Riga, Latvia’s Skaņu Mežs festival for experimental music will happen on October 3-4 at Hanzas Perons (16A Hanzas Street). On the first evening, British jazz multi-instrumentalist Shabaka Hutchings will play a duo with free jazz and free improvised music drummer and percussionist Hamid Drake. Tickets can currently be purchased at www.ticketservice.lv for 55 EUR.
Shabaka Hutchings
Shabaka Hutchings, or, recently, just Shabaka, has been called “one of the brightest stars in the jazz universe” (Downbeat) and “One of the most celebrated jazz musicians of the past decade” (Pitchfork).
London-born, Shabaka Hutchings spent much of his childhood in Barbados. Beginning at age nine, he studied the clarinet, playing in calypso bands while studying classical repertoire, often practicing over hip hop beats by artists such as Nas, as well as the music native to Barbados.
Consequently, after studying clarinet at Guildhall School of Music, he collaborated on a kaleidoscopic range of projects: recording and/or touring with Mulatu Astatke and the Heliocentrics, Soweto Kinch, Floating Points, and Courtney Pine, amongst many other bands, as well as being a part of the London Improvisers Orchestra. He also composed pieces for the BBC Concert Orchestra, London Sinfonietta, Ligeti Quartet, and performed the Copland Clarinet Concerto with the BBC National Orchestra of Wales, Britten Sinfonietta, as well as the Knoxville Symphony Orchestra.
Over the past decade, the lion’s share of his touring and recorded work has been with three bands: Sons of Kemet, The Comet is Coming, and Shabaka and the Ancestors. “In these formations,” he shared, “I’ve been able to display a fundamental approach to creative practice in different contexts spanning Afro-Caribbean fusion, London dance music club culture, and the rich South African jazz tradition – all within the freedom afforded by the legacy of the American ‘jazz’ tradition.”
His musical exploration includes employing a variety of flutes, including the ancient Japanese Shakuhachi, which he started playing in 2020 during the pandemic. “Since then, 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. “As more flutes have been added to my arsenal including Mayan Teotihuacan drone flutes, Brazilian Pifanos, Native American flutes and South American Quenas, 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.”
On New Year’s Day 2023, in the wake of the release of his 2022 debut EP, Afrikan Culture (which notably featured the artist primarily on flutes), Shabaka announced that beginning in 2024, he’d take a hiatus from playing the saxophone publicly. In July 2023, he clarified on his Instagram page his intention to cease playing with bands in which the saxophone was his primary instrument (including The Comet Is Coming, Sons of Kemet, and Shabaka and the Ancestors).
For the flute-forward album Perceive its Beauty, Acknowledge its Grace, Hutchings tapped into a remarkable cadre of players, including percussionist Carlos Niño and bassist Esperanza Spalding. Vocalists including Saul Williams and Lianne La Havas, and hip-hop artists – last year’s guests of Skaņu Mežs – billy woods and Elucid contributed to the album as well.
Pitchfork rated the album 8 stars out of 10, and Mojo’s John Mulvey wrote that “The tools change, the air moves in different ways, the vision evolves; and one of our finest musicians might have just achieved a higher state of artistic consciousness.”
Hamid Drake
Hamid Drake is an American jazz drummer and percussionist. Already by the close of the 1990s, Hamid Drake was widely regarded as one of the best percussionists in jazz and avant-garde improvised music. Incorporating Afro-Cuban, Indian, and African percussion instruments and influence, in addition to using the standard trap set, Drake has collaborated extensively with top free jazz improvisers. Drake also has performed world music; by the late 70s, he was a member of Foday Musa Suso’s Mandingo Griot Society and has played reggae throughout his career.
Hamid’s first experiences with music were in the Church. He played bongos in the St. Paul’s AME Church Youth Choir. In the 4th grade, he began studying drums for the grade school stage band. Originally, he wanted to play trombone; the drum set was not his first choice for the stage band, but that seat was already taken. So, to be in the stage band, he had to play drums. That was the beginning of what has now been a long and fulfilling career in the pursuit of music.
Drake has worked with trumpeter Don Cherry, pianist Herbie Hancock, saxophonists Pharoah Sanders, Fred Anderson, Archie Shepp, Peter Brötzmann, and David Murray, and bassists Reggie Workman and William Parker (in a large number of lineups).
Hamid Drake won the Jazz Journalist Award in 2009, and the Downbeat Critics Poll in 2006, 2010, 2017, 2018, 2019 as best percussionist.
In 2017, he was awarded the title of Chevalier Des Arts et des lettres. The Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (Order of Arts and Letters) is an order of France established on 2 May 1957 by the Minister of Culture. Its purpose is the recognition of significant contributions to the arts, literature, or the propagation of these fields.
David Keenan has written the following words on Drake: “[Drake’s] mastery of pulse drumming, textural sculpting, hand drum techniques, reggae, funk and garage punk makes him one of the most articulate and linguistically advanced musicians on the circuit… Cecil Taylor once claimed that each man is his own academy. If that’s the case, Drake is surely one of the mystery schools.”
Though a large portion of Hamid Drake’s recorded output has been in the role of a sideman, he is now also devoting his energies and creativity as a bandleader and co-leader focusing on his own groups and projects such as Bindu, Indigenous Mind and The honoring of Alice Coltrane Project (premiered in 2022).
This will be Mr. Drake’s second visit to Skaņu Mežs – in 2023, he performed at the festival with William Parker and Joe Morris.
Skaņu Mežs 2025
Skaņu Mežs has been running in Riga, Latvia for more than 20 years. It’s been referred to by The Wire Magazine as “the biggest avant-garde and experimental music festival in the Baltics”.
As of this moment, the other artists announced for the 2025 edition are experimental pop music group These New Puritans and iconic avant-garde vocalist Joan La Barbara.
Tickets can be purchased here.
The first confirmed supporters are the State Culture Capital Foundation of Latvia, Riga municipality, and “Valmiermuiža”.
Skaņu Mežs is part of the SHAPE+ platform for innovative music and interdisciplinary art and sound art project “tekhnē”, both supported by the European Union and the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Latvia. SHAPE+ is also supported by Pro Helvetia.
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