Reference Points: Shabaka

Where his previous LP Perceive Its Beauty, Acknowledge Its Grace hung its hat on high profile, outside collaborations with the likes of Moses Sumney, Lianne La Havas, and Floating Points, Of The Earth – his first release on his own imprint Shabaka Records – finds him performing and producing all the music himself. Here, he returns the clarinet and the saxophone – instruments he knows like the back of his hand – without them taking centre stage within the bigger picture. Each track has a monolithic quality to it, with melodies and sounds blending and scurrying as if they were sentient beings inside larger, panoramic sceneries, capturing the thrill of illumination in Shabaka finding his voice as a producer and sampler.

Speaking to BEST FIT over video call from Morocco, he says there are two levels to his overall mentality as a producer: first the learning and experimenting, then the process of documentation and editing. “I try to separate them,” he explains, adding that his gradual move into production has been fuelled by the recording his gigs and listening back to them, cross-examining the mechanisms behind his musical tendencies.

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With his past work in the bands Sons of Kemet, The Comet Is Coming, and Shabaka and The Ancestors, Shabaka says he more or less knew “what was going to happen” on stage – instruments coalescing into habitual shapes on a night-to-night basis, pure and untethered from any second-guessing. “When those bands were at their peaks, they were machines,” he explains. “We’d turn up at gigs and we knew what we were going to deliver to the crowd. We were going to take you from this point in the set to that point, and we’d know how the crowd was going to react. That’s great and thrilling for everyone concerned, but I wouldn’t necessarily want to document it and listen to it, because it’s going to be effectively the same, apart from small differences, as it would have been a few months prior.”

Last year, Shabaka reflected on ways artists who have outgrown their grassroots beginnings can feed back into these very ecosystems – and by doing so, progress their own art in fruitful ways. "When a scene becomes successful, there’s a kind of paradox in the music industry,” he told me for The Needle Drop last year. “Something that’s nurtured in small, independent grassroots venues grows popular, and then those artists get pulled into a system that removes them from the very environment that made them popular in the first place.”

In doing so, he adds, many artists stagnate into a polished product once they taste fame and success. “You can hear the expensiveness in the gear, and you can hear the professionalism in the sounds. But what they’re doing is unimaginative, it’s non-creative. It is effective, but they’re not creating anything that has a spark of life. And for me, it’s about having a spark.”

Ever the purposeful, thoughtful speaker, he quickly readjusts his original thought. “Actually, it’s not about having a spark. It’s about aspiring to keep a spark, or aspiring to get the spark that you’ve not actually necessarily considered before.”

A year on from our first conversation, Shabaka says that his performances at smaller-scaled DIY venues like Vortex and South London’s Shai Space had the dual purpose of further attuning and developing the material for Of The Earth. The energy is different from playing in a bigger room in a band, he says, “because it’s notfixed. And for me, that’s more exciting, in that I get to actually appraise my performance and think about ways that I can take it up – things that might have worked that I hadn’t actually appreciated, that I hadn’t imagined. And that’s how music progresses.”

For this Reference Points discussion, Shabaka gives a vibrant and thorough testimonial on his methods as a producer and his idealistic view of music as an everyday practice. And while the spiritual fervour of his work often feels like some form of divine intervention, the starting point of introducing a new instrument to his vocabulary is considerably less intuitive…

SHABAKA: Normally, the starting point is reading the manual, and then watching YouTube videos. I’m a big follower of tutorials. I download and watch YouTube tutorials all the time. That’s my thing, basically.

Right now I’m learning the Elektron Model:Cycles, a little kind of groovebox – which is a fantastic instrument, I’m really enjoying it – but it’s taken a tonne of tutorials. You get the box and it’s like an inanimate object, and then you research and you learn a lot about the functionalities and the capabilities of it. Then, a little bit further into the future, and it’s not the same thing that’s in front of you: it becomes this living organism that actually is a part of your brain. It’s like you’ve become an android, and you can speak through the equipment. And that’s, for me, the fun part.

I know some people that don’t read manuals, that try to just jump straight into making music with equipment, and that actually dictates if they think equipment is good or not: the degree to which they can just go straight into it. But I’m not that. I find I just get frustrated and I hit walls if I try that. I’ll basically have a period where I’ll learn what the instrument is and how to use it on a basic level, and then there’ll always be a point where I just feel comfortable with it – comfortable enough to live in it. And then I’ll just start making as much music as possible.

If I get a new flute, I don’t try to play music, I’ll just play long notes from the bottom of the horn to the top of the horn. And try to think about where my fingers are going. Look in the mirror to see if my hand position stays in the right place. What’s optimal? Is my body making any weird contortions as I go through the registers? And that’s the general process: learn the instrument before I can make music. But I guess the difference is that I learn it knowing that I want to make music, and to actually forget about the learning and just kind of shut my eyes and lose myself into it as possible.

