SHABAZZ PALACES - The Don Of Diamond Dreams

Back in the days when I was a teenager

before I had status and before I had a pager

you could find the Abstract listenin’ to hip-hop

my pops used to say, it reminded him of Bebop

I said, “Well, Daddy, don’t you know that things go in cycles?

Way that Bobby Brown is just amping like Michael”

(A Tribe Called Quest, “Excursions”)

Almost thirty years have passed since the days of wine and roses of Ishmael Butler, Mariana Vieira and Craig Irving, but the jazz-rap breeze of the two Digable Planets records still feels refreshing. Dispatches from an era in which it was hip-hop that draped itself in coolness by freely dipping into the jazz record collections of its forefathers – whereas in recent years we've witnessed the exact opposite trajectory – “Reachin' (A New Refutation Of Time And Space)” and “Blowout Comb” sound today like miraculous collections of sunny, feelgood grooves, whose influence can be heard as much in the mainstream as in the work of niche musicians like Jeff Parker – try putting on “Built A Nest” right after “Rebirth Of The Slick (Cool Like Dat)” and tell us you haven't just taken a full, comfortable round trip from one genre to the other.

After the breakup, it then took quite a while before Butler, the creative engine of the trio, resurfaced with a fully-fledged new project, following a brief interlude under the name Cherrywine at the turn of the millennium. That project, called Shabazz Palaces and launched a decade ago now with the collaboration of multi-instrumentalist Tendai Maraire, has now reached its fifth full-length; and while it's not exactly fair to greet the return of an artist with a multi-decade career by harking back to his distant past, it's also true that listening to an album like “The Don Of Diamond Dreams” – qualitatively rather far removed from the far more intriguing “Black Up” and “Lese Majesty” – does partly induce exactly that kind of nostalgia.

The sonic palette is the one we've grown accustomed to from the two 2017 “Quazarz” albums: an abstract, slowed-down hip-hop with an afrofuturist electro-funk streak that seems to arrive from the Seventies and Eighties of a parallel reality, born and raised entirely within Butler's mind. Eight tracks plus two fragments lasting just a few seconds each, “The Don Of Diamond Dreams” opens with “Ad Ventures”, one of the best cuts on offer, five minutes of snare hits, deep bass and pensive mumbling out loud in which worrying about the what or the where really makes little sense: here it's the how that carries the entire minimal composition, lending it a highly peculiar, hallucinated-dream atmosphere.

A Butler at his best, which resurfaces in “Chocolate Souffle”, another highlight of the collection sitting at the crossroads between mid-70s Clinton and Outkast, rolling and pitching over a broad synth line toward unknown horizons (“you're a scroller, I'm an explorer”); almost on the same level sits the beat of “Bad Bitch Walking”, suspended in a void, a feat with Stas THEE Boss strategically placed to open the second side and out of tune down to the bone (“I focused on her while smoking marijuana/ scratched my mind, hmm, did I want her?”).

It works decidedly less well when the tracks spin on too long around a single, less-than-brilliant idea, as is the case with the psychedelic autotune of "Fast Learner" or the trap beat of "Money Yoga". In "Thanking The Girls", Butler finds warm, heartfelt words for the women who allowed him to become what he's become – the mind immediately jumps to the Gil Scott-Heron of "On Coming From A Broken Home" – but the musical backing ends up slipping away like fresh water; closing things out is the stretched-out psychedelia of "Reg Walks By The Looking Glass", a mothership of filtered guitars, synths and sax that becomes an ever-shrinking dot in the sky as it heads back to the alien planet a record like this seems to have rained down from.

"Life at fifty no longer has the magical sparkle of twenty or thirty", wrote Bertoncelli a century ago, describing Peter Gabriel's last album of new material: a radical statement – in truth, there's no shortage of artists who've managed to find new sonic eldorados in the second half of their lives – but one that doesn't feel out of place in telling the story of an imaginative maverick like Butler, from whom at this point it's perhaps fair to expect nothing more than well-made, still-curious, solid and painstakingly crafted products like "The Don Of Diamond Dreams". A hypnosis of an album, one that certainly earns the listener's respect, interest and attention across all forty of its minutes; not always, unfortunately, their enthusiasm.

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13/07/2020