“The Koala app is amazing – it’s the best sampler and the deeper you go, the madder it gets”: Shabaka Hutchings on his journey from jazz saxophone to iPad beatmaking

Relentlessly pushing jazz music’s boundaries, Shabaka Hutchings’ second solo album, Of The Earth, recasts an artist long revered as an explosive instrumental force through groups like Sons of Kemet and The Comet Is Coming.

Built from road-crafted beats and loops built on portable devices, the record entwines choral flute passages, kinetic electronics and, for the first time, Shabaka’s own voice as a rapper.

Nominated for Instrumentalist of the Year at this year’s Jazz FM Awards, Of the Earth surprisingly finds Shabaka immersed in Ableton Live, where he sculpts and interrogates sampled beats and found sounds. Prior to the pandemic, Shabaka knew little of music production, or even how to play the flute, yet here he reveals a striking shift in identity from virtuosic bandleader to meticulous sonic draughtsman.

Returning to when you first started playing the clarinet. Some might say that was a strange choice of instrument to practice alongside genres like hip-hop or the Crop Over scene?

“I did a classical degree in clarinet, so that's always been my first instrument and what I spent most of my time honing my skills and rudimentary techniques on, but at some point a friend told me, ‘Practice is so boring, why don’t we just play along to hip-hop tunes in different tempos?’ It was just a way for me to practice my regular stuff to a metronome beat that wasn't tick, tick, tick, and after I started developing a jazz style I realised that it’s actually all about cadence.”

“You can get jazz phrasing by listening to saxophone players or clarinet players, or you can actually see the rappers and MCs that you're listening to as musicians and figure out what their cadence is. When you start seeing the notes that rappers are utilising as musical notes, as opposed to lyrical narrative, you start to unlock a whole other area.

“Obviously, all rappers aren't the same. Some just do a basic cadence that’s really monotonous, but others are really inventive in how they use rhythm and space. For me, that's what connects the clarinet to jazz and the lineage of using phrasing in inventive ways.”

You spent time in Barbados as a child and at some point returned to London. Did you immediately have ambitions to start a band or be a session player?

“I moved from Barbados to Birmingham when I was 16, did my A-levels and always knew I wanted to be a musician. I didn't know what type of musician, but because I played the clarinet I had to do a classical music degree. I wasn't really that interested in classical music, but I was interested in being a part of the long tradition of that instrument. I guess that put me in this strange position where I was spending all my time learning and practicing a style of music that I had no intention of playing.”

“At that time, there was a lot going on in London - more than I think there is now, because there was lots of electronic music being played in warehouse parties and when I first moved here more or less every pub had some kind of live jazz band in the corner, so my friends and I would join loads of jam sessions and play gigs.”

Were you already studying saxophone at that point?

“I had saxophone lessons as part of my course, which I struggled with because the school already told us that their clients didn't play the saxophone. At one point, they even told me that playing jazz would destroy my classical ability.

“The idea that embracing one culture will destroy another was a cultural thing back then, but I fought hard to get a certain amount of lessons in every month with a great saxophone teacher who taught me a lot of the basics. It was a split thing - during the day I was practicing clarinet with orchestras and ensembles, and in the evening I’d go out with the saxophone and play that.”

A few years back, we spoke to Danalogue from The Comet Is Coming, and he told us that your suggestion to improvise without any specific starting point was fundamental to the band’s sound?

“For me, that's really where the magic is. When I first started with them, we’d get in a room, start playing and it was just instant. There was no talking and no rationalisation - even about where we’d start.

“For me, a lot of the problems with bands is that they have a formula that works in terms of the music itself, but once they get on the publicity train they get locked into selling a commodity that can be packaged, whereas when you get in a room and just try to let the magic happen, you don't need to change the formula.”

You’ve played with an incredibly diverse range of artists. Are you always given complete freedom or do you typically have to work within defined parameters?

“These days, what I do is becoming a little more set because I guess I'm a name and people know that my vibe is to have open-ended collaborations. But I've done loads of session work before and paid my dues by playing in all types of bands from Indian bhangra to big band and funk sessions.”

