Towards the end of the final performance in his six-night residency at Blue Note New York, Shabaka speaks volumes to his artistic perspective as he explains the tilinkó.

Showing the narrow wood tube to the packed-in crowd, Shabaka Hutchings–who has performed with his mononym since 2022–illustrates how the Bulgarian overtone flute’s complex frequencies resolve from many natural harmonics in its resonating chamber. He cites London and New York, his home city and the stomping grounds of special guest George Burton: the distinct cultures (and sounds) for which those metropolises are known are the result of countless moving parts within. Coyly cutting his music theory lesson short, he demonstrates the instrument’s rich timbre, and his own intricate style, with a solo.

Shabaka has walked a long road to the stage on this late summer Sunday night. After 11 sets in the Blue Note run, an exhaustive eight months of North American touring and the release of his acclaimed sophomore solo album Perceive Its Beauty, Acknowledge Its Grace, a busy year has come to a clear climax. For his series closer, the artist is joined by trombonist Kalia Vandever, drummer Austin Williamson and featured pianist Burton, who sits behind a grand piano and array of effects on stage right.

Burton, too, arrives from an eventful stretch, as the New York-by-Philadelphia scene veteran has performed with the likes of the No Name Pops, Dezron Douglas and Marquis Hill on the way to White Noise, his fourth studio record. Set to arrive on Sept. 20, the pianist and composer’s forthcoming album collects three years of his efforts and inner life in a total reflection of his musical identity.

Between the two figureheads, the mounting energy in the space is palpable. When the ensemble steps into the spotlight, the booming jazz institution snaps to absolute silence.

Shabaka’s performance begins with a lone, sustained tone from his shakuhachi. A deep mood swells with further long notes and subtle mallet rinses from Williamson’s ride cymbal, then breathy outbursts and pounding toms build pressure. As Shabaka shifts to a transverse wind, Vandever and Burton enter, swirling around each other in unstructured improvisation to produce a vivid, moving atmosphere.

A central melody resolves from the harmonic crosswinds as the bandleader, now wielding a reeded wind, finds a core feeling and pours his soul into it. The artist and ensemble are not just reciting the slow-burning compositions of Perceive Its Beauty, but living them. The musicians follow the music, patiently drawing out sudden bursts of revelation and catharsis to charge the songs on. Loose, scattered interplay and carefully arranged passages run together, blurring to a trance state.

Shabaka aptly reflects this process when he takes a beat to introduce his Teotihuacan double flute, which he loves for the “wide-open, imaginative space it leaves for you to dream into the music.” As the show goes on, standout tracks like “Living,” “Breathing,” “Kiss Me Before I Forget” and the album opener “End of Innocence” open up in this way, becoming repositories for the musicians’ spirits as they dig deeper and deeper. The sound seems to envelop the club, and the audience, too, is welcomed into the alternate, contemplative space.

Every player is a vital moving part of this spellbinding resonance. Vandever brings rich harmonies to Shabaka’s wind cries in deep, atmospheric rumbles and quick-footed staccato sprints that trade breaths with the bandleader. Williamson makes the crowd sway with stick-clicks and heavy kicks slotted between the metronomic pulse of Shabaka’s mini-modular synthesizer, then reels back with airy, bowed cymbal canopies that paint a sky behind the soundscape.

Burton listens very closely. The pianist is precise and diligent, channeling tremendous intention into steps that perfectly complement his peers’ contributions. He shows a gift for building environments from the free, expressonist runs of his bandmates, setting themes with looping phrases and encouraging momentum with dilations in tone and intensity. As new songs rise and fall, it’s Burton’s dreamy, twinkling lines and echo effects that blend the sound into the air. When the quartet’s energy surges, the artist dramatically stabs along the high and low octaves and gives himself over to fevered and ferocious solos. When so moved, he scats irrepressibly over his hectic sequences, channeling Bud Powell or Keith Jarrett.

While Burton’s improvisatory language stirs hip-hop, Philly soul, avant-garde and more into a deceptively straight-ahead hard bop sound—darting from Ahmad Jamal, to McCoy Tyner, to Cecil Taylor and back again—Shabaka draws on another lexicon entirely. Unbound by any single musical tradition, the wind expert’s style courses from countless distant streams. From breath to breath, he courts comparison to such eclectic forebearers as Pharaoh Sanders, Bennie Maupin, Hermeto Pascoal, James Newton, Minoru Muraoka and Don Cherry, all rushing into a sound so expansive that even jazz seems like an oppressive category.

He’s peerless, though, in his cultivation of a timeless mood, summoning an elusive spirit that’s flowed as a river across geographic and temporal bounds. When the bandleader reflects on his central aims as an artist before concluding the evening’s program, he defines this spirit as “vital energy,” “the force that says ‘I will.’” Now fully charged for his final entry, Shabaka cues up album closer “Song of the Motherland,” which frames a spoken poem from his father—dub poet Anum Iyapo—and takes its name from his sole 1985 album. On the record, he recites: “I am your culture/ Know me/ For I am your future/ I water the flower of your past.”

Rattling hand percussion and soft snare brushes set fertile soil for the quartet, who carefully push out to the light with collective exploration. A bittersweet core melody emerges from the sonic shroud and Shabaka, devout and resolute, breaks from the common chorus to bare his soul. He is managing his breath, confidently yearning, dismantling structures, recombining ruins and holding ancestral inheritance close. He is living, and echoing the cry of all those who lived before him.

Soon, the melody drifts away. The ensemble peels back into some slipping echoes from Burton, and the din of shifting in seats and shuffling checks rises to take its place. But Shabaka’s tones still ring out, and the crowd still listens closely, to a sound that was formed long before the late show and will endure long after the lights go down.