India, March 27 -- There is a chapter early in Shabaka Hutchings's creative lore that feels almost mythological in retrospect.

A young man with roots in Barbados, born in Britain and training at London's Guildhall school of music, absorbs the full canon of Western jazz and then quietly decides it isn't enough. He goes looking for the rest: for the South African township sounds of pianist Abdullah Ibrahim, the spiritual fire of American saxophonist Pharoah Sanders, the poly-rhythmic thrum of the Caribbean, the electronic pulse of the London underground.

What he builds from all of it over the next 15 years will become one of the most restlessly original bodies of work in contemporary music.

Shabaka's third solo album, Of the Earth, relea...