By Melina Paris, Music Columnist
Epic, the title of tenor saxophonist Kamasi Washington’s latest album, is just that.
The three-volume album, which Washington composed and arranged, is a journey through his musical life. Each disc with its own title describes a place in time on his journey.
A musician on the rise, Washington has contributed to two acclaimed albums over the past year, Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly and Flying Lotus’ You’re Dead!
Washington was asked by Flying Lotus to record on his label, Brainfeeder. So he called members of his band, The West Coast Get Down, to make the album. The band features two drummers: Ronald Bruner Jr. and Tony Austin. It also has two bass players: Thundercat and Miles Mosley, and it has pianist Cameron Graves, keyboardist Brandon Coleman and three horn players, including trombonist Ryan Porter. There are two lead vocalists: Dwight Trible and Patrice Quinn. The album also includes a 20-piece choir and a 32-piece string section.
Washington recently spoke about Epic in an interview with Random Lengths News.
Melina Paris: What was the inspiration for this album?
Kamasi Washington: Half of the band (on Epic) and I grew up and played together since we were very little, but we never actually recorded that whole band together. So I wanted that band for the record. They each had stuff to record too. So we decided to record all of each other’s music during the month we were in the studio. For me, I was trying to capture a good quality studio recording of our sound and style when we play together at gigs around LA.
I also like writing for large ensembles and choirs and always wanted to add those two elements to what I was doing. It was hard. I wanted to record how the band moves very organically. Then, bringing the choir in around it brought those two worlds together.
MP: Why did you name each disc, “The Plan,” “The Glorious Tale” and “The Historic Repetition”?
KW: I had a dream I came up with when I was working on the album but there is also a more literal meaning.
I wrote a lot of these songs when I was younger. The songs on The Plan came from a time in my life when I was cultivating myself as a musician and pushing towards a place. It also links to a part of my life when I was in high school and my studies were all in jazz. But, when I came out of high school my first gig wasn’t a jazz gig, it was with Snoop (Dogg). It was kind of a curveball for me. I love Snoop and was happy to get the gig but it just wasn’t what I expected.
I went on the road with Snoop and it was interesting. It was mostly a jazz band but it was led by these producers who all came with this West Coast hip-hop producer perspective. They never asked us to play anything that was technically difficult. It was all pretty simple chords and like three or four notes, but the way they wanted us to play, it was so particular. They heard every nuance of exactly what they wanted us to play. We had to really listen to the music, and the more I listened to it, the more I had a detailed ear. Like listening to music through a microscope. So then I had that mentality and brought it to my band (who got it) and when we started playing jazz together that didn’t turn off. All of a sudden, we’re playing music where there’s hundreds of notes but I was still listening with these super detailed ears. I’m hearing every nuance of how someone is playing as well as focusing on my playing so it added a third dimension. It was a blessing in disguise.
The Plan was what I did in preparation for my life, then The Glorious Tale was my actual life. I was playing the music that I was taught in high school, then you have your life go on and it becomes something different. It’s actually beautiful if you look at it that way. The culmination of my sound comes from all these gigs that I got to do and that’s what my sound is about.
The other part is half the guys in my band’s parents are musicians. So there’s a certain cycle, a loop that I didn’t want to have happen. I felt like if I knew what happened I could keep myself from getting caught in this loop or The Historic Repetition.
MP: What you see in that cycle?
KW: My dad was really deep into jazz in high school and when he came out, the opportunities weren’t there in jazz. That’s probably an LA thing. I think LA jazz just got overlooked. They were in the cycle of playing for different artists. They didn’t really push their own music outside of that, at least not when they were young. That’s where we changed the cycle a little bit.
It’s a form of self expression. While it’s great to play with other people and help them and realize their musical vision, if you’re going to be a musician, you need to also work on your own vision and make it a priority. That was part of the repetition we are trying to change. The record has a lot of references to that past and for me it was like inhabiting that. History is going to repeat itself but in what way is it going to repeat itself? It depends on how knowledgeable we are.
MP: LA jazz, where do you see it right now?
KW: LA jazz has always been only in LA. The boom hasn’t really stepped far out of LA. If you talk to people from South Central, they’re very connected to the LA jazz scene. Even Kendrick (Lamar) has been connected to the LA jazz scene for years. So it’s all been musically very rich, very full but it’s a big city, so it can feel a little diluted. LA is bigger than New York but if you take it all and condense it you realize there’s a lot of musicians and a lot going on here. The cool thing now is because of artists like Kendrick and Flying Lotus, everyone is looking at LA and giving it a fair amount of attention. The world is open for young players now. The scene is going to grow actually.
MP: Anything you would like to add?
KW: If people keep their minds open, they can discover some cool things. I hope that continues. It’s pretty cool to meet lot of people that don’t normally listen to jazz who gave my album a chance and just listened to it. That’s a cool place for the world to be in, where we’re not so stuck on what we’re told. Music is already blended, it exists on its own. We just add words to it. If you call it James Brown jazz it wouldn’t change how funky it is, or if you call it John Coltrane funk it wouldn’t diminish how intense or how harmonically dense it is. Music lives outside of those terms, I think people are coming to that realization.
You can see Washington on July 25, for his show “65-92: The Rhythm Changes but the Struggle Remains” at Grand Performances, before he embarks on a world tour. He plans to come back to Los Angeles with another show around the holidays.