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Shabaka - Perceive Its Beauty, Acknowledge Its Grace makes Paste: The 100 Best Albums of 2024

Posted: December 2, 2024

Paste Staff  writes….Paste’s 22nd Best Albums of the Year list, first compiled by the music team in a Google doc nearly 60 pages long, has arrived. 2024 was one for the books, and one of the best years of music of my life. Whether it was a pop record becoming so definitive that it had a whole season named after it, a two-hour album only available via YouTube and MP3 taking over the zeitgeist for a month, or some of this publication’s longtime favorite artists putting out career highlights, it’s hard to really quantify just how good these last 12 months have been, but we did it—and we’re ready to enshrine projects from Cindy Lee, Sturgill Simpson, ScHoolboy Q, Beyoncé, Thou, Kim Gordon, Bladee, Kendrick Lamar and countless others.

Combining staff picks, review scores and contributor votes, we’ve assembled a comprehensive list of our favorite full-length records released since December 1, 2023 (there will be a separate list for EPs). The genres range far and wide, touching everything from country to sludge metal to drill rap to hypnagogic pop, R&B, electronica, hardcore and big, tough, riffy rock ‘n’ roll. We aimed to leave no stone unturned and catch up on what we missed throughout the year, give more praise to the records we’ve loved since release day and showcase the vibrancy of such a diverse and talented crop of modern music. Here are the 100 best albums of 2024. Let us know in the comments which records we missed!
 

From PR…….Perceive its Beauty, Acknowledge its Grace by multi-instrumentalist Shabaka Hutchings is, in a sense, a debut album. And yet, the album also serves as a reintroduction to the artist, a levitating, stunning work chock full of the lessons he’s learned over the course of his life and career. And perhaps, most importantly, it represents the spirit of exploration that the artist is most tapped into these days.

London-born, Hutchings spent much of his childhood in Barbados. Beginning at age nine, he studied the clarinet, playing in calypso bands while studying classical repertoire, often practicing over hip hop beats by artists such as Nas, as well as to the music native to Barbados. He imparted that at the time, “The idea of being a particular ‘type’ of musician who limited themselves by genre was totally alien to me and my peers, it was just about playing with skill and dedication, and whether music moved me or left me cold.”

Consequently, after studying clarinet at Guildhall School of Music from 2004-2008, he collaborated on a kaleidoscopic range of projects: recording and/or touring with Mulatu Astatke and the Heliocentrics, Soweto Kinch, Floating Points and Courtney Pine amongst many other bands, as well as being a part of the London Improvisers Orchestra. He’s also composed pieces for the BBC Concert Orchestra, London Sinfonietta, Ligeti Quartet, and performed the Copland Clarinet Concerto with the BBC National Orchestra of Wales, Britten Sinfonietta as well as the Knoxville Symphony Orchestra.

Over the course of the past decade, the lion’s share of his touring and recorded work has been with three bands: Sons of Kemet, The Comet is Coming and Shabaka and the Ancestors. “In these formations,” he shared, “I’ve been able to display a fundamental approach to creative practice in different contexts spanning Afro-Caribbean fusion, London dance music club culture and the rich South African jazz tradition - all within the freedom afforded by the legacy of the American ‘jazz’ tradition.” That approach reflects a mantra he absorbed early in his life.

“My primary school teacher told me ‘the music isn’t hard, just practice it mechanically then relax and let your soul shine through’. This is an adage which I’ve kept throughout my life of learning how the musics and instruments of different cultures relate to my personal vision of sound.”

His musical exploration includes employing a variety of flutes, including the ancient Japanese Shakuhachi, which he started playing in 2020 during the pandemic. “Since then, it has slowly changed the scope of my musical inner landscape and drawn me towards a multitude of other instruments in the flute family,” he explained. “As more flutes have been added to my arsenal including Mayan Teotihuacan drone flutes, Brazilian Pifanos, Native American flutes and South American Quenas, I’ve started to appreciate the underlying principles that cause these instruments to resonate most fully and use this understanding to form a concept allowing me to freely move between instruments.”

On New Year’s Day 2023, in the wake of the release of his 2022 debut EP, Afrikan Culture (which notably featured the artist primarily on flutes), Shabaka announced that beginning in 2024 he’d take a hiatus from playing the saxophone publicly. He clarified in July 2023 on his Instagram page his intention to cease playing with bands in which the saxophone was his primary instrument (including The Comet Is Coming, Sons of Kemet and Shabaka and the Ancestors).

For the flute-forward album Perceive its Beauty, Acknowledge its Grace, Hutchings tapped into a remarkable cadre of players, including percussionist Carlos Niño and bassist Esperanza Spalding. Vocalists including Saul Williams and Lianne La Havas contributed to “Managing My Breath, What Fear Had Become” and “Kiss Me Before I Forget”, respectively. Floating Points, with whom Shabaka shared a stage with for their performance of Promises at the Hollywood Bowl, provided additional production on the track “I’ll Do Whatever You Want".

“I invited a bunch of musicians I’ve met and admired over the past few years of touring throughout the United States to collaborate and everyone said yes, which I constantly find breathtaking,” he disclosed. His aim was to gather the musicians at Rudy Van Gelder’s historic studios, which he says “informed the sound of so many seminal jazz albums that have shaped my musical aptitude. We played with no headphones or separation in the room so we could capture the atmosphere of simply playing together in the space without a technological intermediary. After recording hours of inspired interactions, I set to work producing an album from the material.”


Paste's Matt Mitchell writes…Shabaka Hutchings’ latest LP, Perceive Its Beauty, Acknowledge Its Grace, is a towering and powerful offering from the jazz virtuoso. The record features André 3000, Surya Botofasina, Moses Sumney, Jason Moran, Nasheet Waits, Carlos Niño and others, and the final product is potent in its own genius, as songs like “The Wounded Need to Be Replenished” and “Body to Inhabit” revel in the abstract while conjuring beautiful textures and emotional spectrums. “End of Innocence” finds Shabaka putting down his tenor saxophone in favor of a sublime lead clarinet, making for a sharp detour from the riotous sphere he normally orbits in projects like Sons of Kemet and The Comet is Coming, but it’s no less mountainous. There’s something subtly mystifying about this song and the album, both a culmination of Shabaka’s colorful chemistry with his ensemble and his desire to take risks within his own oeuvre. The woodwinds and brass sound dim light, while the piano that’s a set piece behind many of these compositions unravels delicately. The voices wrap around the arrangements, as Sumney’s vocal is woven into Shabaka’s flute on “Insecurities,” while poet Saul Williams introduces “Managing My Breath, What Fear Had Become” before the song contracts outwards into something lush and braided. Perceive Its Beauty, Acknowledge Its Grace is tranquil at every turn, a marvel calling to mind the works of Alice Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders, Brian Eno and Iasos more than 40 years ago—an incantation of kind, spiritual talent from one of jazz’s very best.

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