Kamasi Washington
When asked to categorize his music, Kamasi Washington’s answer is immediate: “jazz.” “I’m not averse to categories,” he clarifies, “but I am averse to letting categories limit the music.”
Letting a variety of traditions influence, but not dictate, the terms of his music has placed the 36-year-old tenor saxophonist, along with a likeminded group of friends from his native Los Angeles, at the forefront of a sort of jazz renaissance. These are the musicians-arrangers-producers—Washington, Terrace Martin, Ronald Bruner Jr. and Thundercat, to name a few—that gave Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly its winsome jazz flavor.
Washington first came to jazz by way of hip-hop. “I was really into West Coast hip-hop, especially gangster rap,” he recalls. “There was something about [drummer] Art Blakey’s feel that has a similar groove to it. That’s what brought me into the music.” The sample-heavy hip-hop of A Tribe Called Quest also drew Washington deeper with elusive bits of jazz at its most tantalizing.
Washington studied ethnomusicology at UCLA, where he gained an appreciation for the diverse world of human music making. He cites North Indian Classical, Javanese Gamelan, Irish Celtic and Native American music as well as traditions from Zimbabwe, Nigeria and Ghana as leaving a mark, adding: “Ethnomusicology really opened my mind to how powerful and universal music is.”
Washington’s tenure at UCLA also put him in direct contact with heavyweights from the history of jazz, particularly trumpeter, composer and arranger Gerald Wilson, drummer Billy Higgins and guitarist Kenny Burrell. Guitarist Burrell, a Distinguished Professor in the Departments of Music and Ethnomusicology at UCLA, began his recording career in the early 1950s, when 78-rpm records were still the dominant medium. Appearing on Burrell’s 2004 album, The Ralph J. Bunche Suite, places Washington in a discography that boasts albums with John Coltrane, Dizzy Gillespie and the aforementioned Art Blakey.
In Washington’s words, Burrell sounds half-jazzman, half-Zen master. “Kenny was very wise,” he recalls. “He asked me more questions than I asked him. In explaining what you’re doing, you start to see your own path more clearly. Kenny understands that music is a personal journey, not something that someone can tell you how to do. He pushed his students inward.” This immersion in the jazz tradition and study of non-Western musical cultures continued to peaceably ferment with Washington’s love of rap, and he was tapped to tour with Snoop Dogg during his sophomore year at UCLA.
“That’s when I really started to study hip-hop,” he says. “I had listened to a lot of hip-hop before, but I had just enjoyed it. I didn’t study it. So much of what hip-hop is about is a deep understanding of rhythm, feel, placement and timing. Once I understood that it’s not just what I play, but where I play it, that really affected the way I think about and hear music.” This deep study solidified producers such as Battlecat and J Dilla as well as rappers like Snoop Dogg and Dr. Dre as central influences on Washington’s artistic vision.
In 2015, Washington released his first major label album, The Epic. The album resulted from a month’s immersion in a studio with friends that yielded a collective 190 songs—45 of which were Kamasi’s—17 of which were spread over The Epic’s three disks under the thematic divisions of “The Plan,” “The Glorious Tale” and “The Historical Repetition.” His unrelenting adherence to artistic vision also flouted a conventional rule of monomaniacal success seekers: All the tunes are well in excess of radio play’s requisite three-minute-ish limitation. Despite the audacious ambition, or because of it, The Epic was a mainstay on “Best Album of 2015” lists and debuted at number one on iTunes’ jazz chart (not to mention going gold in Germany).
Washington kicks off his North American tour in Milwaukee, having recently released the follow up to The Epic, an EP entitled Harmony of Difference. In form, the EP differs markedly from its predecessor. Five of its six tracks lend themselves in length to radio play. The sound, however, will please fans of The Epic. Washington originally composed Harmony of Difference for the art world’s prestigious Whitney Biennial. “I wrote it as a celebration of diversity,” he says. “We lose sight of how beautiful it is to experience someone else’s perspective, but the world is a collection of difference.” The sixth track of the EP is itself a collection of difference, overlaying the previous five tracks like a hip-hop sample on overdrive.
Despite its suitability for serving as mood-perfecting background music, Washington’s music belongs on a stage with a large, open-eared audience ready to give itself over to the music. Of his gigging philosophy, Washington says, “When we play live, we try to create an experience that’s unique to each show. We try to connect with the city we’re in, the people, the venue. It’s about creating something for that very moment. And so it’s different every night.”
Kamasi Washington headlines at Turner Hall Ballroom on Tuesday, Nov. 7 at 8 p.m.
