – so it’s understandable we will interpret them as the finished end point of those processes. In reality, these moments – records, digital files, gigs – are just snapshots of creativity in motion. We think of them and react towards them and respond to them as if they were destinations, when in the vast majority of cases they are waystations – moments of intersection on the separate but occasionally coinciding lifelong journeys being made constantly by both artist and audience.
Those journeys don’t get much more circuitous, or more prone to heading off down promising-looking detours, than Shabaka’s. The classically trained clarinettist who became a genre-obliterating, generational talent on saxophone before giving that instrument up to investigate the possibilities of production and concentrate on a plethora of different flutes, has evidently reached a point on his creative quest where a number of earlier pathways have begun to converge. Of The Earth – a first release on his own new label – is the first record on which he’s played sax since, probably, the pandemic-era London Brew collaboration (though his list of credits is so vast, with the dates the recordings were made generally not published, that it’s difficult to be certain), and, despite several collaborations with billy woods, it’s the first on which he raps. It’s certainly the first of his records where he plays and produces everything. But it may also be the first on which Shabaka is able to simultaneously inhabit and explore all the different possibilities his previous work has indicated.
Thoughts of exploration are never far from the mind when immersed in this remarkable record. It lives up to its title, sounds apparently sprouting from the seeds of ideas, climbing through the creative consciousness’s soil, then reaching up and out as they begin to introduce themselves to their immediate environment. On the opener, ‘A Future Untold’, a saxophone glides through a haze of chimes, bells and synth washes. ‘Step Lightly’ layers groups of flutes playing precisely drilled motifs over an ever-changing looped keyboard bounce, before a drum machine turns up and seems to transform the scene from rural idyll to a sunny city park. As urgent hand percussion instruments tussle with wheezing woodwind and roaring, throaty staccato sax figures, it isn’t clear whether we’re climbing ‘Marwa The Mountain’ or standing at its base, awed by its timeless and imposing presence.
Always, whether building a new world or describing parts of the existing one, the music here speaks to, and draws directly from, the emotions and the spirit. The interplay between a blazing guitar figure, a portentous bass drone and a series of floating flute figures on ‘Call The Power’ feels like both warning and promise; ‘Ol’ Time African Gods’ uses the physicality of its sound to impose its moods and meanings. Even the flutes have a percussive element, the flicking of the tongue over the mouthpiece not just a means of creating music but an intentionally corporeal act. The whole record feels alive, every sonic element audibly breathing: even when he raps (‘Go Astray’, ‘Eyes Lowered’), Shabaka’s performances are as much about the sound of the delivery and its emphasising of the organic and the human as they are about the words being uttered.
There will be things here that feel familiar to fans of The Comet Is Coming or Sons Of Kemet, just as there is plenty that seems to draw on and bring forward the ideas and atmospheres (not to mention obeying the instruction/suggestion formed by running their titles together into a single phrase) of Afrikan Culture and Perceive Its Beauty, Acknowledge Its Grace. But Of The Earth is so much more than an expected next step, far greater and more expansive than a development of earlier themes and ideas. For all that Shabaka’s journey has already proved to be long, winding and singular, you leave this record convinced that he’s only just getting started.
