Year of the Soft Radicals

Shabaka, Ganavya, André 3000, et al: when improv turns ambient

Shabaka, with shakuhachi, on the Bowery. Photographed Jan. 14, 2024. (The Gig)

“What would it mean to speak inwardly, instead of outwardly?”

The poet Saul Williams offers this rhetorical prompt about one minute into a track titled “Managing My Fear, What Fear Had Become,” off the quietly mesmerizing 2024 album by Shabaka (né Hutchings). I’ve been mulling over my answer to his question all year, because it holds an implicit skeleton key to so much of the music that resonated (yes, in all senses) across our improvisational sonic realm.

That Shabaka album, Perceive Its Beauty, Acknowledge Its Grace, was graciously received when it dropped in April. We made an episode of The Late Set about it, in which Shabaka reflected with sagacious candor about his decision to hang up the tenor saxophone in favor of hand-carved bamboo flutes. The clear parallel, then and now, was to another lithe, enthralling flute evangelist: André 3000, who caused a curious stir late last year with the release of his trippy nebula of an album, New Blue Sun.

This morning, Shabaka dropped a new EP, Possession, with a different feature on each of its five tracks: rappers Billy Woods and E L U C I D, pianist Nduduzo Makhathini, bassist and vocalist esperanza spalding, and yes, André 3000 (who was only credited, in the watermarked advance copy I received, as SPECIAL GUEST).¹ Here is that track, “To the Moon,” whose title has (I’ll presume with confidence) nothing to do with the 2024 Meghan Trainor tune, the 2011 role-playing video game, the mid-‘50s Ralph Kramden catchphrase, or the landmark 1902 film by Georges Méliès.

The release of this new flute-bro lovefest is a useful nudge, a reminder that I’ve been puzzling over our jazz-ambient moment for a while. As the year draws to a close, I think it’s time for some focused deliberation on this deliberately unfocused micro-genre, which has an outsize cachet among many listeners coming to improvised music anew. (For a lot of committed jazz fans, these artists don’t register, like at all.) For lack of a better catchall, I’m calling these artists “Soft Radicals,” for the distinctive balance of nurturing affectation and revolutionary intention in their art.

In addition to André 3000 and Shabaka, each of whom I saw in concert a few times this year, the cohort I’m talking about includes percussionist Carlos Niño, a New Blue Sun conduit and Shabaka copilot; keyboardist Surya Botofasina, a fellow traveler to all of the aforementioned; pianist Amaro Freitas, who struck a gentle balance of Brazilian pulse and Amazonian ambience (at times avec Shabaka); Ganavya, a South Indian devotional singer turned shape-shifting avant-gardener; and Nala Sinephro, a Caribbean-Belgian harpist and synth specialist evidently drawn to the eternal now.

It could also extend to the impeccably jazz-trained² trombonists Kalia Vandever and Andy Clausen, each of whom released a carefully calibrated ambient solo album in the spring. It certainly extends to the late Alice Coltrane, whose Carnegie Hall Concert was among this year’s vault-sprung astonishments, and who looms as a lodestar for most of the artists I just mentioned (in some cases, almost to a fault).

Enough preamble. Let’s balance our chakras, tune our harp strings, and figure this out.