Shabaka. Photo by Atiba Jefferson.
Possession can mean several things — ownership, a thing we own, (as in “prized possession”), a fixation on a certain idea, or an inhabitation by something supernatural (often evil but not necessarily so). For Shabaka Hutchings, possession is a beautiful, spiritual thing, a state that allows him to embody something much larger than his corporeal form.
Shabaka is constantly brimming with freeform jazz. Following his epic April album Perceive its Beauty, Acknowledge its Grace, he’s returned with a smaller capsule of his sweet, haunting sounds. A tighter project with a marquee feature on every song, Possession is more than a B-side tape; it’s an evolution for the former Sons of Kemet and The Comet Is Coming saxophonist, as he moves away from his former fieriness to explore softer, ambient pastures with his flute and other wind instruments less common in contemporary Western culture.
Always a master collaborator, Shabaka uses this project to highlight his featured artists, and the cast is stacked: both halves of Armand Hammer, André 3000, esperanza spalding, and Nduduzo Makhathini. (Familiar faces Brandee Younger, Jason Moran, and Carlos Niño comprise the backing band.)
On opening track “Timepieces,” Shabaka flips a flute tune into a stern piano beat for billy woods to ride for a powerful two-and-a-half minutes as he raps about a mysterious old flame who still gets in touch every now and then. The light melancholy of the lyrics contrasts with the sharpness of their delivery, and the wooziness of the beat makes the whole affair feel less like an earthy love story than a captain’s log transmitted from an interstellar vessel.
woods’s rhyming partner E L U C I D gets to stretch out a bit more on “I’ve Been Listening,” unraveling a mystical spoken-word poem over five minutes of wild, swelling flute drones; pensive bass plucks, courtesy of Moran; Younger’s effervescent harp; and occasional twinkles of rustling percussion from Niño. “To be you,” E L U C I D sings deeply, repeating the phrase as the track winds down along with fractured lines detailing some sort of earthly rapture.
On “To the Moon,” the seven-minute centerpiece of the record, Shabaka and André sit alone together for a while, their airy stylings swirling around each other. Later, other, more grounded instruments enter the mix, but so subtly they barely make a splash. It’s here that Possession is at its most mesmeric, a sea of soft noise that’s easy to get lost in.
spalding’s prominent presence on “Cycles of Growth” is a welcome turn, though the general aura of the track remains in the depths of Possession’s strange dream. Adding a sense of focus to Shabaka’s wanderings, her vocal melody has a discomfiting dissonance that’s enough to trouble our reveries without fully breaking the spell.
Shabaka. Photo by Atiba Jefferson.
Possession closes with “Reaching Back Towards Eternity,” a hushed nightscape of a song that centers the impressionistic pianisms of South African sound weaver Nduduzo Makhathini. Here, a barely tonal drone sits behind Shabaka and Makhathini’s more melodious parts, forming an otherworldly backdrop for a lament that seems to slowly melt as the track progresses. Piano fades, woodwinds slink into their lowest registers and then detune, and we’re left standing on an empty field in the dark, a chilling breeze rippling the air around our bodies. No longer literally possessed by Shabaka’s music, we remain in his thrall for a while, still reverberating with the energy of something greater than ourselves.
