On his debut EP as a solo artist, the jazz musician and composer weaves various wind instruments through eight tracks that thrum with kinetic energy.
A few years ago, while doing research for a story, I found some archives detailing South Carolina’s “Negro Code,” a 17th-century relic that forbade enslaved Africans from playing or owning horns, drums, loud instruments and any others that could give “sign or notice to one another of their wicked designs and purposes.” Whether it’s the sounds of mbira sharply knocking against the balancing rocks in Zimbabwe, a kora ringing through the harmattan breeze in Mali, or drums signaling the start of a rebellion in Palmares, African instruments have a life that reverberates across frontiers. Shabaka Hutchings—bandleader of several acclaimed groups including Sons of Kemet—believes in the galvanizing capacity of African instruments that served to unnerve white inhabitants in the Carolinas, and more so, he is drawn to their ability to soften and comfort. On Afrikan Culture, his debut EP as a solo artist, Hutchings weaves eight tracks that thrum with kinetic energy, submerging listeners into an experience that draws them inward as he simultaneously steps into the role of a solitary performer.
From the opening notes of “Black meditation,” Hutchings maps out the compulsions of the EP—an impatient need to tap into every undiscovered melody. While playing the shakuhachi (a Japanese bamboo flute) he lulls listeners with low and heavy notes. It’s in the surrounding sounds—lightly tingling bells and low-key horns—that Hutchings compels his audience to experience the textures and scents of the places that their minds fall into when they are at peace. On “Call it a European Paradox,” the kora with its hollowed, calabash interior makes every string land like it’s coming from the bottom of a well where the acoustics can induce envy, as easily as they could be inaudible. It takes a particular kind of skill to make the sounds hit as lightly as they do, without losing that unmistakable tension that gives the instrument its solid heart.
Hutchings shared a little about the creative process for the EP, centering the explorations that led him to create an album that produces “a forest of sound where melodies and rhythms float in space and emerge in glimpses.” This fleeting presence is made clear on “Memories don’t live like people do,” a skipping stone’s attempt to crystallize precious moments into a long-lasting escape. Slightly over one minute long, the shakuhachi builds and recedes, falling in and out of step as quickly as memories fade, before it suddenly drops into silence. You are left wondering what the melodies were before they fall off, and you’ll replay over and over, trying to find the note that will become the memory. “The dimensions of subtle awareness” finds Hutchings sitting with mbira—the instrument known among Zimbabwe’s Shona people to summon the ancestors—and deliver messages, warnings, and insight from lost ones. Zimbabwean composers such as Stella Chiweshe, the band Mbira dzeNharira, and the late singer-songwriter Chiwoniso Maraira have leaned on the instrument for its clarity and layers, concealed between chiming metal twines. Hutchings hums along with it, a vocal arrangement you could miss tucked between the ever-present shakuhachi.
It’s not an album that struggles, but it does lag, a strange occurrence for a project that mostly rests on a track’s ability to rearrange the mundane, and intertwine with a listener’s own desire to self-soothe. And maybe that’s where the uncertainty comes because when you think you are about to let out a scream, the melody switches and pulls your body back into stasis. Often it’s in the ways our bodies expel distress that our minds can quieten, and Hutchings doesn’t offer enough room to physically contort oneself back into shape. “Explore inner space” could have been that genesis, but for over six minutes, the flutes, although captivating, are an anchor keeping us in place and ultimately stuck.
To call “Rebirth” the closer would be a misnomer because Hutchings is aware that he is beginning a different course with this EP, and aligning his musicality with something far less tangible than an orchestra—he wants to be a part of your space, transmitting into your private silence. Much like noted peer and fellow multi-instrumentalist Esperanza Spalding did on last year’s release, Songwrights Apothecary Lab, this is an EP of aural inscriptions meant to be as fluid as memory, with the certainty of a lived past. There are wicked things afoot in African instruments—wickedly vivid, and mutable. With Afrikan Culture Hutchings is coaxing introspection while urging us to be less cautious and follow the memories. Even if they last just a second.
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