Switched On: SHABAKA

Jazz maestro, Shabaka Hutchings took up the clarinet from age nine, playing in calypso bands while studying classical repertoire, and often practising over hip hop beats and music native to Barbados, where he spent much of his childhood.

Since then, Shabaka has collaborated with a range of luminaries including Mulatu Astatke, Andre 3000, Floating Points, Esperanza Spalding and Milton Nascimento. He’s also composed pieces for the BBC Concert Orchestra and London Sinfonietta.

Over the past decade, the focus of SHABAKA's touring and recorded work has been with three bands: Sons of Kemet, The Comet Is Coming, and Shabaka and the Ancestors, which have seen him explore Afro-Caribbean fusions, London dance music club culture and South African jazz.

SHABAKA's first solo album Perceive Its Beauty, Acknowledge Its Grace sees the British jazz lynchpin putting down his saxophone to devote his energies toward the flute for a questing, mediative journey. The show will highlight his new album and a broader musical scope and a captivating body of work that places SHABAKA's mastery of global flutes at the forefront. Combining his flute work with the talents of creative improvisers (including two harpists), experience SHABAKA weaving together a rich, textural world that is both beautiful and serene.

Supporting SHABAKA is Ganayva.

Tamil Nadu-raised and New York-born critically acclaimed vocalist Ganavya lives, learns, and loves fluidly from the nexus of many frameworks and understandings. Hers is a deeply profound and rooted voice. A multidisciplinary creator, she is a soundsmith and wordsmith. Trained as an improviser, scholar, dancer, and multi-instrumentalist, she maintains an inner library of “spi/ritual” blueprints offered to her by an intergenerational constellation of collaborators, continuously anchoring her practice in pasts, presents and, futures. Much of her childhood was on the pilgrimage trail, learning the storytelling art form of harikathā and singing poetry that critiques hierarchal social structures. She is a co-founder of the non-hierarchical We Have Voice Collective. 

"Ganavya’s voice is a thick ephemera, like smoke as dark as ink, just coming off the fire." New York Times