Kamasi Washington is in many ways the most significant jazz musician of the 21st century. Alongside figures such as Norah Jones, Gregory Porter, Jacob Collier and, more recently, Laufey, the 43-year-old Los Angeles tenor saxophonist, composer and bandleader has proven to be an unlikely celebrity and catalyst, a free spirit reaching out across genre and generation to jolt jazz back into the popular arena – to save it, some might argue, from itself.
Beginning with his monumentally ambitious 2015 triple album, The Epic – a near three-hour opus that features a 10-strong jazz collective, 20-member choir and 32-piece orchestra – Washington’s maximalist mix of spiritual jazz, cosmic fusion, catchy melodies, modal grooves, bravura soloing, gospel voices and cinematic strings has recast contemporary jazz (much as some of his counterparts have in London) as many-sided urban music that is vital, accessible and community-based – while looking outwards and beyond.
Connections to such similarly open-eared and era-defining hip-hop forces as Kendrick Lamar and Flying Lotus; irresistibly exuberant live performances at major festivals such as Glastonbury and Coachella, and even a night at the BBC Proms (Washington plays Dublin’s 3Olympia on October 23rd and, I can reveal, Cork Opera House on October 25th); and his newfound position as a potent symbol of black positivity and pride have since rendered Washington at once near universally acclaimed and critically untouchable.
That air of authority and invincibility stares out from the cover of Fearless Movement, his first album in six years – and not just because, with his thick beard, freestyle Afro and ceremonial robes, medallions, rings and cane, Washington increasingly resembles an Afrofuturist warrior or shaman. It permeates the music too.
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A relatively modest, 86-minute, 12-track double album, Fearless Movement is somehow both more and less than The Epic and its similarly expansive follow-up, Heaven and Earth. Gone are the orchestra and choir; very much present are some of Washington’s long-standing collaborators – the bass wizard Thundercat, the altoist Terrace Martin and the soulful vocalist Patrice Quinn – and guests who include André 3000 on flute, George Clinton on vocals, and the rappers Taj and Ras Austin. Even in this truncated state, however, the ensemble still mostly sounds immense and multilayered; the kaleidoscopic arrangements, dense polyrhythms and breakneck solos are sprawling, frenetic and often exhausting, an aural equivalent of Los Angeles. It’s like being a passenger in a speeding high-performance supercar: there’s a lot to take in.
“Dance, movement and expressing your spirit through your body” were apparently on Washington’s mind while he was making the record: “There is a tender proposition behind Fearless Movement – we’re all born elastic, and if you don’t use it, you lose it,” according to the blurb. For a musician whose all-embracing, more-is-more aesthetic seems to employ almost everything at hand, sometimes to excess, there seems little fear of that.
[ Jacob Collier: ‘Music was my second language’Opens in new window ]
