Shabaka Hutchings was born in London in 1984 and moved to Birmingham at the age of two. From the age of six he was raised in Barbados, his parents' native island, where at nine he took up the clarinet and practised along to hip hop verses by Nas, the Notorious B.I.G. and Tupac as well as the rhythms of the Crop Over festival. His father, the graphic designer Anum Iyapo, had worked on sleeves for King Tubby and Jah Shaka and recorded a reggae poetry album, Song of the Motherland, in 1985.

Back in England, Hutchings entered the Guildhall School of Music and Drama at 19 and took a classical degree on clarinet. In London he joined Tomorrow's Warriors, the workshop programme run by the bassist Gary Crosby, Janine Irons and the New Orleans trumpeter Abram Wilson, where he met many of the musicians of the South East London scene. He was a BBC New Generation Artist from 2010 to 2012 and has also spent time in South Africa. An early recording, Night Time on the Middle Passage by Zed-U, came out on Babel in 2009, and he was a member of Melt Yourself Down, whose self-titled debut appeared on The Leaf Label in 2013.

Sons of Kemet, his first leader project to break through, was a quartet of saxophone and clarinet, tuba and two drummers. Its debut Burn appeared on Naim Jazz on September 9, 2013, and the group won the Best Jazz Act prize at the 2013 MOBO Awards; Hutchings also received a Paul Hamlyn Composer Award in 2014. Lest We Forget What We Came Here to Do followed in 2015. After the group moved to Impulse!, Your Queen Is a Reptile (March 30, 2018), on which Hutchings wrote every track and Nubya Garcia guested on saxophone on one of them, was nominated for the 2018 Mercury Prize. Black to the Future came out on May 14, 2021. On June 1, 2022, the band announced that it would be closing this chapter of its life after its current run of shows.

At the same time he worked in two other bands. The Comet Is Coming, a trio with the keyboardist Dan Leavers (Danalogue) and the drummer Max Hallett (Betamax), with Hutchings billed as King Shabaka, released the Prophecy EP in 2015 and its debut album Channel the Spirits on The Leaf Label on April 1, 2016, which was nominated for the 2016 Mercury Prize. The band signed to Impulse! in 2018 and released Trust in the Lifeforce of the Deep Mystery in 2019 and Hyper-Dimensional Expansion Beam, its third album, in 2022. Shabaka and the Ancestors, a band he leads that includes South African musicians, made its debut with Wisdom of Elders on Gilles Peterson's Brownswood Recordings in 2016 and followed it with We Are Sent Here by History on Impulse! on March 13, 2020. In 2018 he directed the Brownswood compilation We Out Here, a survey of the London scene, and curated part of the programme of the Le Guess Who? festival in the Netherlands. In December 2020 he joined London Brew, a dozen British musicians who recorded an improvised set inspired by Miles Davis's Bitches Brew over three days in North London; the album was released by Concord on March 31, 2023. He also founded the label Native Rebel Recordings, whose releases are recorded at RAK Studios over three days.

Hutchings released his first record under the single name Shabaka, the EP Afrikan Culture, in May 2022. On January 1, 2023, he said on Instagram that he would stop playing saxophone from the end of that year, later citing the physical and emotional strain of performing on it on tour. His next record, Perceive Its Beauty, Acknowledge Its Grace, was released by Impulse! on April 12, 2024. It was recorded in six days in 2022 at Van Gelder Studio in New Jersey and co-produced with Dilip Harris, with guests including André 3000, Laraaji, Floating Points, Moses Sumney, Lianne La Havas, Saul Williams, Esperanza Spalding, Jason Moran and Nasheet Waits. Hutchings played mostly flutes, among them shakuhachi, svirel and quena, plus clarinet on several tracks and tenor saxophone briefly on "Breathing." It reached number one on the UK Jazz & Blues Albums chart.

He played saxophone in public again in 2025, and Of the Earth, released on March 6, 2026, on his own label, Shabaka Records, brings it back alongside flutes and other woodwinds, electronics and percussion. He made it largely alone while travelling, and critics described the saxophone as an element of texture and colour rather than the lead voice. As of November 2026 he plays both saxophone and flutes.

Hutchings is known for combining saxophone and clarinet playing with Caribbean and African rhythms, rock and electronics. In Sons of Kemet the band had no chordal instrument at all, and the tuba carried the bass line against two drummers. The Comet Is Coming was described by The Guardian in 2016 as an heir to the cosmic-jazz tradition of Sun Ra, a mix of improvisation, Afrobeat and electronics, and Hutchings has said he likes the way Sun Ra urged people to create their own myths. Reviewers of his flute-led solo record compared it to Alice Coltrane and Don Cherry. Like many musicians of his generation in London, he is wary of the word jazz, since the scene's influences run from acid house and drum and bass to hip hop and soca rather than the blues. Gary Bartz's own profile lists him among the later musicians influenced by Bartz's mix of jazz with funk and spoken word. His 2023 decision to step away from the saxophone, and his return to it for Of the Earth, have been a central part of the critical story of his recent work, and Perceive Its Beauty, Acknowledge Its Grace earned a Metacritic score of 84 out of 100.