Shabaka – Perceive Its Beauty, Acknowledge Its Grace
A collaboration between beings, instruments, melodies and spaces, Perceive Its Beauty, Acknowledge Its Grace offers room to listen, reflect and become
After years of collaboration and performance, Shabaka’s debut solo album, Perceive Its Beauty, Acknowledge Its Grace, is an evocative declaration of multitude. His second flute-forward outing, after 2022’s Afrikan Culture EP, the title is, at first, imperative, but swiftly becomes an invitation into an expansive, inner space that is built upon throughout the album’s various instruments and voices.
In Managing My Breath, What Fear Had Become, this story and invitation is extended through a narrator’s voice, and is where the album feels like a vast culmination of voices shining in a collision of subjective learning, almost bringing the listener into their own being. The lamenting Japanese Shakuhachi flute and vocals on Insecurities is a form of rhythmic entrancement that swells and spirals.
Body To Inhabit has light fusions of jazz-ish walking double-bass and soca-inflected melodies that expand on Shabaka’s flutes, all added to an immense list of collaborators: Carlos Niño, André 3000, Esperanza Spalding, Lianne La Havas, Moses Sumney, Brandee Younger, Floating Points, Laraaji, Miguel Atwood-Ferguson, Saul Williams and Elucid. This debut comes from immense, fruitful collaboration. A collaboration between beings, instruments, melodies and spaces that offer room to listen, reflect and become.
Listen to: Insecurities, Managing My Breath, What Fear Had Become, End of Innocence