Jazz musician Shabaka Hutchings and his magic flutes
March 2025
In the final weeks of 2023, the celebrated British jazz musician Shabaka Hutchings put down his saxophone after a live show playing John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme with four drummers at a heritage church in Hackney, London.
He knew it was a goodbye. He used the sax just once more over Christmas, to finish parts of the astonishing Perceive Its Beauty, Acknowledge Its Grace, the second album under his own name, released last year. On New Year’s Day 2024 he packed it away, and that was that, perhaps forever. He still doesn’t know.
Hutchings abandoned the tool upon which his name and identity was built to concentrate on the flute, an instrument that he reveres and, in a way, has come to worship. Heading to the shop for a new flute is not his vibe: instead he goes to traditional makers and players in South and Central America, Mexico and Japan. He’s also turned flute-maker himself, digging up a particular bamboo in southern Japan and curing the woody stems for up to two years.
Hutchings, 43, is telling his stories on a call from Bridgetown in Barbados, where he is staying with his mother before heading to Australia for a national tour that includes Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, Perth and WOMADelaide. He was born — and usually lives — in London but spent much of his childhood in the Caribbean. His father was around the music scene, but his mother was not. An English teacher, she made sure he could learn music from the moment he showed an interest. He soon settled on the clarinet and double bass.
“First, I did music exams at a basic level and then played in a lot of school bands and church bands and just any music I could play with, like soca bands or calypso bands,” he says. “It seems like that was the general atmosphere in Barbados when I was growing up. Musicians played in a lot of different settings.” He ditched the double bass but kept up the clarinet, studying the instrument at London’s Guildhall School of Music & Drama in his early 20s.
Once he finished his studies, he entered the heart of the fertile British contemporary jazz scene as a new-school multi-instrumentalist, as well as a composer for jazz and classical orchestras. His three acclaimed bands followed — Sons of Kemet (politicised Afro-jazz, now defunct), The Comet Is Coming (psychedelic jazz-rock, now defunct) and Shabaka and the Ancestors (African spiritual jazz), all saxophone-centred, all experimental, adventurous and wild.
When Hutchings decided to call time on the sax, he knew the Coltrane show would be the last outing. “I’ve not picked it up since the 1st of January, 2024,” he says. “I’ve not opened the box.” He says he got too used to the instrument and the instrument got too used to him, and the two sides added up to an unwelcome overfamiliarity.
He found himself second-guessing what his saxophone might do, which is not what he wanted. The wider world of flutes was more unknown, which is what he wants. Hutchings’ first record under his own name, Afrikan Culture (2022), was just him (on flutes) and a kora player. He says he doesn’t yet fully know a flute’s possibilities. “It sparks me up creatively. That’s what it’s all about. Working to actually realise the creative potential. Flutes give me freedom to just explore sonic possibilities.”
We talk flutes some more — actually a whole lot more. I sense quickly that Hutchings loves to talk about music and especially musical instruments, either very generally or in fine detail. We get onto Pharoah Sanders’ Thembi album from 1971, well before Hutchings was born, in which the great jazz player uses tenor and soprano saxes, but also all kinds of odd wind or reed instruments, including a cow horn. Sanders appears on the cover in a kaftan looking mystical, playing an Indian pungi with an ornate bowl like the one a snake charmer might use.
Hutchings begins to describe his own, ever-growing flute kit, and his absolute attentiveness to them, his sense of wonder at these simple, ancient tubes drilled with holes.
“I have all kinds of flutes. I’ve got Mesoamerican and Mayan clay flutes, from that Central American and Mexican area. I’ve got side flutes from Brazil. I’ve travelled to the north-east of Brazil in the Pernambuco region quite a lot in the last few years, where you’ve got a lot of pifano flute-makers and players.” The pifano is a small, seven-hole traditional side flute made of bamboo. “At the moment, that’s what I’m practising a lot, actually, trying to get up my proficiency.”
“There’s this thing in jazz where the players need to climax. Start in one place, climax, go back. I had to explain it wasn’t what I wanted, and I told them to try to stay in one space for as long as possible.”
Perceive Its Beauty, Acknowledge Its Grace features many flutes, an array of musicians playing other instruments and, in another new Hutchings twist, human voices. Percussionist Carlos Niño and Hutchings worked together on André 3000’s flute odyssey New Blue Sun two years ago. Electric and stand-up bass player Esperanza Spalding has won a Grammy for jazz. The electronic/fusion of producer Floating Points is here, as is ambient/mediation pioneer Laraaji. The voices are bold picks, used sparingly — avant-garde hip-hop/spoken word guy Saul Williams, British soul/jazz singer Lianne La Havas, Moses Sumney, New York MC Elucid, London singer/songwriter Eska and also Hutchings’ father, Anum Iyapo, previously known as Orville Hutchings.
