Kamasi Washington The Epic (2015)

From pitchfork.com

It is probably impossible to discuss Kamasi Washington’s new record—all three impressive hours of it—without copping to at least some awareness of two extra-musical truths. The first of these holds that, as a member of the studio wrecking crew that brought Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly into being, this saxophonist-composer is unusually well poised to secure the attention of listeners who have previously been uninterested in jazz. (This past spring’s celebration of all-things-TPAB was sufficiently strong that Billboard even published a well-reported piece that detailed exactly how Lamar’s album came to feature so many jazz figures, including Washington.)

The second truth is that jazz could use a few more people with Washington’s cachet in the wider world—touring with Snoop Dogg, or putting out albums on Flying Lotus’ Brainfeeder imprint. Admitting this is not tantamount to saying that jazz is in some unhealthy creative state (it isn’t), but rather that the music currently faces an uphill struggle in the marketplace (as it often has).

You can see hints of these outside considerations in some of the pre-release writing around The Epic—virtually all of which cites Washington’s hip-hop associations as a reason to pay attention to his big debut as a jazz bandleader. (Washington cut one prior album as part of a collective, in 2004, but this set is his real coming-out party.) One can imagine other elite contemporary jazz artists grinding teeth while checking Twitter, muttering to themselves: if anyone paid attention to me, they’d notice the post-turntablism beats in my music.

Given all this, it’s something of a gobsmacking paradox to discover what a hip-hop-free zone The Epic is, and how enamored of jazz’s past it turns out to be. This triple-album set is an extravagant love letter to (among other things): soul jazz, John Coltrane (various periods), and 1970s fusion leaders like Miles Davis and Weather Report. The Epic‘s Disc 1 opener, “Change of the Guard”, might as well be titled “We Love All Kinds of ‘Trane”. Its ringing opening piano chords sound almost entirely lifted from the playbook of McCoy Tyner, the pianist in Coltrane’s so-called “Classic Quartet.” (That’s the group responsible for A Love Supreme.) The opening theme in the saxes is something that could only have been written after “Impressions”. And the harmonious writing for Washington’s string section recalls posthumous Coltrane releases like Infinity—tracks from which featured orchestral overdubs supervised by Alice Coltrane (who is, as you may have read, Flying Lotus’s aunt). Toward the end of the 12-minute tune, Washington’s tenor sax solo veers off into flights of screeching intensity that were the hallmark of Coltrane’s later groups—specifically the ones that also included Pharoah Sanders. (Who is, by the way, still active—and still great, on the evidence of last year’s record with the São Paulo Underground.)

What The Epic does come to sound like, over the course of its significant running time, is a generational intervention—an educational tool that widens the definition of styles that fall under “jazz classicism.” With his writing for string sections and chorus, Washington even flirts with that most dreaded of appellations: smooth. But these specific choices also wind up paying dividends: The calmly spiritual voices and Washington’s wailing playing during the back half of “Askim” feels novel.

Three hours is a lot of music, and Washington uses the space to range freely—the R&B vocals of Patrice Quinn crop up roughly once per disc, and there are long sections that feel indebted to grittier funk and soul. Washington has a healthy sense of melodrama, which is especially clear whenever the chorus swoops in with open-hearted “ooohs” and “aaahs”, aiming straight for the listener’s gooseflesh. Meantime, some of the longer, less ambitious instrumental tracks (like “Isabelle”) play things much safer, in a kind of chill-jazz mode that features greasy-soul-organ and tasteful solos from Washington’s large cast of skilled supporters (like electric bassist Thundercat and trombonist Ryan Porter). While faultlessly executed, these are the only moments across the music’s three-hour sprawl that resemble padding. On the uptempo, high-energy music, like the updated Miles Davis-isms of “Re Run Home”, as well the potent Disc 3 closer, “The Message”, Washington and his band truly excel.

The big news is that The Epic actually makes good on its titular promise without bothering to make even a faint-hearted stab in the direction of fulfilling its pre-release hype. If you came for the hip-hop associations, and can’t listen for anything else, you will surely be disappointed. But to listen like that is to cheat yourself. If you want rapping over contemporary jazz, you can find it elsewhere. If you’re in the mood for acoustic adaptations of electronic-music practices, look to Vijay Iyer Trio’s recent Break Stuff (specifically, the track “Hood”, which is a shout-out to Detroit DJ Robert Hood). You can find more studiously contemporary R&B vocals on Robert Glasper’s recent Black Radio series. Kamasi Washington’s epic isn’t the place for those things—though it is also a zone of surprise. Instead of a self-conscious attempt to seize someone else’s idea of the zeitgeist, it’s a large and generous canvas, clearly created in the hopes of attracting new visitors to the post-Coltrane wing of the jazz museum. At this point, that project is its own form of radicalism.

