“HE’S ONE OF THE FUNNIEST PEOPLE I KNOW” BRANDON COLEMAN
ROUND midnight most evenings, Kamasi Washington will sit down at the piano in the living room of his home in Inglewood, Los Angeles, and begin to compose. Despite being synonymous with the saxophone, he only ever writes on piano, which goes some way towards explaining the harmonic richness of his music. “The piano is so much more versatile as far as being able to play the different parts and hear the song in its entirety,” he explains. “I played piano before I played saxophone, so it was always the logical choice. The saxophone is the racehorse, but the piano is the workhorse.”
He never tends to get much written during the day. “When the world gets quieter, it’s easier to focus. There’s rarely something I have to do at one in the morning.” But there’s another reason for his nocturnal schedule: lately his piano has been monopolised by a different, smaller pair of hands. Born during lockdown in 2020, his daughter has already shown aptitude for the family business, even writing one of the songs on his new album, Fearless Movement. “She’s very musical,” beams Washington. “She would get up every morning and go play piano. Sometimes she wouldn’t let me get on! Normally she’d play a bit more random, but one time she was playing this melody over and over again. Luckily, technology’s cool – pulled my phone out and recorded it. Then I started messin’ around with it, slowed it down, added some chords to it. And it made the record!”
The simple, rousing chorus of “Asha The First” – along with some funkier rhythms and a clutch of star cameos – helps to make Kamasi Washington’s fifth solo album his most accessible to date. But it’s still a lavish and expansive piece of work. Washington hasn’t become the most celebrated saxophonist of his generation by crossing over, dumbing down or condensing his vision into Spotify-sized snippets. Instead, he’s flourished as a radical maximalist, making music that’s vast in sound and scope, without losing sight of where he’s from. Indeed, at the heart of each record is the same tight-knit core of musicians, most of whom have been together since their teens, jamming in the garage between bouts of Street Fighter.
“I feel like his music reflects his personality,” says keyboardist Brandon Coleman, who first knew Washington as the linchpin of South Central LA’S formidable multi-school jazz band, “comprised of all the baddest musicians in innercity schools”. Later they roomed together as students, playing church gigs on the weekend. “Kamasi’s one of the funniest people I know. He can talk to anybody about anything. He’s a genuine person, just a sincere individual. [With the music] his intentions are to create something magical, something unique. And he always stays true to that, even in moments where everyone else is trying to project another idea. He has a very clear stance on what he wants.”
“We end up having these very ethereal conversations,” adds long-serving bassist Miles Mosley, another alumnus of the multi-school band. “Sometimes there are very high-level theory discussions about chord structures and harmonies. We will have a lunchbreak-length conversation about E flat minor 13 with the sharp 11! But generally speaking we’re looking for a feeling, and he’s looking for the sandbox to be right. We’ve been making music together for a long time and he composes his music knowing the arsenal of players he’s going to have at his behest. So he derives a lot of joy from just seeing what happens.”
EVEN on a Zoom call at 11am on a Monday morning, Kamasi Washington looks as majestic as his music sounds. He’s dressed in a green striped dashiki, accessorised with a large, bell-like Indian necklace that could double as a percussion instrument. On his hands he sports a number of supersized rings, including an impressive topaz-coloured design in the shape of a Mayan pyramid. Behind him on the wall, above a vase filled with wildflowers, is a vibrant yellow abstract painting.
Washington has been surrounded by art for as long as he can remember. Not only is his father Rickey a jazz musician, but he grew up in Leimert Park, which he describes as “the hub for African-american art in Los Angeles”. It was not uncommon to spot members of alternative hip-hop mainstays The Pharcyde and Freestyle Fellowship rubbing shoulders with free jazz legends like Billy Higgins and Horace Tapscott. “It was definitely a very artistically nutritious place. Not just musicians – there were visual artists, dancers, poets, people making clothes, scholars walking around who’d drop some historic knowledge on you. Everything was there.”
Picking up his dad’s saxophone at the age of 13, Washington was soon muscling his way into jam sessions at local hotspots The World Stage (founded by Higgins and performance poet Kamau Daáood) and 5th Street Dicks. “The jam session at The World Stage started at around 8.30 or something. And then you had 5th Street Dicks that started at 2! So that’s where it got kinda heavy.” Were the regulars always welcoming of precocious young upstarts? “Oh yeah, it was like they were so happy to see that we existed. You’d hear stories and they would explain things, not just about music but also about life. It was a great ground for us. And we were learning from each other as well.”