“When someone says you’ve got to play something in these eight bars, you’ve got to just do it - and I practice so that I'm able to be a functional musician, but it’s also important for me to remember what my personal vision of music is and not just be a session player. At the end of the day, when you live somewhere like London, you've got to pay the rent and be able to adapt, but you're always learning whatever you’re doing.”

You didn’t release a solo record until 2022. Was that simply down to finding a window of opportunity?

“I actually took a break for a month, went to Margate, got a little flat by the sea and was able to get down to some fundamental, contemplative practice, and that's where I developed a lot of the music that became the Afrikan Culture EP. Once I’d settled down, I started to ask myself what I really wanted to get out of my musicality.”

Was it completely freeing or did you quickly find yourself struggling with things that you hadn’t previously been responsible for, like mixing?

“I loved it because I had a strong idea of what I wanted the music to be. I’ve always enjoyed the democratic process of consulting with other people and talking things through with bandmates, but sometimes it's good to follow your ideas through to the end, knowing that if something doesn't work you can change it without it having to reflect on your integrity. Even if that's not overt, there's just something freeing about not having to adapt or answer to anyone else and I guess we're all trying to get an idea of who we are and articulate that as adequately as possible.”

“The only way to really know that is to allow yourself the freedom to be expressive, so that was an important moment in time for me as a musician. But I still love playing in bands. There's something special about playing with a consistent group of people and getting into the psychology of each member and how they deal with material. All the little in-jokes and the whole arc of a live set are really powerful within that band format.”

You took a hiatus from playing saxophone in 2023. What physical and emotional pressures come from playing the instrument that people may not be aware of?

“Emotionally, I guess it’s about the high-energy style that I was used to playing. You’re trying to be expressive on stage every night and transmit that to the audience, and I think I did that adequately and was good at it, but it can't be something you do just because it's your job - it's got to be something you feel personally and have an enthusiasm for.

“I guess the problem with bands that become successful is that you work hard for years to get to a point where you can share your art with lots of people, but then it turns into gruelling flights at 4am to some festival in the middle of wherever and it’s just eat, play gig, go back to the hotel and repeat.”

“Eventually, that enjoyment of playing every specific gig slowly drifts away and when the curtain opens, it’s hard to summon all of that enthusiasm into one energy ball and give it to the audience. I felt it was important for me to be able to recharge that enthusiasm by doing exactly what I wanted, which was practicing all of this quieter, more delicate music on the flutes. At the point that I finished the saxophone playing, I wasn't exhausted - I loved it, but I just decided to make a principled decision for a period of time.”

The flute has become a mainstay of a lot of your recent material. Perhaps similar to the clarinet, it's not an instrument that most people would expect to play a starring role, but is that precisely what makes it so challenging?“You wouldn't necessarily see it in a starring role, but if you look at a lot of the melodies in drill and grime music, they use a lot of high-pitched synth melody frequencies that are more or less in the same register as the flute. When you look at something like Stormzy’s Shut Up, it’s basically a MIDI flute sound. So people are used to where the flute is in that sonic register, and if you look at the flute in general, it’s one of the most prevalent instruments in global music culture.”

“I guess everyone loves the flute; it’s just that everyone doesn't know they love the flute. The thing is, I couldn’t play the flute that well right up until the pandemic, but I could see the potential for the instrument. I knew I really enjoyed playing it, but needed to spend a period committing to it so I could improve, and questioning what you're doing and why you're doing it is what makes you develop as a musician.”

Your second solo LP, Of the Earth, does feature flute and saxophone, but from what we understand the focus was more about your approach to production as opposed to the choice of instruments used?

“I've been making beats for a few years on various portable devices while I’m on the road, but that wasn't something I saw as being reflective of where I was at artistically - I just really liked making beats.

“I'm basically a nerd who likes watching YouTube tutorials about how to make beats while I’m eating breakfast. I’d watch them again and again, copying stuff on my device, and as a result of that I suddenly had a lot of music that I’d put in file folders and listen to on loop. At some point I realised, this is where I'm at, and on deep reflection I knew I needed to record something with all these beats.”

