Shabaka Hutchings announces solo EP, Afrikan Culture

Shabaka Hutchings, saxophonist and bandleader of Sons of Kemet, The Comet Is Coming and Shabaka and the Ancestors, has announced a new solo EP. On May 20, he’ll release Afrikan Culture via Impulse! Records. Produced by Hutchings and collaborator Dilip Harris, the album finds him employing instruments such as the shakuhachi, kora, and mbira. Today he’s shared a new track, “Black meditation,” which you can hear below.

“Afrikan Culture was made around the idea of meditation and what it means for me to still my own mind and accept the music which comes to the surface,” Hutchings says in a press release. “It features various types of Shakuhachi flutes and a new technique of creating that I’ve been experimenting with in layering many flutes together to create a forest of sound where melodies and rhythms float in space and emerge in glimpses.”

Sons of Kemet’s last album was last year’s Black to the Future.

Shabaka Afrikan Culture tracklist:

1. Black meditation
2. Call it a European paradox
3. Ital is vital
4. Memories don’t live like people do
5. Ritual awakening
6. Explore inner space
7. The dimension of subtle awareness
8. Rebirth

Read our 2021 interview with Shabaka Hutchings, Sons of Kemet’s Journey of the World of the Artist.