Shabaka And The Ancestors has been played on NTS over 10 times, featured on 12 episodes and was first played on 25 September 2016.

Though Shabaka Hutchings is perhaps best known for playing in Pete Wareham’s Melt Yourself Down, he has long been finding ways of escaping the trappings of their pop sensibilities – playing in the Sun Ra Arkestra in 2014 – and pushing himself musically. And on Wisdom of Elders Hutchings delves even further into the spiritual jazz that originated in part with Sun Ra, with the help of a new band in Johannesburg. And it's a record that goes even further than his playing in Comet is Coming, another London-based project that refers less indiscreetly than Melt Yourself Down to Afrofuturist images.