Washington ran with a crew of talented young players – among them Coleman and Mosley,
pianist Cameron Graves, trombonist Ryan Porter and drummers Tony Austin and Ronald Bruner Jr – who still form the backbone of his band to this day. The local scene was so vibrant and inspiring that even when they started to pick up paid gigs with major artists, they’d always come straight back to Leimert to jam. “We would go on tour with Snoop and be playing stadiums with 60-70,000 people. And then, soon as we got off the plane, go directly to 5th Street Dicks and play for eight people – and put more energy into that!”
Washington talks of Leimert Park almost as a selfcontained musical oasis in a wider culture that didn’t really care about jazz. In many ways, he sees that as a positive: it meant that he and his friends weren’t motivated or corrupted by success, because breaking out of Leimert with their own music never seemed like an option. “There is a common Leimert Park sound and approach to music that is very honest, very individualised. You can hear it in people like Thundercat, Terrace [Martin] and myself, all the way back to Horace Tapscott and Gerald Wilson, everyone has this [attitude], like, ‘I’m gonna make the music that is coming from me.’ Because the world isn’t really looking at this anyway, so why not just make the music that you really love?”
Back at the turn of the millennium, jazz had “a bad reputation. You’d hear stuff like, ‘Jazz is the least popular music in the world and nobody likes it!’ The general sentiment was that jazz was either old or corny, that it was functional music. We were notorious for destroying those types of scenarios. Someone would want a band to play
for their cocktail hour and we’d bust into some Ornette Coleman.”
“By the time I got into jazz, it had been fairly well established as a museum artform,” says Mosley, who credits Washington with having the vision to see a bright future for jazz beyond the “conservationist phase” of the 1990s and 2000s. “Out of everybody in the clique, Kamasi is the one who thought that there were the least amount of rules, that everything always goes together as long as you mean it. I think we all recognised that jazz and blues and hip-hop and R&B – and Brazilian music, and music from the Caribbean – that’s all one thing. We put it together in some funky ways initially, but pretty soon we realised that there is no limit. If you can hear it, you can play it.”
Washington always felt their fresh, omnivorous, 21st-century take on jazz had the potential to reach a wider audience. Now calling themselves the West Coast Get Down, the group began to score gigs all across LA, from Venice to Hollywood. “We’d play anywhere, we had this feeling that our music was completely universal,” he says. “We started a residency at this place called the Piano Bar, which was more like a rock club. We played a gothic club called Bar Sinister, where people were walking around with vampire teeth. We were playing in places like Low End Theory, which was just DJS. The stage was so small that our drummers had to share their drums.”
It was at Low End Theory where Washington first met Flying Lotus, who eventually proposed releasing an album on his influential Brainfeeder label. Washington had already made a couple of self-released albums in his dad’s garage, burning the CD-RS himself, but this time he wanted to do it properly. “The Shack’s cool, but you could hear airplanes flying over and neighbours’ dogs barking and stuff like that.” So he and the rest of the West Coast Get Down decided to pool the money they’d saved from touring and session work and block-book a month at Kingsize Soundlabs in Echo Park.
They recorded for up to 18 hours a day, sometimes even sleeping in the studio, amassing “a ridiculous amount of music, 200 songs or something like that”. Even after divvying them up between their various projects, Washington ended up with an 17-track album of almost three hours in length. “I had a recurring dream where all the songs were the soundtrack to the dream, so I took that as a sign that I’m not supposed to cut this record down. I went back to Lotus and was like, ‘Man, I wanna put this whole thing up.’ He was like, ‘That’s crazy…’ We went back and forth a little bit on it, but in the end he said, ‘Alright, cool, let’s do it.’”
Released to global acclaim in 2015, The Epic became a testament to Washington’s ambition and abundant creativity, revitalising the entire jazz scene in the process. His appearance around the same time on Kendrick Lamar’s epochal To Pimp A Butterfly (alongside many of the West Coast Get Down crew) helped cement his status as the standard-bearer of a new jazz revolution. 2018 follow-up Heaven & Earth was even more opulent, making use of an orchestra and 13-piece choir. It couldn’t even be contained on eight sides of vinyl; breaking open the packaging revealed a whole additional disc of music, including wonderfully
languorous versions of “Ooh Child” and “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow”.
NEW album Fearless Movement is what Washington previously described to Uncut as a more “grounded” effort – although at 90 minutes long, it’s still a rich and detailed listen, with each track allowed to unfurl at its own stately pace, carving out a deep, contemplative space away from the incessant jabber of the online world. “I didn’t mean grounded as in simple,” he clarifies. “I meant grounded in the physical world. The Epic was very much inspired by imaginary places that exist in my mind, and this is definitely inspired by the world and life and reality.”
