Gig review: Shabaka + Rory Green at Brudenell Social Club, Leeds

At one point during his 45-minute opening set, Manchester-based guitarist Rory Green reminisces about a gig in a department store that found him playing to no one apart from the soundman. It’s fair to predict that the Wigan-via-Ghana musician won’t face such fate again any time soon.

Tonight’s solo performance can’t replicate the beautifully nuanced layers of Green’s upcoming Gondwana debut Moments Brighter Than The Sun (in fact, the noisier prerecorded accompaniments get in the way of the graceful glide of Green’s compositions), but it’s a captivating performance nonetheless, during which the audience turn from curious to audibly appreciative.

For all their merits, the two solo albums Shabaka Hutchings has put out since the retirement of the multi-instrumentalist’s much-acclaimed bands Sons of Kemet and The Comet Is Coming have felt slightly tentative in their efforts to put maximum distance between Hutchings and his musical past.

The blissful ambient glide of 2024’s Perceive Its Beauty, Acknowledge Its Grace was recorded not long after Hutchings opted to swap his trademark saxophone for a variety of flutes, documenting a transition from an undisputed master of one instrument to a dedicated student of another. This year’s Of The Earth (largely recorded on the move during spare moments on tour) captures Shabaka in the process of learning how to craft beats, mixing fully realised, hypnotic gems with rough sketches.

Tonight’s often mesmerising 90-minute performance to an appreciative audience suggests that Hutchings is again at ease with dipping into all aspects of his musicianship. The results strike a carefully calibrated balance between his current interests (notably electronic loops) and giving the crowd what they are likely to expect, notably soaring, intense lashings of saxophone, which draws parallels with the physically robust fieriness of later period John Coltrane.

Proceedings get off to a hushed start with an extended flute solo, but Hutchings – accompanied only by virtuosic drummer Austin Williamson – gradually hits his stride.

With potentially extemporised workouts and heavily modified cuts from the two solo albums blending into an almost non-stop, often transfixing medley, it’s not the kind of performance that emphasises individual tunes. Instead, a pattern emerges: Hutchings starts a loop constructed largely of what sounds like snippets of his rhythmic flute playing, Williamson launches into the appropriate rhythmic pulse, which Hutchings then adorns with rhythmic flute motifs and more assertive (yet also occasionally tenderly lyrical) saxophone solos which – together with Williamson’s often astonishingly expressive drumming – provide the set’s highlights, drawing enthusiastic applause from the attentive crowd.

The performance peaks with a joyous polyrhythmic gallop which finds Hutchings work his way through a number of flutes and horns whilst Williamson maintains a relentless yet nimble barrage that has one foot in South America and the other in Africa: imagine Tony Allen’s polyrhythmic splendour executed with Elvin Jones’s oomph with the reach of an octopus, and you’re not far from the ensuing, pulverising bounce, at the end of which Williamson has to finally remove his shades to wide off sweat from this eyes.

It’s an energised, irresistibly vivid musical dialogue that couldn’t be further removed from the occasionally claustrophobic, solitary starkness of Of The Earth.