KAMASI WASHINGTON
Serpentine Pavilion, London, August 3 The new jazz figurehead thrills a genteel corner of Hyde Park
The band manage to be peerlessly tight while drifting into sublime freedoms
IT’S a balmy Friday night in the hottest London summer since ’76, and the aroma of weed drifts across Hyde Park. An officious-looking member of Royal Parks security identifies the source: two intensely relaxed musicians who have just spent the last half-hour in soundcheck, filling the refined environs of SW7 with the sound of cosmic West Coast jazz. “Excuse me,” says Mr Royal Parks. “Would you gentlemen care to step to the other side of that tree where I can’t see you?”
This is a night full of beautiful incongruities. Kamasi Washington and his band have beamed down into the Serpentine Pavilion, this year a Frida Escobedo fantasia of stacked roof tiles. For almost two transcendent hours, for an audience of barely 100 lucky souls, they transform the space into the world capital of 21st century afro-futurism. It is a reminder of just how magnificent, when the stars align, live music can be.
This is an incredible collective. Miles Mosley is something like the Hendrix of double bass, conjuring uncanny drones, wah-wah guitar and polyrhythmic funk from the same instrument. Ryan Porter on trombone, swooping through arrangements from his own elliptical orbit, is like Lebron James or Zinedine Zidane, apparently playing his own private game amid the wider commotion. Patrice Quinn on vocals grooves beautifully, charting strange choreographies across the stage. The band is completed by dual drummers Tony Austin and Ronald Bruner J, topknotted gonzoid keys player Ruslan Sirota, and Washington’s father Rickey on flute, looking disconcertingly like Brighton & Hove Albion manager Chris Hughton. Kamasi himself is resplendent in striped kaftan, calmness personified at the heart of this beautiful storm.
Although his two major studio LPs, 2015’s The Epic and this year’s
Heaven And Earth, can seem at times overwhelming and portentous, tonight is pure delight: no choirs or strings overegging the pudding, no vainglorious soloing (at least until the final “Fists Of Fury” when the drummers finally get a chance to let rip), no shameless demonstration of chops. Miraculously the Kamasi Washington band manage to be peerlessly tight while drifting into sublime freedoms. “What time signature is this?” wonders the saxophonist, introducing Ryan Porter’s composition “The Psalmist” “86/5? 20/3?” . Of course, they play it perfectly anyway. Introducing “Truth”, Washington tells us, like a ringmaster announcing a death-defying trapeze performance: “On this song you will hear five melodies played simultaneously.” It’s a breathtaking highwire act.
Best of all is “The Rhythm Changes”, which Kamasi introduces with a speech about the power of integration versus the temptations of separation. “People are not to be tolerated,” he beams, his smile a match for the London sun, “they are to be celebrated.” The track feels like the anthem the long hot summer of 2018 has been building to, like some dream collaboration between Marvin Gaye and John Coltrane. It even manages to stall the sunset. Before he plays “The Space Traveller’s Lullaby” Washington says, “I was hoping it’d be dark for this tune, but I guess the sun is digging the music, too.”
“Fists Of Fury” ends things on a more urgent note. “Our time as victims is over,” declaims Quinn, with glorious matter-offactness. “We will no longer ask for justice/
Instead we will take our retribution.” It’s a welcome reminder that for all the ways they carry echoes of earlier generations of jazz pioneers, this band is as rooted in the modern US black experience as Donald Glover’s Atlanta or Kendrick Lamar’s To
Pimp A Butterfly. On tonight’s evidence they may be the most thrilling players in the scene.