Shabaka with special guest George Burton

Perceive its Beauty, Acknowledge its Grace by multi-instrumentalist Shabaka Hutchings is, in a sense, a debut album. And yet, the album also serves as a reintroduction to the artist, a levitating, stunning work chock full of the lessons he’s learned over the course of his life and career. And perhaps, most importantly, it represents the spirit of exploration that the artist is most tapped into these days.
 
London-born, Hutchings spent much of his childhood in Barbados. Beginning at age nine, he studied the clarinet, playing in calypso bands while studying classicalrepertoire, often practicing over hip hop beats by artists such as Nas, as well as to the music native to Barbados. He imparted that at the time, “The idea of being a particular ‘type’ of musician who limited themselves by genre was totally alien to me and my peers, it was just about playing with skill and dedication, and whether music moved me or left me cold.”
 
Consequently, after studying clarinet at Guildhall School of Music from 2004-2008, he collaborated on a kaleidoscopic range of projects:recording and/or touring with Mulatu Astatke and the Heliocentrics, Soweto Kinch, Floating Points and Courtney Pine amongst many other bands, as well as being a part of the London Improvisers Orchestra. He’s alsocomposed pieces for the BBC Concert Orchestra, London Sinfonietta, Ligeti Quartet, and performed the Copland Clarinet Concerto with the BBC National Orchestra of Wales, Britten Sinfonietta as well as the Knoxville Symphony Orchestra.
 
Over the course of the past decade, the lion’s share of his touring and recorded work has been with three bands:Sons of Kemet, The Comet is Coming and Shabaka and the Ancestors. “In these formations,” he shared,“I’ve been able to display a fundamental approach to creative practice in different contexts spanning Afro-Caribbean fusion, London dance music club culture and the rich South African jazz tradition - all within the freedom afforded by the legacy of the American ‘jazz’ tradition.” That approach reflects a mantra he absorbed early in his life.
 
“My primary school teacher told me ‘the music isn’t hard, just practice it mechanically then relax and let your soul shine through’. This is an adage which I’ve kept throughout my life of learning how the musics and instruments of different cultures relate to my personal vision of sound.”
 
His musical exploration includes employing a variety of flutes, including the ancient Japanese Shakuhachi, which he started playing in 2020 during the pandemic. “Since then, it has slowly changed the scope of my musical inner landscape and drawn me towards a multitude of other instruments in the flute family,” he explained.“As more flutes have been added to my arsenal including Mayan Teotihuacan drone flutes, Brazilian Pifanos, Native American flutes and South American Quenas, I’ve started to appreciate the underlying principles that cause these instruments to resonate most fully and use this understanding to form a concept allowing me to freely move between instruments.”
 
On New Year’s Day 2023, in the wake of the release of his 2022 debut EP, Afrikan Culture (which notably featured the artist primarily on flutes), Shabaka announced that beginning in 2024 he’d take a hiatus from playing the saxophone publicly. He clarified in July 2023 on his Instagram page his intention to cease playing with bands in which the saxophone was his primary instrument (including The Comet Is Coming, Sons of Kemet and Shabaka and the Ancestors).
 
For the flute-forward album Perceive its Beauty, Acknowledge its Grace, Hutchings tapped into a remarkable cadre of players, including percussionist Carlos Niño and bassist Esperanza Spalding. Vocalists including Saul Williams and Lianne La Havas contributed to “Managing My Breath, What Fear Had Become”and “Kiss Me Before I Forget”, respectively. Floating Points, with whom Shabaka shared a stage with for their performance of Promises at the Hollywood Bowl, provided additional production on the track “I’ll Do Whatever You Want".
 
“I invited a bunch of musicians I’ve met and admired over the past few years of touring throughout the United States to collaborate and everyone said yes, which I constantly find breathtaking,” he disclosed. His aim was to gather the musicians at Rudy Van Gelder’s historic studios, which he says “informed the sound of so many seminal jazz albums that have shaped my musical aptitude. We played with no headphones or separation in the room so we could capture the atmosphere of simply playing together in the space without a technological intermediary. After recording hours of inspired interactions, I set to work producing an album from the material.”
 