BEST FIT: Can you give any examples of artist peers that do that other thing, who go into an instrument completely intuitively and without needing the manual?

During the moment I’ve spoken to Andre 3000, I get the impression – though I’ve not asked him directly – that he’s intuitive. From all the time that I’ve spent with him, seeing how he learned, how he approaches the playing of new instruments. He picks up an instrument and he sees what it suggests to him in particular, in relation to what’s going on around him.

And, often, what’s going on around him is shifting. So he’s creating different formats and situations for him to place his intuitive reading of these instruments. And I appreciate that. It’s a special way of approaching music. It’s not my way in particular, just because I’m classically trained. My way of going into the learning process is more systematic, but systematic with the aim of then breaking through the system.

Shabaka says sequencing is a “really important” part of the record making process, and he admits that for the abundance of creative ideas he poured into Of The Earth, he initially struggled to streamline them within a single album format. He initially wanted to make it a double album, but in retrospect, he prefers how the album turned out in the end. For all the rich musical lineages absorbed over the years that are poured into the album’s primordial soup, a simple question beckoned within the process: Does this sound cool or not?

SHABAKA: I hope that I can keep listening to things in that way forever, because I don’t want things to necessarily be musically cohesive. I don’t want things to necessarily be professional. I just want things to sound cool. That was the main driving force, especially considering that I was working alone. I wasn’t working with a mixing engineer who could advise me on aspects. It was all just a matter of: do I think the sound of this works or not? In that way, it just makes sense to keep an open mind and just follow the sound.

BEST FIT: Does it go deeper, though, than just sounding cool? Because when I listen to this record, it’s tricky to discern the organic sounds from the electronic sounds. Which I guess, a compliment in a way, because I think you use a lot of unconventional sounds. You talked earlier about Sons of Kemet and other bands where you can discern all the instruments. You know where the sax is, you know where the tuba is, you know where the drums are. You know where the instrumentation is coming from. But with this record, it feels a little more muddy, maybe even deliberately so?

SHABAKA: That’s what I meant when I say ‘sounding cool.’ It’s not in a diminutive way. For me, having a record where everything sits and you can hear everything in this clean, organised fashion, that’s not very cool. It’s pretty straightforward and orthodox. Whereas having a record that has mysterious shadows is to make something where you can hear it one day and something comes out to you, and then you can hear it another day and something else keeps your focus. When I say ‘cool,’ I guess I mean something that keeps my attention. Where I kind of go, “This sounds interesting. It sounds fresh.

That’s one of the aspects that I’m into. I’m into shadows and mystery, where you hear something and it suggests something else. Because I’m not a mixing engineer – I don’t know anything about mixing, it’s actually quite shocking and completely audacious because I have not looked into the mixing process – but I trust my ears. For instance, there’s basically no panning on the album. I think the mastering engineer did a little bit, just to kind of make something stereo, but I more or less made it mono, with everything front and centre.

But then the levels were mixed in such a way – or the levels were negotiating in such a way – that things come out and go back in your aural frame of reference. And I guess it gives that sense of muddiness, in that you can’t necessarily hear everything. Not everything sits in its own specific place. In that way, things can come out of the mud and then go back in, and that’s what I think is important, in terms of what decisions I make in the production process: What’s the thing that’s prominent at any given moment, considering that there’s a general homogenous mass of sounds that’s going on.

You mentioned the relationship between the music and the medium it's being carried by. It makes me think of the late Ras G, who infamously blew up the odd stereo system back in his day. He wasn't really preoccupied with ‘the right fidelity,’ for lack of better description.

Ras G was a big Sons of Kemet fan, so he came to a few Sons of Kemet gigs. One of my big regrets is that Ras G invited me to go to his home studio just to kind of hang out and make some music. I couldn’t get it together in time, and he actually passed away before I was able to go. But we did spend quite a few times together backstage, and just at the end of gigs. And I’ve seen him play a few times. And when I’ve seen him play, it’s been so… I guess ‘vicious’ is the word. It’s like, you can hear the records and it’s cool, but you step into the room and the bass just hits you in the stomach. It was crazy.

And knowing that he would make a whole album on his iPhone. Or he would use sound recordings, make snare drums from audio that he captured on his voice notes. There was no separation between his day-to-day creativity – just putting together something from the material that he had got at his disposal in front of him – and what goes out to the public.

That’s what I’m trying to do. To bring a representation of my creative ideas that’s not clean and polished. Because I’m not clean and polished. I guess it’s all relative, because I feel like I’ve got a level of organisation in my thoughts that’s intuitive. So it means that you wouldn’t listen to the record and think this is a record that’s produced in a way that’s unprofessional, or without the benefit of a big studio. But there’s just something that’s personal about it. And I think that’s what we’re all trying to get to: creating a vision of music that’s personal, as opposed to something that’s mechanised and systemic.