As a result, the horns are earthier, the drums livelier. “Rhythm was leading the way, where normally harmony would. Probably the biggest technical difference for me on this record was that I was hearing rhythms first, and then writing songs – or choosing songs, because I didn’t write all the songs.
That was another big part of it. On my other records, I wrote all the songs, and this one is more collaborative: Ryan Porter wrote a song, Brandon Coleman wrote a song, Ronald Bruner Jr wrote a song. And so I was more open in that sense, too.”
While West Coast Get Down singer Patrice Quinn remains a vital presence, Fearless Movement’s convivial spirit has drawn in a number of guest vocalists, including Taj and Ras Austin – sons of veteran South Bay rapper Ras Kass – whose playful rhymes are a callback to the jazzy ’90s hip-hop of Washington’s youth. There is a cover of Zapp’s “Computer Love”, discovered when tracing the roots of the West Coast G-funk sound. And all-time hero George Clinton even turns up on “Get Lit”, duelling with local Inglewood rapper D Smoke.
“I have my daughter now, and I’m playing her all the music that I loved,” Washington explains. “It’s like I got a new perspective on it, because it’s brand new for her – it brought back the joy of that music. So for me, this record
wasn’t only grounded, it was light. The sense of joy was the part of it that made me almost fearless about change.” He draws a parallel between artistic development and the rapid adjustments you need to make to your life as a new parent.
“It seems scary at first, but then you grow and become a more complete person. I had the idea that this record is kind of like navigating the maze of our minds, being comfortable with finding new spaces and not being afraid to move into uncharted waters.”
It doesn’t take much for Washington to get philosophical, and Fearless Movement perfectly mirrors this aspect of his personality. Just as it threatens to become a full-on party record with the appearance halfway through of Clinton and D Smoke, it veers back towards the long, blissful ruminations where Washington clearly feels most at ease.
A key song on the album’s more introspective second disc is “Lines In The Sand”, whose lyrics are a rousing plea for togetherness (“Lines in the sand/keep us so far from the dream”). Initially it was prompted by an argument within his family over Covid restrictions, which forced him to reflect more deeply on the madness of our increasingly partisan culture. “I was just like, ‘What is going on in the world that we’re just so divided?’ Everything is about choosing a side: I’m on this side, and you’re on that side, which means
I’m supposed to hate you, and you’re supposed to hate me. I’m supposed to think that everything you say is a lie, and everything you do is wrong, and you’re supposed to think the same thing about me. That’s a ridiculous, impossible place to exist in, you know?”
Which is all admirably utopian, but does this magnanimity extend to MAGA
loudmouths, who seem to view any vibrant celebration of black culture as a threat? “My answer is yes. Just because someone has been persuaded by a certain ideology that I don’t agree with, doesn’t make them hopeless, doesn’t make them a lost cause. The reality is, if they’re a lost cause, then the world is a lost cause. So I have to feel like I can communicate with some Trump supporter. If my reality makes more sense than theirs, then I should be able to use my words to explain it to them.”
Or your music… “Absolutely. Music is a sleeper, it speaks to you in a way that you don’t know you’re being spoken to. I feel like, if I can get you to listen to John Coltrane’s music and to fall in love with it, without telling you anything about what he thought about the world… I never met someone that loves John Coltrane’s music that has a hateful, bitter, bigoted spirit. I think that music cleanses us, it breaks down our defences and gives you a piece of who that musician is. And once you know someone, once you connect with them, it’s a little harder to hate them. That’s what that song is about, it’s about breaking down those lines, because they just serve to alienate us, and I don’t think that’s good for anyone.”
Mosley recounts an incident, midway through a long European tour, when Rickey Washington was pushed to the ground by a (white) bouncer who refused to believe he was part of the band. With tensions running high backstage, Kamasi convened a band meeting to agree on a way forward. Rather than escalate the violence or cancel the show completely, they all decided to take the stage and play just the one long song, “Truth”, with all the frustration and anger and forgiveness they could muster.
“To me, that was a moment that showed the character that Kamasi brings to his music,” says Mosley. “Sometimes the most beautiful things have to come out of disagreement. And that’s OK, you find you learn something about yourself, you learn something about the situation. Getting on that stage and being able to plug into that emotion, that’s what Kamasi is looking for all the time.”
Fearless Movement is due out on May 3 via Young
“MUSIC CLEANSES US, BREAKS DOWN DEFENCES” KAMASI WASHINGTON