Kamasi Washington: Heaven and Earth (2018) review – passionate sounds of the gathering storm

From theguardian.com June 2018

The US saxophonist has found his time and it is now: this excellent album connects politics with the jazz of the past to create an angrily inclusive new vision

Ten years ago, British saxophone legend Courtney Pine painted a sobering picture of life as a modern British jazz musician in an interview with the Guardian. For all the study involved in becoming one, most jazz musicians had no hope of making a living, unless they were one of the clean-cut vocalists content to ring-a-ding-ding their way through the great American songbook to the delight of Michael Parkinson: you could fully expect your weekends to be spent not exploring the outer limits of improvisation, but playing in a wedding band to make ends meet. “An incredible sale in this day and age is 3,000 copies,” he lamented.

Here was evidence of how modern jazz lurks on the very fringes of mainstream public consciousness. You could fill a book with ways jazz has influenced rock and pop – from post-punk’s skronk to the samples of hip-hop and trip-hop – but apart from the aforementioned ring-a-ding-dingers, no serious jazz musician has really crossed over to huge mainstream success since the 1970s, the era of Miles Davis’s Bitches Brew and the Mahavishnu Orchestra, of the super-smooth George Benson and Grover Washington Jr, and of Keith Jarrett’s Köln Concert wafting around in the background of dinner parties.

All of which makes Kamasi Washington faintly extraordinary. His last London gig was not at the intimate Servant Jazz Quarters, but the Roundhouse, a venue at which the audience was clearly not comprised of longstanding jazz buffs. He records for Young Turks – home of the xx, FKA twigs and Sampha – and is reviewed in the kind of places jazz artists seldom get a mention. It all seems to have been achieved without pragmatic compromise. The record that catapulted him from self-releasing CDs in amateurish home-made sleeves, 2015’s The Epic, was a three-hour-long concept album.

Various theories exist as to how Washington has pulled this off, all of which are supported by The Epic’s full-length follow-up, Heaven and Earth (by Washington’s standards, this is a work of economy, clocking in at a mere two-and-a-half hours). One is that the time is simply right: his guest appearances on Kendrick Lamar’s epochal To Pimp a Butterfly didn’t merely elevate his profile, they established him as “the jazz voice of Black Lives Matter”, in a grand tradition of jazz as black protest.

Heaven and Earth frequently appears to be a furious state-of-America address. You can hear portentous anger in everything from its track titles – Street Fighter Mas, Song for the Fallen – to its astonishing opening cover of the theme from 1972 kung fu movie Fists of Fury, which arrives not merely extended to 10 minutes, but with additional lyrics: “Our time as victims is over / We will no longer ask for justice.” Washington’s sound tends to the maximalist – he is not a man afraid of breaking out the orchestra and choir – but on the album’s closing tracks Show Us the Way and Will You Sing it doesn’t feel dense so much as tumultuous, the former heaving and yawing behind a high-drama choral arrangement, the latter calmer, but with its ostensibly positive message of empowerment and change underscored by noticeable darkness. It sounds more like storm clouds gathering than sunlight breaking through.

Another theory is that his sound is audibly rooted in the kind of old jazz texts that non-jazz buffs tend to recognise, the kind of thing that gets collected on hipster-friendly compilations released by Soul Jazz and Strut: the spiritual jazz of John Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders, Sun Ra’s big band Afrofuturism, the political funk of Archie Shepp’s Attica Blues, the synth experiments of Herbie Hancock and Joe Zawinul. They’re all present here, further smoothed with ample references to early 70s soul and funk, not least the ambitious, orchestrated psychedelia of Rotary Connection. But what’s striking about Heaven and Earth is how expansive and ever-changing it is, its musical focus shifting constantly from lavish grandiosity to perspiration-soaked Latin rhythms to concentrated improvisation, from the edge of chaos to the lushly melodic – sometimes within the same track, as on The Invincible Youth. It never lingers in one place long enough for its running time to seem gruelling. Instead, Heaven and Earth feels writhingly alive and passionate, angrily of the moment but inclusive.

If describing Heaven and Earth as “jazz for people who don’t like jazz” sounds pejorative, it isn’t meant to be. Rather, it’s simply to indicate that on Heaven and Earth, Washington continues to explore a sweet spot between artistry and approachability. Whether his success will lead audiences to further explore music that usually exists on the fringes is an interesting question. What is more certain is the quality and accessibility of his own music.