BEST FIT: “Marwa the Mountain” sounds like a studio recording but with the immediacy and jumbled charm of a field recording, almost as if it all happened on the spot.

SHABAKA: That track was me learning how to use the Session View in Ableton. I was literally just learning, going through some YouTube tutorials, and getting whatever kind of MIDI flute sounds. If I’m experimenting with something, I’ll try to fill the machine up with musical ideas and just go to town on it. So I did that, and then I left it.

I went back through it maybe a year later or something, and it was a massive mess at first. It was all just really ramshackle. It really didn’t sound anything like this tune. It was just a lot. Imagine all the multi-flute ideas that you hear on there, then imagine each of them had about four or five other layers on top of them.

This happens a lot in my process: I’ll see what happens when I add things to ideas, but then I’ll also see what happens when I subtract things from ideas and see what’s left. So I started subtracting elements, and then I realised there was something in there. I was thinking about adding more drums, but then I realised that the basic drum thing reminded me of when I was in school, as a teenager, and when the guys would be sitting around just beating on the school tables. So I was like, “I’ll keep that.” And then the more I started listening to it, the more I started connecting the flute thing to rara music from Haiti, which I’ve always been a big fan of. It just started to remind me of that. So yeah, I started to look more deeply into what the piece could become.

Is there a particular record or artist from the rara lineage that you had in mind?

One record in particular that I listen to all the time is called Caribbean Revels: Haitian Rara & Dominican Gaga. There’s no singing on it. The whole thing with rara music is that it’s drums and then they’ve got multiple horns – long vuvuzela-type horns, almost pipe-looking. Each horn plays just one note and each performer plays that one note rhythmically, so that it will interlock in a kind of hocketing fashion with the other horns.

So you might have like ten people with these long, one-note horns, and each person will be vibing to their own repeated, rhythmic cellular structure. But then all the cellular structures together make this polyphonic cacophony. When you add the drums to that, it just kind of creates this crazy, mad sound. When I previously travelled to Martinique, there was a Haitian band that was traveling around the streets playing it. And I was just following them around, listening and recording. It’s really unbelievable when you hear it live.

On the subject of repeitition, some of the jazz bands you’ve played in were very freeform in their rhythmic approach, whereas, when you work with drum machines – since you’ve mentioned that you were compiling beats for Of The Earth – there’s a repetition you suddenly have to work within. So I'm wondering if there were certain tools that you gravitated towards to deal with that, in a way.

That situation where you’ve got to just be satisfied with repetition… that’s something I had to basically negotiate, you know, with my jazz sensibility. And it’s something that I’m still negotiating with, even in terms of preparing for the live format, you know? Because the thing is, as a jazz-slash-creative musician, sometimes you get so into this free stream of expression where you’re trying, consciously, to not repeat yourself. You’re trying to alter. It’s like a constant creative process where you’re progressing and you’re progressing. You might have an idea and you alter it and you see where it can go.

There’s just a different headspace that happens when actually something repeats and repeats. And, yeah, it’s something that I had to really think about in terms of being at peace with the fact that I get a drum groove and that repeats throughout the whole track. In general, with the drum underpinnings, what I would normally do [for this album] is I would basically drum on whatever machine I decided to do the percussion with throughout the whole track, and just do my jazzy, creative thing. Then I’d go back through the material that I’d made, get the best bit, and then just loop that.

BEST FIT: You've been collecting instruments from all corners of the world, using them to bring all these global sounds together in these fresh contexts. Do you think that there's also a political aspect to bringing all these sensibilities together? These different sounds that were once in an autonomous sort of ‘folk’ space, interacting within this common zone?

SHABAKA: When you talk about multiculturalism, or you talk about cultural convergence, it’s like there’s no equality to it. You go towards one culture and you learn their thing, you know? But for me, it’s like: if cultural cooperation is a thing, it’s got to be that all cultures come to a central point and they meet in a place that actually is unknown, and gives voice to all aspects.

Me learning a Japanese traditional flute means that I’m learning how to bring that towards my sensibility, which might include more African-type rhythms. It doesn’t mean just going towards that flute and then trying to do the things that were suggested by that instrument. In terms of a larger political idealism, I guess the ultimate question is: Do we think there is a benefit to multiculturalism or not? Or do we think that things stand alone, in and of themselves?