When asked about the meaning of the song’s titles, he explained that his previous album’s song titles can be read as poems, respectively. “The narrative aspect of my albums is always intentional,” he explained.“Around the release of the Shabaka and the Ancestors album We Are Sent Here by History, I coined the term ‘sonic poems’ to express how I’m intending the listener to relate to the words associated with the sounds contained on the disc. Each title on this disc was extracted from a longer poem written specifically for the album which only achieved its full meaning in the presence of the music.”
He further relayed that “How the listener interprets the words in relation to the sounds is personal and it’s this subjective unravelling of complex ideas that’s an integral part of the journey I intend to take the listener on. This idea permeated sons of Sons of Kemet’s Black to the Future album whereby each track title reads as a poem. Perceive its Beauty, Acknowledge its Grace follows in this tradition of titles as symbolising a narrative which is necessarily subjective and expansive in relation to the listener’s experience with the heard music.”
 
--Ayana Contreras
 

Award-winning pianist, composer, bandleader and producer George Burton has been called "formidable" (NPR), "charismatic" (The New York Times), "revolutionary" (Nextbop), and "soulful" (Philadelphia Inquirer); his music "multidimensional" (Phila. Inq.), "sublime" (NPR). Burton has established himself as a visionary and prolific force on the piano, a standout who consistently turns heads both on record and in the live music scene, across the jazz spectrum and beyond. His dazzling virtuosity and wide-ranging approach beautifully reflect his experience—beginning with rigorous classical training, branching into the heady nightlife of the Philadelphia jazz scene, and refining his stunningly distinctive style in the New York clubs and on stages worldwide.

Born and raised in Philadelphia by musician parents, Burton grew up playing classical violin and viola while absorbing gospel and blues at home; in high school and college he turned to jazz, diving head first into the scene to get his informal training from Philly hard-bop legend Bootsie Barnes, and learning the subtleties of the genre from veteran pianists on the Philly scene, notably Sid Simmons and Shirley Scott, as well as Mulgrew Miller. After his graduation from Temple University, Burton’s eclectic talents brought him to countless recording studios and stages all over the world in classical, jazz, and beyond, with a diverse range of acts that eventually included Patti LaBelle, Meshell Ndegeocello, The Philly Pops, Terrence Howard, and many others. He had a long tenure as the pianist for Odean Pope's saxophone choir, and from there he earned a place on the world stage with some of the most significant practitioners of post-bop and the avant-garde—from Tim Warfield to James Carter to the Sun Ra Arkestra, with whom he sat in the pianist’s chair from 2012-2019.

Where Burton truly shines, as many reviewers have noted, is in his ability to bring out the best in his band; his ensembles are among the most cutting edge groups on the scene and have played the most prestigious of stages, including the Newport Jazz Festival. Burton’s two fulllength releases, The Truth Of What I Am > The Narcissist (2016), and Reciprocity (2020) were both received to international critical acclaim; the former was chosen as a Top Debut by the NPR Jazz Critics’ Poll, and the latter (which Burton also produced) was nominated for Outstanding Instrumental Jazz Album by the NAACP Image Awards in 2021.

George Burton currently leads multiple performing ensembles and recording projects; his latest endeavor, ambitious as a holiday album but utterly soulful and layered in Burton’s unmistakable style, the Yule Log, will be released in late 2023.

"Burton’s jazz is multidimensional. It incorporates influences from hip-hop and R&B, electronic music and indie rock into a surprisingly cohesive sound shaped by his mastery of vibe — a soulfulness that underlies all of his tunes, whether the surface feels more like hard bop, avantgarde explosiveness, or blissed-out atmospherics." — Shaun Brady, Philadelphia Inquirer

"This critic has rarely, in 11 years and hundreds of concerts, seen a musician who fed off the energy of the room as voraciously as Burton. ... The quintet made magic." — Mike West, Washington Post