“It was more about actually finding a way to make each particular piece of music come alive using all of the instruments that I had at my disposal - including the saxophone. I’d only come back to playing the sax last September, but it was only after I’d finished the album and got it mastered that I realised that it could actually work on this. What’s weird is that it was almost pre-decided, because there were spaces on the album that were perfect for the saxophone, even though I’d had no intention of using it a week before.”

We understand this was also your first time using Ableton to produce?

”I used Ableton as the master hub for all my ideas. For instance, I’d create stuff on really small devices like the Teenage Engineering OP-1 or the Roland P-6, fill them up with music and then put everything onto Ableton and start arranging and looping small sections. What I'm a big proponent of is making music fluidly and intuitively, but then taking the stems and seeing what happens when I mix them all together.

“I’d open a really long Ableton session window and put all my music on that one page so I could see what ideas worked next to others, but I’d also start thinking about sequencing and the arc of the album as an album. I didn't want to just make a beat tape; I wanted to make an album that's got an actual narrative from start to finish.”

Because you were using small devices, did that allow you to work from remote environments?“Every day, I’d just wake up, open Ableton’s Session View and see what needed to be done, whether that was chipping away at beats or using tutorials if I wanted to record orchestral parts. Once I had a folder with about 20 potential tunes, I went to my mum's place in Barbados and just sat there for a couple of months writing melodies in the same bedroom I grew up in. That's where most of the recording was done, but the flute parts were mainly recorded in studios.”

There’s a lot of African-sounding percussion on the LP. Did you turn to sample libraries for that or play by hand?

“For a lot of the percussion, I used a Roland HandSonic percussion pad. I actually bought it during the pandemic and had been tinkering around with it a lot, but really went to town on it while I was getting this album together. I’d play for 20 minutes, select a four-bar loop of drums that worked and just put everything together in a rough and tumble process. At one stage, I was going on YouTube, snatching animal sounds and using them for snares, and my only parameter was that I didn’t want to sample or steal anyone's music.”

We read that you used the Koala sampler, which is a mobile app. What made that device so useful?

“The Koala app is amazing – I actually think it’s the best sampler because the interface is so easy to use and the deeper you go, the madder it gets. Because you can use it on the iPad, there’s something about being able to touch the screen and drag a waveform out with your fingers and position it wherever you want.”

“It's a lot more intuitive and easy to use than a Roland SP-404 or sampling in Ableton because you can drag and drop any sample from any project into any other project. It’s also got loads of really good stock sounds and bus effects and it’s one of those apps where they’re consistently updating it and giving you more stuff. So, yeah, I’m kind of a Koala champion!”

Being an accomplished musician, did you find it difficult to retain the swing of a rhythm using sequencer-based tools?

“I don't see the sequencer as being restrictive and I don't generally use quantization except for some basic bass drums or if I need a hi-hat. In general, I play things in so I don't really have that problem with the stiffness of a sequencer. I'm not a percussionist and I'm not even known as a producer, so I don't have any hang-ups. Because people aren't expecting anything from me, I feel I have the freedom to do whatever I want.”

It’s sometimes hard to discern meaning from instrumental albums, but does Of The Earth have an ecological concept?

“For me, instrumental music democratises the process of both the composer and the listener having something to say about what an album means. With most music, the vocalist explicitly tells you what to think, whereas an instrumentalist can drop clues that are not so obvious or literal. None of my albums start with a meaning - I just go down rabbit holes and at some point everything starts to take shape in relation to issues that have been on my mind or things that have come up in my life based on my temperament.”

“Quite far into this process, I realised Of The Earth is a metaphor for how I've dug into my core musical foundation, but we’re also in a period of time, politically, where there are a lot of fractures. People are grasping for nationalistic sentiment and there are questions about who belongs in certain spaces, so it's always good to remind everyone that we’re all ‘of the earth’ and we can hopefully contextualise that in terms of nationalistic boundaries and how we see ourselves as communities.”

Shabaka performs at Village Underground on April 7 and his new album, Of The Earth, is released March 6 on Shabaka Records. For more information, click here.