If you came to jazz through London's scene in the last ten years, you probably found your way in through Shabaka Hutchings. He was everywhere at once — leading the Afrofuturist punch of The Comet Is Coming, the tuba-and-drums stomp of Sons of Kemet, and the more meditative, ancestor-worship modal work of Shabaka and the Ancestors with South African musicians in Johannesburg. Three bands, three sounds, one saxophonist tying them together with a tone that could go from a raw shout to something closer to prayer within the same eight bars.

What made his playing distinctive wasn't technical flash. It was breath — long, circular, almost meditative phrases that owed as much to John Coltrane's late spiritual period as to the calypso and dub he grew up around in Barbados. He didn't solo like someone showing off scales. He built tension the way a preacher builds a sermon, repeating a phrase until it started to mean something different the fourth time through. Albums like Your Queen Is a Reptile (2018) and We Are Sent Here by History (2021) work because of that patience — they're heavy, political records that never feel rushed, even when the drums are going off underneath.

Then in 2023 he announced he was done with saxophone. Not retiring from music, just from that instrument, in favor of the shakuhachi and various flutes. It's a strange move for someone at the peak of his commercial and critical momentum, and honestly it's the most interesting thing he's ever done. His solo debut on the new instruments, Perceive Its Beauty, Acknowledge Its Grace (2024), is quieter and stranger than anything in the Sons of Kemet catalog — closer to Alice Coltrane's harp records or Japanese court music than to the club-friendly grooves that made his name.

You don't have to love every phase of his output to respect the shape of the whole thing. He's not chasing a sound, he's chasing an idea about what breath and repetition can do, and he's willing to burn down a successful format to keep chasing it. Start with Your Queen Is a Reptile (2018) if you want the version of Shabaka that filled festival stages, then go backward to the Ancestors record for the version that's closer to church, and only then try the flute music — it'll make a lot more sense once you've heard where he came from.