Iyapo is a story unto himself. He was a graphic designer during the Jamaican dub heyday and made album covers for Jah Shaka and King Tubby. In 1985 he made an album of dub poetry, Song of the Motherland, as well as poetry books; the final track on Perceive Its Beauty, Acknowledge Its Grace is the Afrocentric “Motherland” poem from 1985, read anew by Iyapo for his son: “I am not magic, not a miracle … but I bring determination, I focus your consciousness…”
I thought Perceive Its Beauty was the best new music released last year, by quite a distance. Partly what Hutchings is now exploring is playing old flutes — which may be actually old or made in a traditional way — how Western instruments might be played. He might make a regional Brazilian flute go chromatic, or play half-steps between the notes that might otherwise be activated by levers on a clarinet or a sax.
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He hasn’t used this technique in recordings yet but is doing so live with his band. In Australia through March he will have mainly American jazz musicians with him, including Grammy-winning trombonist Kalia Vandever, drummer Austin Williamson from the band Onyx Collective, pianist George Burton and Charles Overton on harp.
I venture that he must have large flute road cases these days, and multiple flute roadies. Hutchings laughs, but only, I think, to be nice. He’s serious about flutes, like a sort of pilgrim with all his intrepid journeying, with contacts and teachers all over the world. In the Brazilian city of Maceió, for example, he visits a traditional flute-maker at his home for instruments and also for advice and guidance.
“There’s something very special about actually meeting the person who’s made the flute, hearing how they play it and actually seeing which flutes they think I’m going to sound good on,” he says. “I find a lot of time when I encounter new flutes, what I’m listening for might be different to what the maker listens for, because they understand the potential of each instrument. So he suggests certain instruments for me to play that I only really start to sound good on months later.”
On his last visit he went to the nearby Olinda Carnival with flute bands of up to 40 players. “Can’t get any better than that for me,” he says.
He often visits a master flute-maker in Los Angeles, named Guillermo Martinez, and his former apprentice, Nash Tavewa, who make clay Mesoamerican instruments.
In Japan, Katsuya Nonaka in Fukuoka, in the south, has shown Hutchings how to make the shakuhachi, a bamboo flute dating back to the Edo period, from about 1600, used traditionally by Komuso monks as part of their Buddhist training. “He’s a rice farmer and shakuhachi maker and player,” says Hutchings. The shakuhachi flute is the one Hutchings played on André 3000’s record. Nonaka is also a documentary-maker, translator and illustrator and is in the band Seppuku Pistols, who play punk on traditional instruments in art galleries. “He’s a skateboarder too,” Hutchings says. “Definitely a bit of an old punk. But he makes the shakuhachi in the traditional way.”
It starts with finding a madake bamboo forest, then finding the best plants. “You need particular qualities,” says Hutchings. “You want it not too young, there’ll be too much moisture in the plant. If it’s too old, it’ll be brittle and probably snap or crack when you’re starting to bore it. So it’s got to be middle aged. And then you’ve got to basically dig around the soil and get as deep as you can until the roots extend down to their microfibres and then you effectively pop it out the ground.”
It is stripped, the oils are burned off, and then it hangs for one or ideally two years to cure. “Then you come back and start doing the mathematical equations that tell you where the holes are going to go in relation to the size of the bamboo and the bore size and all that kind of stuff,” Hutchings explains. “You bore out the insides, then you fashion the mouthpiece, which affects the air speed.”
He says he’s made four flutes so far but is still learning to extend his craft further so he can line the inside of a flute with resin and make different mouthpieces, all to make it play differently.
“Three years ago I went and did my first harvest,” he says. “Then two years ago went back to make three instruments and harvest another four. And then last December I went back, made one of those into a shakuhachi and left the other three to cure for another year. Next year I’ll go back and make the three that I left into new shakuhachi.”
So you currently have four of your own? “Yes,” he says. “Two are in London. One I carry to use. One I’ve given away.”
Hutchings is currently making a new record to follow Perceive Its Beauty, Acknowledge Its Grace, which, he says, will inevitably be very flute-y. The album was recorded nearly two years before it came out, which means it is four years old. A lot has changed. He’s travelled more. The Comet Is Coming and Sons of Kemet have disbanded. He’s more into making music on his own now, which is the opposite of Perceive Its Beauty.
For that album, an array of musicians recorded in a highly freeform manner in the rarefied surrounds of New Jersey’s Van Gelder studio, probably the most famous workspace in jazz. They played without headphones or scores and without being separated. Hutchings told them he was interested in what might normally be considered the beginnings or endings of songs and he told them to hold moments and atmospheres as if the piece was starting or fading out.
“I wanted a series of small events in the music that are impactful. I think that’s a valid way of structuring music,” he says. “I thought that actually all I wanted was great musical events to occur, and the way to get them was for people to be non-stressed about getting it specifically right or wrong, and just have them really concerned about the atmosphere they’re creating and maintaining the atmosphere for as long as possible, and trying to milk it, basically.”
So — no crescendos, no choruses, no exclamations. No big noise. “There’s this thing in jazz where the players need to climax,” he says. “Start in one place, climax, go back. I had to explain it wasn’t what I wanted, and I told them to try to stay in one space for as long as possible, which is difficult because people always start moving the music forward.
“I wanted restraint,” he says. “To see where we could navigate as a group within that restraint.”
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on March 1, 2025 as “The magic flute”.
Originally published at https://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au on February 28, 2025.