What we call tradition is something that’s fixed and not fluid. There are these binary demarcation lines between people and cultures, and if you think that, then that’s fine, and you’ll get what that suggests. But if your ideals are for multiculturalism – and my ideal is for that – I don’t think the world is healthier for going into a point where we’re distancing ourselves and detaching our cultures. Which doesn’t mean that we don’t uphold our unique traditional values. But there’s a particular kind of mindset that says that the inclusion or the acknowledgement of another culture destroys another culture. Like, there can’t be any intermingling or intermixing, because one thing is destroying another, you know? And that’s a particular mind state.

I remember when I was studying in music college in Guildhall and I did a classical clarinet degree – not because I wanted to be a classical musician, but because the clarinet is my first instrument and I just wanted to be a part of the tradition of learning that had the most years attached to it. So I became a part of the classical course, and I remember the head of the department came up to me at one point and said, “What are you going to do about this jazz problem?” And I went, “What do you mean, what am I going to do about this jazz problem?” And he said, “This jazz is going to destroy your ability to play classical music.”

I thought it was so interesting, that he thought that just the acknowledgement and the performance of another type of music that comes from a different culture to European classical music will destroy, will annihilate my ability to perform classical music. That’s a political statement if I’ve ever heard one. For me, at that point, I was like: I don’t subscribe to that way of seeing music. I’ve seen how different music and cultures can live together. That other way of seeing music comes directly from the colonial mind state.

BEST FIT: It makes me think also of the language of hip-hop and how that pretty much evaporated the whole idea of binary context, bringing all these elements together to create an almost monolithical new entity. There’s a very present hip hop element to Of The Earth too. I mean, one of the many firsts you explore on this album is using your voice as a rapper.

SHABAKA: I’ve a real big rap head since my mid-teens. I’d write out all the lyrics to the tunes… I could, for instance, recite probably the whole of Illmatic. I could more or less recite Ready to Die, and numerous Tupac albums I just know by heart. There are some seminal albums that I just know. Like, ATLiens, Enter the Wu-Tang. That’s my era of hip-hop, the mid-’90s hip-hop.

Then, later on, when I was getting more into developing a way of playing jazz, I realised that if I’m learning a particular scale, what I could do is play the scale with a rap song. So I basically went: I’m gonna speak the words, but the only notes I’m going to use are the notes of the scale. So I’d play along to “New York State of Mind” from Illmatic, only using the notes in the altered dominant scale, and that would be a way of just internalising what I’m practicing. Instead of having the practice be something that’s dry and boring, I could just have something there and be playing to my favourite music.

At some point I decided, I’m gonna rap on this album. At first it was something that I just said in jest, you know: “I can rap on the album. You know, I’m making beats, right? Why don’t I rap?” Andre 3000 had a part to play in that too, just because of the audacity he inspires to just follow your creative leanings. At that point, I had to ask: What do I do as a creative individual in the face of a new challenge? And the answer was, “Let’s go,” and that was all there was to it. I carried around a notebook all the time, played the beats in my headphones, and just wrote whatevert came into my head, in a kind of free-flowing fashion.

I wrote lines and lines and lines, and then just tried to put them together in terms of what I know of hip-hop. And the way that modern hip-hop is… like, you don’t have to rhyme. There’s so many rappers that don’t rhyme. You don’t have to say a consistent narrative structure. It’s not like one line has to make complete sense in relation to the other. Like, in terms of left-field hip-hop, the floor is open.

One line on “Eyes Lowered” struck me in particular, especially in light of recent events: "Seeing visions of the spirit / That the beasts have designed."

I mean, yeah, it’s tough. But these things are not new. And it’s like we’re getting the underbelly of things that we’ve seen, that we know. For me there’s no disconnect from what we’re seeing now to the horrific violence that we see at the point where the Black Lives Matter protests. And there’s no disconnection from this and what we saw in Gaza. It’s all a part of a system of dehumanisation, and kind of relentless capitalistic greed and insensitivity and white supremacy. So it’s about continuing to be shocked by it, but not going, “I don’t understand why this is happening.”

Because we do know. I don’t know if art, at this stage, can have answers other than the kind of answers that make for self-congratulatory statements in The Guardian or whatever. I have no answers. The situation is so dark; there's no poetic sheen that can be put on it. There’s no triumphant words of optimism. It really feels like we’re within a time of things coming to light that don’t have heroes, you know? Art isn’t going to heal the world. A song isn’t gonna rouse people to do something that shifts the paradigm that we’re in. But still, people have to keep going forward.

One of the phrases that [South African drummer] Louis Moholo used to say all the time was "And then…" You’d say something and then he’d be like, "Yeah, and then…," and that stuck with me. Because it’s like, all this shit happens, and then what? For me, that’s the thing. We understand what’s happening. We can see the horrors. And then… where does that leave us? If we see the futility in the attempts to go against it, does it just leave us demoralised and disillusioned? Or does it mean that we’ve got to find a way of actually reconstituting ourselves for a more distant future than we can imagine?