It is the end of the year, when the usual best-of lists come out. A number of musicians have released stellar recordings during the past 12 months—Mdou Moctar’s Funeral for Justice (Matador) and Shabaka’s Perceive Its Beauty, Acknowledge Its Grace (Impulse!) immediately come to mind. Mdou Moctar (Mahamadou Souleymane) continues to update the guitar-heavy sound and style of assouf, the so-called desert blues forged by Tuareg predecessors like Tinariwen and Abdallah Oumbadougou, while also maintaining their political orientation that has drawn attention to the contested region of the Sahel.

Shabaka (Shabaka Hutchings) goes in a completely different direction on Perceive Its Beauty, Acknowledge Its Grace. As an album that brings together jazz improvisation and a concerted spiritual bearing—its title conveys an affinity with John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme—its defining instrument is the flute. André 3000 of Outkast got all the attention in 2023 for his flute venture, New Blue Sun (Epic), which the London-based Shabaka guested on, but Perceive Its Beauty, Acknowledge Its Grace takes this aesthetic even further. On tracks like “As the Planets and the Stars Collapse,” the effect is meditative, even cosmic. With roots in Britain and Barbados, along with periods spent in Johannesburg (check out Wisdom of Elders by Shabaka and the Ancestors from 2016), Shabaka triangulates between influences like Sun Ra, Ryuichi Sakamoto, and Herbie Mann.

Not to be left out is Ibaaku (Ibaaku Bassene), the Dakar-based DJ and producer whose 2024 LP, Joola Jazz (Miziku Tey), goes even further into an Afrofuturist sound. Afrofuturism has all the attention in African literature through writers like Masande Ntshanga (Triangulum) and Nnedi Okorafor (Lagoon), but it has also made inroads into music. Joola Jazz is arguably more difficult than the rock-oriented Funeral for Justice and the contemplative Perceive Its Beauty, Acknowledge Its Grace. Ibaaku’s work has a glitchy, patchwork quality that displays a sense of experimentation and playfulness, with the listener entering a world structured by slippery digital extracts, carefully chosen guest vocalists, and ethnographic-like field recordings.  

Afrofuturism cuts differently, of course, in one of the homelands of Négritude, given the movement’s strong orientation toward the Black past. Ibaaku seems fully aware of this contrast and has acted accordingly. As part of Senegal’s hip-hop scene and a member of the I-Science collective, Ibaaku released his first album in this vein, Alien Cartoon (Akwaaba), in2016, the result of a collaboration with the Senegalese fashion designer Selly Raby Kane during the 2014 Dak’Art Biennale. The album title itself indicates the impishness of his style—his vision of the future is the opposite of dystopian—with emphasis placed on aural collages and the hybridization of musical sources, another divergence from Léopold Senghor’s cultural essentialist legacy.  

During the intervening years, Ibaaku issued two compilations—Neo Dakar Vol. 1 (Miziku Tey, 2021) and Neo Dakar Vol. 2 (Miziku Tey, 2022)—which further sampled, spliced, and stitched together soul (“Boy Doolé”), R&B (“Jazzy Classy”), electronica (“Xol Ak Roo”), jazz (“Suba Teel”), musique concrète (“Street Couture”), and traditional compositions (“Mystere des Affaires Etranges”) into a mélange of sonic Black Atlanticism. Neither entirely works of futurism nor pure nostalgia, these LPs reworked temporalities as well as sounds with the purpose of situating a different cultural historicism regarding Dakar’s past and present. 

Joola Jazz returns to the future. With ten tracks at 53 minutes, Ibaaku’s new album is his longest, and he settles into building a soundscape that is more cohesive without dispensing with the bricolage approach that animated his preceding releases. The first track, “Bombolong,” signals his tongue-in-cheek spirit once more, an electronica composition named after a traditional percussion instrument from Casamance, the region of his birth. Songs like “Bukut” and “Ajamat Computer,” which is one of the best on Joola Jazz, sustain this technique of layering and counterposing the analog beats of West African percussion with contemporary synth melodies. Other tracks take different routes, like “Btwinen,” which integrates electric guitar by Brahim Wone, while “Bumiro” has a kora accompaniment by Edouard Manga and a tenor sax by Gianni Denitto, resulting in a work with trap loops and nocturnal tones that genuflects to Miles Davis’s Bitches Brew from 1970.

The standout tracks on Joola Jazz involve guest vocalists, which bring levity and a human element to the modern club sound that Ibaaku cultivates. The Senegalese musician Alibeta contributes vocals to “Jazz Griots” with the type of prophetic delivery that recalls Sun Ra. The track “Nuit à Yaoundé” has Danielle Eog Makedah of Cameroon introducing moments of sensual romanticism over hip hop beats that last all too briefly. Joola Jazz’s instrumental closer, “Ancestral Intelligence,” points in the direction of another type of AI, returning to Ibaaku’s signature style of sourcing and incorporating the artificial and the human-made, thus allegorizing the global present and future from the vantage point of Dakar.

Cerebral in disposition, Joola Jazz is full of ideas. Ibaaku has spoken of the hybrid nature of his work, even referring to his stage persona as half-human and half-alien. The musical eclecticism and underlying arguments of his recordings resemble the literary créolité of Patrick Chamoiseau, Raphaël Confiant, and Jean Bernabé of Martinique, who have drawn from Édouard Glissant’s notion of “Caribbeanness” (Antillanité) as a critique of Aimé Césaire’s monolithic take on Blackness through Négritude. In this instance, Ibaaku offers yet another critique via the issue of temporality.

Similar to Shabazz Palaces (Ishmael Butler, formerly of Digable Planets), whose albums Quazarz: Born on a Gangster Star (2017) and Quazarz vs. the Jealous Machines (2017) assisted in mainstreaming Sun Ra’s Afrofuturism into American hip-hop, Ibaaku is dissatisfied with dwelling on the past and the idea that Black artists, musicians, and intellectuals have no claim on the future. In this way, Joola Jazz and the 2024 releases by Mdou Moctar and Shabaka share a common politics directed toward the present as well as toward new horizons, despite their different approaches. To revise Chinua Achebe, the history of the future will always be written by the hunter, until the lions have their own futurists.