The imaginative and much-acclaimed UK reeds player Shabaka Hutchings is a regular visitor to South Africa – this album joins him with a South African band on a simmering blend of imploring, Albert Ayler-esque sax salutations, township jazz grooves, and spacey Sun Ra-like music underpinned by glowing Fender Rhodes sounds. The fusion of township and Caribbean rhythms, and Hutchings’s sonorous tenor in harmony with vocals, make a seductive opener of the steadily rhythm-shifting – and eventually striving and impassioned – Mzwandile. The Observer is soulfully and bluesily Coltraneish; there are lilting two-sax conversations that unfold over washes of cymbals and turn to long, looping minimalist spins, and Hutchings’ deep, slow-moving tenor joins a chanting vocal in a prayer-like incantation that swells and boils at the close. As the album title implies, this is sometimes a more meditative and reverential form of South African jazz than that of the first uninhibited wave of the country’s post-Coltrane-ists in the 1960s and 70s, but it exerts its own kind of hypnotically groove-driven pull.
