One of London's most promising saxophone players - Shabaka Hutchings teamed up with a South African group of musicians to deliver what appears to be one of the most vibrant, colourful and emotionally dense Jazz albums of 2016 - "Wisdom of Elders". The 9-piece album flirts with many genre boundaries, ascending to World and sometimes almost shifting into Ethno Jazz. However Hutchings's notable Sun Ra influence returns the sound, very challengingly, into its intentional nest.
The concept of the album explores the leitmotivs of slavery and apartheid, never an easy task to accomplish, moreover an artist can never be too serious and careful in approaching such matters. It is a type of an album recorded with eyes closed. As the band stamped the album: “800 million voices. 700 years. Millions of bones cracking under the weight of 22 false free years”, the theme of slavery is conceptually launched in a very blissful, almost afro-futuristic manner, shedding a self-sufficient light of optimism on the matter at hand.
The album is opened by a repetitive, almost tribal bass. The first track is Mzwandile, which happens to be Hutchings’s tribal name. The song becomes more and more melancholic as the singer, Siyabonga Mthembu is drives into incantation.
Joyous, the second piece of the album comes very close to a Bop-ish rhythmic pattern. Reverbed and structurally complex, this song is one step from containing one to many instruments and too much variation, but it ends up uncovering a carefully designed expressionist soundscape. And such is the general progression of the album, as Shabaka puts it: “The grand scheme of the album is to present the musical language I normally associate with my UK bands in the context of SA musicians and musical sensibilities”.
“Give Thanks”, a personal favourite. The hidden beauty of this song are the repetitive, yet gorgeously phrased wind instruments at the very beginning of the piece and as it moves into its core, the song literally bursts into an untamed solo of Shabaka’s saxophone. The first half of the track keeps building up tension for what then evolves into a three-minute screaming coda.
A rather astonishing aspect of the album, having taken its complexity into account, let alone the complicated arrangement of each track in part, the album was recorded in a single day in a studio in Johannesburg, literally progressing on the same breath from the first track to the last.
“The Wisdom of Elders” is Hutchings’s much-awaited crystallisation, finally designing and releasing a full-length album, as what we’ve only been exposed to until now were some grainy videos on youtube, featuring his live shows. I truly believe, yet at the same time hope that this will be the artist’s first truly grand milestone in his career. The album has a lot of potential in terms of being spoken about in years from now.
