I heard Kamasi Washington last night at White Eagle Hall in Jersey City. He rocked the place. He had an eight piece bank with jazz instrumentation: tenor sax (himself), flute (his father, Ricky), trombone, vocal, keyboard, upright bass (the ferocious Miles Mosley), and two drummers. But the time, the time was anchored in jazz but owed a lot to pop forms, including rock and roll. The music was often anthemic if character.
From a profile in the NYTimes Magazine in January of 2016:
Washington is no less sensitive to the spirits of the past than Wynton Marsalis and the so-called Young Lions who burst onto the scene in the early 1980s, playing a somewhat updated version of 1960s-era small-group jazz in Brooks Brothers suits. Marsalis wanted to revive the fundamentals of blues and swing, which he believed jazz musicians had forgotten during the 1970s, an era of avant-garde and fusion experimentation. Washington, by contrast, conjures the ghosts of 1960s and ’70s black-consciousness jazz, of the ecstatic, expressive Coltrane and his successors.
It would be unfair, and a little silly, to ask whether Washington might be the next Coltrane. In any case, there’s room for only one Coltrane in the theology of jazz. But with his overt spiritualism and his humble bearing, Washington has reawakened the widespread longing for a Coltrane-like figure who might lead jazz out of the desert of obscurity and restore its spiritual purpose. He is not the first such figure — Pharoah Sanders, Albert Ayler and David S. Ware have been cast as prophetic messengers in the wake of Coltrane’s death in 1967 — but he is the first to come along in some time. Stranger still, he comes from a city that few people even associate with jazz.
Of course the church:
Throughout the 1980s, Rickey Washington [Kamasi's father] led a Christian jazz band, which Bruner joined after giving up secular music. When Kamasi first expressed a desire to play, his father sent him to church. ‘‘It’s the best place to learn,’’ Rickey said. ‘‘You play every week, and you’ve got to play a groove. It doesn’t come any other way but with a groove. They’re clapping on two and four, and you’re moving to the music. If you listen to Kamasi, you know what the groove is, because it’s right in his body.’’
I went to hear Washington play gospel a few days later at a Nigerian evangelical church. The stage was bathed in pink and purple lighting worthy of a Prince show. Hundreds of parishioners, overwhelmingly Nigerian, many in African ceremonial clothes, swayed to gospel songs made faster and funkier by Nigerian highlife beats. Washington’s solos were modest in length, as befit a sideman, but he kept his big, preacherly sound. Whenever he played, the music came into stirring focus, and his flowing African robes gave him the air of a griot or medicine man.
His first album, "The Epic":
That sense of home, of African-American pride and identity, reverberates throughout ‘‘The Epic.’’ It’s not just the tributes to his grandmother and great-grandmother, or the concluding hymn to Malcolm X, which incorporates Ossie Davis’s eulogy as well as one of Malcolm’s speeches. It’s the album’s soaring panorama of black American musical history, from gospel and blues to jazz, doo-wop and funk, offered as a celebration of black beauty in the face of adversity. Its sound is particularly evocative of the early 1970s, when Marvin Gaye, Curtis Mayfield and Stevie Wonder were composing their own epics and jazz musicians like Max Roach were playing spirituals with gospel choirs. The Afro-futurist cover of ‘‘The Epic,’’ too, suggests an early ’70s LP: a picture of Washington in a black dashiki against an interstellar backdrop, saxophone in hand.
That blend of rebellious intent and retro self-fashioning is hardly unique to Washington. It permeates the cultural renaissance spawned by Black Lives Matter, a movement that has combined Black Power nostalgia with an exuberant faith in the revolutionary potential of technology and social media. [...] The writer Greg Tate, who calls Washington the ‘‘jazz voice of Black Lives Matter,’’ told me that his music offers ‘‘a healing force, a place of regeneration when you’re trying to deal with the trauma of being black in America.’’
From Coltrane to Snoop Dogg:
In 1999, Washington began studying at U.C.L.A. with the composer Gerald Wilson, who had written charts for Duke Ellington and Ella Fitzgerald. But in his first year, Marlon Williams, Snoop Dogg’s musical director, invited Washington to go on tour with the rapper. A former guitarist in the black rock band Fishbone, Williams had already recruited Washington’s friend Terrace Martin to put together Snoop’s horn section, and Martin immediately called Washington. ‘‘I was a big Snoop Dogg fan, and I knew the repertoire — I mean, this was dope,’’ Washington recalled. Although ‘‘it was cool to make money,’’ financial considerations were far less compelling than the promise of adventure. ‘‘I had never been on the road,’’ he said. ‘‘I’d been to New York and D.C. once, so it was a chance to go on tour. I was young and on a full scholarship, so I hadn’t even gotten to the point of thinking about the economics of the music business.’’ Washington continued his studies with Wilson, but he received an equally important education with Professor Snoop.
At the point when Washington got the call, he had been spending most of his time trying to master harmonically demanding songs like Coltrane’s ‘‘Giant Steps.’’ Now his job was to play apparently simple riffs to ‘‘line up with the groove.’’ Playing those riffs, however, was tougher than it looked: Hip-hop was a miniaturist art of deceptive simplicity. ‘‘When you play jazz in school, you talk about articulation, but it’s a very light conversation,’’ he said. ‘‘The question was about what you were playing, not how you were playing it. But when I was playing with Snoop, what I was playing was pretty obvious — anyone with ears could figure it out. The question was how to play it, with the right articulation and timing and tone.’’ Snoop didn’t come to rehearsals or even really explain what he wanted. ‘‘It was all very unspoken. You had to use your intuition to figure out why it didn’t sound right. We had to have it right before he got there, because if it was wrong, he’d veto it, and we’d have to just sit there.’’
Snoop was particularly demanding when it came to the placement of notes in relation to the beat, and Washington struggled at first to hear the beat the way Snoop did. [...]
That mellow, West Coast inclusiveness is another pointed contrast between Washington and the young Wynton Marsalis, who once declared, ‘‘There is nothing sadder than a jazz musician playing funk.’’ When Washington and his trombonist, Ryan Porter, trade riffs, they make no secret of their love of Maceo Parker and Fred Wesley, two of the horn men in the James Brown band.
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