BACK FROM THE FUTURE
SHABAKA Hutchings has a photograph of himself, aged 14, clipped from the front page of a newspaper in Barbados. In it, he is pictured down on his knees, playing the saxophone in a school talent show to an audience of adoring peers.
“I had a whole routine worked out,” he says with a laugh. “I was playing this romantic R&B ballad by Brian McKnight called ‘Back At One’. I’d play the melody and the chorus, take a solo, hold a high note until the audience went wild, then I’d grab this rose that was resting on the piano, like a prop, give the rose to a female friend in the audience, then come back and start playing again. Everyone went mad! It got me on the front page of the paper!”
It transpires that Hutchings didn’t actually win the pageant. “It was won by the son of the headmaster,” he chuckles. “Outrageous nepotism! But I never forgot how important that area of showmanship and stagecraft is in Caribbean music, and how I felt it was lacking in jazz. When I came to England and started going to jazz gigs, I remember noticing that there seemed to be a reluctance to even acknowledge the audience. I always felt that there had to a be a way of making serious music without disregarding the audience.”
We’re in Shabaka’s flat in suburban south London, sitting next to his collection of shakuhachi flutes, antique wooden recorders, African thumb pianos and Brazilian percussion instruments. You might have seen Hutchings playing to huge, ecstatic crowds with assorted rabble-rousing bands at outdoor festivals from Glastonbury to Coachella. But in person the improbably tall, imperious musical titan is a disarmingly nerdy figure in sweatpants and slippers. He speaks in a professorial register, a light Brummie accent softened with vestiges of the Caribbean.
Hutchings has become the face of British jazz this century. He is signed to thethis month. But these bands are just a fraction of his recorded output.
