The latest album from the Toronto saxophonist, best known for his work with Destroyer, is an inventive work of auditory storytelling exploring his own fraught religious background.
Joseph Shabason is a Toronto saxophonist best known for performing with Destroyer, memorably serving up those transportive sax licks that graced Kaputt a decade ago. But in his parallel career as a composer and solo artist, Shabason takes a different tack, minimizing the instrument’s potential as a vehicle for scene-stealing solos and disguising it into what he has called a “dense chordal instrument”—a sound that, like much of Shabason’s music, feels curiously suspended between ’80s new age nostalgia and a more processed, alien cadence.
Yet there is nothing alien about the emotional core of Shabason’s music. Shabason creates instrumental music with richly personal, unabashedly human underpinnings, and his previous albums, 2017’s Aytche and 2018’s Anne, both used field recordings and snatches of interview chatter to investigate intergenerational trauma. His latest work, The Fellowship, focuses on Shabason’s own past, examining his fraught religious upbringing within—and eventual need to walk away from—an insular Islamic community called The Fellowship, which his parents joined before he was born. The result is an undeniably inventive work of auditory storytelling—even if it requires an accompanying CliffsNotes of sorts for listeners to grasp its thematic weight.
Shabason’s grandparents were Holocaust survivors, and their lingering trauma apparently inspired his parents’ decision to leave Judaism and raise Shabason in a fellowship led by the teachings of a Sufi sheik named Bawa Muhaiyaddeen. “Life With My Grandparents” uses a chilly template of fretless bass and heavily processed sax murmurings to convey his parents’ troubled childhoods, and features the record’s only trace of a human voice (a faint cassette sample of a child’s babbling). The title track, with its fluttering birdcall and yearning pan flute, could soundtrack a movie montage of a young family seeking out a new beginning. It is airy and optimistic, a glimpse of daylight in a drab room.
As a teenager, Shabason wrestled with the implications of the dogmatic teachings he’d been raised to believe. “By 13, I had smoked weed and I was terrified about what God was going to do to me,” the musician recalled in a Talkhouse piece. This album’s thorny midsection is a musical suite of songs titled after age ranges in Shabason’s youth, which use nonconventional instrumental choices to illustrate that spiritual tumult. If the gentle new age sheen of “0–13” suggests the innocence of Shabason’s early childhood, the more unsettled unravelings of the track’s final minute represent his growing unease.
This turmoil explodes into full view on “13–15,” which recruits a barrage of marimba and flute squawks to illustrate Shabason’s pained questionings. If the composition sounds distressing, so is a crisis of faith. Equally turbulent is “Comparative World Religions,” a piece that takes its title from a college course that inspired Shabason’s self-reckoning and eventual renunciation. With its unsteady gamelan convulsions, the track is among several that reflect Shabason’s attempts to channel the composer and interdisciplinary artist Maggi Payne. “So Long” is the narrative culmination, a soft-focus coda that luxuriates in loungey textures yet subverts the artificiality of smooth-jazz timbres to convey the very real emotional relief of letting go.
You could easily slot The Fellowship alongside a recent string of albums from talented, nonreligious songwriters reckoning with complicated relationships to faith. There was last year’s Youth Pastoral from New York musician Ben Seretan, whose songwriting expressed unresolved feelings on an evangelical upbringing, and Kevin Morby’s Oh My God, a secular album shot through an impassioned gospel prism. Each of these records approaches religion with more empathy and nuance than, say, XTC’s “Dear God.” (As Shabason himself has put it, “I have a lot of anger towards religion, but this was a way to approach it with curiosity.")
What separates The Fellowship is that it confronts these themes as a wholly instrumental work. The downside of such an approach is that it’s impossible to fully grasp the album’s narrative arc without the aid of a written guide—detailed promotional materials, for instance, or any of the highly personal interviews Shabason has given. Without such thematic grounding, The Fellowship still delivers rich and emotionally engaging ambient-jazz, but some of the more abrasive passages (“13–15,” “Escape from North York”) wind up feeling more like fragmented narrative transitions than satisfying compositions. This is an album that demands more than passive listenership, but also rewards it. On its own cathartic terms, The Fellowship is a fiercely creative record that offers nothing less than an auditory document of private liberation.
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