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KAMASI WASHINGTON Bringing abstract jazz and creative funk to the mainstream
‘The album seems to be resonating with people,’ says Kamasi Washington, affi rming his happiness with the success of his second studio record Heaven and Earth. ‘The message is we each have a stake in this world, and we have the power to make it what we want it to be. It’s about different sides of reality: how you live on the inside greatly affects the world on the outside.’ Educated in ethnomusicology at UCLA, he played for over a decade in the jazz world – along with the occasional rock session – until mainstream demand for his services suddenly leapt after he appeared on Flying Lotus’ You’re Dead! in 2014. Within a year, his fi rst album proper, The Epic, was out, and he had guested on big releases by Kendrick Lamar, Run the Jewels, Thundercat and St Vincent.
Born in Los Angeles in 1981, Washington has been ‘That’s how it works, it doesn’t just happen
playing drums since he was three, piano since he was fi ve, and clarinet since he was nine. By the age of 12 his saxophonist father had introduced him to the music of Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers, with saxophonist Wayne Shorter his favourite player. ‘Saxophone’s kind of related to clarinet, so I switched over,’ he says. overnight,’ says Washington who feels his ‘arrival’ coincides with a return for jazz. ‘Yeah, I think people are searching for that too, but there’s jazz within hip hop, funk, R&B, rock’n’roll. Right now it feels like people are really open to it; the freedoms, the abstract side of it.’ (David Pollock) ■ Barrowland, Glasgow, Wed 22 May.
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1 Apr–31 May 2019 THE LIST 89