Akbank Jazz Festival: Shabaka & The Ancestors at Akbank Jazz Festival at Babylon

Years ago, given the tribal name Mzwandile (Home is Extended) during a stay in Cape Town, Shabaka Hutchings was inspired to write fragments of tunes. Thus, he started to trace his real musical roots through his visceral blowing of the saxophone and the eonian call of long-gone spirits. He played with the groups like The Comet is Coming and Sons of Kemet. Reaching out from New Orleans jazz tradition to Carribean calypso rhythms, and from Central Africa’s song forms to Nguni music of South Africa, while seasoning all these with 60’s spiritual jazz and Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew, he created a spacious world of Afro-futuristic improvisation...

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Years ago, given the tribal name Mzwandile (Home is Extended) during a stay in Cape Town, Shabaka Hutchings was inspired to write fragments of tunes. Thus, he started to trace his real musical roots through his visceral blowing of the saxophone and the eonian call of long-gone spirits. He played with the groups like The Comet is Coming and Sons of Kemet. Reaching out from New Orleans jazz tradition to Carribean calypso rhythms, and from Central Africa’s song forms to Nguni music of South Africa, while seasoning all these with 60’s spiritual jazz and Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew, he created a spacious world of Afro-futuristic improvisation. The new generation British-Barbadian saxophone player Hutchings, brewed in the bandstands of Sun Ra, Mulatu Astatke, Jack DeJohnette and Charlie Haden, comes to Istanbul to share with us tunes from his 2016 album, Wisdom of Elders, which he recorded in Johannesburg, together with his band “the Ancestors” which consists of his South African musician colleagues.

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