“I’ll Do Whatever You Want” features André 3000, Floating Points, Esperanza Spalding and Laraaji, and is out now
Debut solo album Perceive its Beauty, Acknowledge its Grace – featuring André 3000, Moses Sumney, Floating Points, Esperanza Spalding, Lianne La Havas, Brandee Younger, Laraaji, Miguel Atwood-Ferguson, Saul Williams, Elucid and more – is released on April 12th via Impulse!
“Maybe the most essential listening of the week, if not the year. This music is so transporting”
– NPR Music
Shabaka, the multi-instrumentalist and former bandleader for heralded groups Sons of Kemet, The Comet Is Coming, and Shabaka and the Ancestors, shares a new single/visualizer for “I’ll Do Whatever You Want” from his forthcoming solo album Perceive Its Beauty, Acknowledge its Grace, which is released on April 12th via Impulse! Featuring Shabaka on the Shakuhachi — an ancient Japanese end-blown flute made of bamboo — the piece features vocals from Laraaji alongside contributions from André 3000 (Teotihuacan drone flute), Floating Points (Rhodes Chroma synthesizer, vibraphone), Esperanza Spalding (bass), Tom Herbert (bass), Dave Okumu (guitar), Marcus Gilmore (drums), and Carlos Niño (percussion).
“‘I’ll Do Whatever You Want’ is about surrender and the intimate space we go to within the grasp of possession,’ states Shabaka of the track. Its accompanying visualizer, utilizing his own artwork, offers a fitting, kaleidoscopic supplement to the hypnotic piece.
Having put the saxophone down to devote his studies and energies towards softer woodwinds, Perceive its Beauty, Acknowledge its Grace is, in a sense, a debut album. And yet, the album also serves as a reintroduction to the artist, a levitating, stunning work full of the lessons he’s learned over the course of his life and career. It represents the spirit of exploration that the artist is most tapped into these days. With contributions on the record from Moses Sumney, Brandee Younger, Miguel Atwood-Ferguson, Saul Williams, Elucid, André 3000, Esperanza Spalding, Laraaji, Floating Points, and more, Perceive its Beauty, Acknowledge its Grace is a grand artistic statement from Shabaka, impossible to classify into genre, and bottomless in its exploratory curiosity.
Shabaka began exploring and employing a wide variety of flutes, including Mayan Teotihuacan drone flutes, Brazilian Pifanos, Native American flutes and South American Quenas, in addition to the ancient Japanese Shakuhachi, since announcing in 2023 that he would be taking a hiatus from playing the saxophone publicly. “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. “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.”
For the flute-forward album Perceive its Beauty, Acknowledge its Grace, Shabaka tapped into a remarkable cadre of players. “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.”
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