It was the spaciousness that made Perceive Its Beauty, Acknowledge Its Grace, Shabaka Hutchings’ pensive ambient jazz full-length, so remarkable. In all of Shabaka’s previous projects—Sons of Kemet, the Comet Is Coming, and Shabaka and the Ancestors—players piled up on top of one another, craggy stones stacked into a towering wall of sound. For Perceive Its Beauty, Shabaka set aside his hard-edged tenor sax, replacing it with the soft watercolor palette of flute and clarinet. Even on the album’s busier compositions, like the sprawling “I’ll Do Whatever You Want,” or the polyrhythmic groover “Body to Inhabit,” you could hear the distance between each instrument: Shabaka his collaborators reaching transcendence through a different kind of expansiveness.
There’s a lot less space on Possession, Shabaka’s follow-up to Perceive Its Beauty, but these dusky songs unfold with equal grace, like an evening primrose blooming. Shabaka’s woodwinds are constantly molting, the tail ends of echoes settling into the fecund humus. Textures fill up the stereo field: Droning chords radiate quietly in the background like the hum of an electrical appliance. Filtered percussion chugs like far-off machinery. The delicate beauty of its predecessor remains, but Possession is a bit more shadowy. A thin current of anxiety winds through each of its five songs.
Opener “Timepieces” illustrates this point most explicitly, beginning with a piano that loops over itself like a buffering .gif and distant, doleful moans dipped in reverb. As the drum pattern quivers to life, rapper billy woods describes the contours of a specific kind of adult heartbreak, one where the formerly entwined can’t ever let go completely. Shabaka’s clarinet shimmies through woods’ syllables, his flute repeats a circular figure, and wordless, choral harmonies add a depth that goes almost unnoticed at first. Though every tone has a rounded edge, woods’ gruff cadence and heartrending lyrics offer a counterbalance; the song exudes the sting of a bittersweet memory.
That competing tranquility and tension colors most of Possession. On “To the Moon,” samples of crickets create the noise floor, over which a digital keyboard’s arrhythmic triggers form a glassy, undulating pad. As Shabaka and André 3000 whirl around each other, everything melts: Their flutes overlap with a vibraphone, which overlaps with a chiming guitar. A hang drum emerges from the haze, gradually overtaken by a sine wave bassline. During “Reaching Back Towards Eternity,” Shabaka’s plaintive clarinet glides over Nduduzo Makhathini’s spare piano while Surya Botofasina’s synths and Carlos Niño’s wispy percussion deepen the somber mood. There’s an exquisite ache to this music, the juxtaposition of bright autumn foliage against a grey, overcast sky.
“Timepieces” is the sharpest departure, but all five tracks on Possession take Shabaka’s blend of New Age, jazz, and hip-hop further afield, each in a slightly different direction. The songs feel too distinct from one another to be a collection of leftovers or B-sides—though “I’ve Been Listening,” which features Elucid, Brandee Younger, and Esperanza Spalding, the same crew that produced Perceive Its Beauty standout “Body to Inhabit,” occupies a brighter, more mystical space that doesn’t quite sync with the EP’s uneasy vibe. Possession demonstrates Shabaka’s eagerness to tinker with the formula, to explore how his previous maximalism could be applied to the sparser, more internal music he’s been making since returning to the flute. Not all of the noise that surrounds us is deafening, but it’s constant, and perhaps the only way to transform is to fold into the enveloping din.
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English (US) ·