Shabaka - "Eyes Lowered"

Shabaka will release a new album called Of the Earth and today he shared the third single, "Eyes Lowered."

Since departing from his groups Sons of Kemet and The Comet is Coming, Shabaka Hutchins has embarked on solo work that moves from his traditional instrument, the saxophone, and to his newfound inspiration, the flute. This new song doesn't only further his experimentation with the woodwind instrument, which he's naturally excelled at, but also features him foraying into vocals and lyrics, primarily via rapping. When sharing the new song, Shabaka posted a lengthy statement about the track:

Within the process of compiling my beats I had this idea that it would be cool to rap, but I hadn’t done it before. This became a really fulfilling exercise in approaching a new creative endeavour from scratch and trying to figure out what I’m guided towards. One of the last things Wayne Shorter told me as I visited his house in the year before his passing was an adage Art Blakey would recite to his bandmates ‘gents, you can’t hide behind your horn forever’. I take from this proclamation a call to confront all aspects of the emotional self, a rejection of self imposed definitions, not hiding behind identity frameworks imparted by any particular medium and the acknowledgement that at some point there will be a reckoning whereby it won’t be about what you can play on the instrument you’ve spent the most time practicing and systematising, it won’t be about skill or perfection, it will be about music and the depth of transmission. Sometimes the pursuit of technical prowess dumbs us to this dimension of awareness.

While writing I kept coming back to the dialogue between Tupac (posthumously) and Kendrick Lamar at the outro of the last song on ‘to pimp a butterfly’. It kept me grounded. Kendrick ruminates on the centrality of vibrations in the space where he’s deep in the music. He says when he’s behind the mic he doesn’t know what sort of energy will come out, to which Tupac replies ‘because the spirits, we ain’t even really rapping no more, we just letting our dead homies tell stories for us’. This notion of surrender and the ability to channel words from a source that goes beyond the temporal plane freed me up from needing to rationalise why I’m choosing to write anything in particular. Letting my mind go and my pen flow.

While it may be a bit of shock at first, the flow of the track embraces the vocals and gives new depths to Shabaka's already dazzling talents.

Of the Earth is out March 6.