Heaven and Earth (Young Turks)
Kamasi Washington
Released June 22, 2018
The Guardian Highest Rated Jazz Albums of All Time
YouTube: https://music.youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_kpup7fMtRdqAkAQfcBWBOay93TlIzKNP4
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/album/5mG7tl4EW2xrTy5rI8BgGL?si=7eA7HxXZS06WMaDjiPSjKQ
About:
Kamasi Washington‘s idea of heaven is the world he creates and retreats to in his mind. The jazz torchbearer’s double album Heaven and Earth, out today, represents that inward heaven versus his outward reality on Earth.
Growing up in Los Angeles, Washington was known in school for playing renditions of Boyz II Men and Jodeci songs on his clarinet. Now, he’s mentioned in the same breathe as rapper Kendrick Lamar — Washington’s saxophone skills can be heard on Lamar’s 2015 album To Pimp A Butterfly — as major players in a larger celebration of black culture.
“I feel like we’re in that turning point right now,” Washington says. “It’s been a long time coming. It’s weird, it’s like culturally we’ve been appreciated in a certain sense, but not necessarily celebrated. And now we’re going to celebrate the culture.”
For Heaven and Earth, Washington tapped into creative escapes in the form of the video game Street Fighter and movie Fist of Fury, both of which found their way into song titles (“Fists of Fury”, “Street Fighter Mas”) on the album. Washington tells NPR’s David Greene about the movie’s influence and explains the deeper sentiments expressed in his music. Read the edited interview highlights below and listen to their full conversation at the audio link.
On the meaning of “Fists of Fury”
At a certain point, when there’s a barrier between you and what’s right, eventually you have to decide you’re not going to allow yourself to be subjugated. For me, that song is that decision and recognition of the fact that I see what’s happening in the world, and I’m no longer going to wait for someone else to fix these things that are happening in the world. I’m going to do it myself.
On his 2017 LP Harmony of Difference
Harmony of Difference to me was an opportunity to celebrate one another. And “Fists of Fury” is an opportunity for us to protect one another. If you look up, and you see that all of a sudden the world is really coming down on people with brown hair, I would think the people with black hair would look at that and go, “Well, that could be me and so, I shouldn’t stand for that any more than those people with brown hair stand for it.” Harmony of Difference is about appreciating the fact we have people with brown hair, black hair, blonde hair, green, blue.
On empathy This precious thing of empathy and love and understanding is something we have to hold and appreciate and protect. That’s why I was saying Harmony of Difference and “Fists of Fury,” they’re together. It’s like, “I understand, and I see who you are, and I love who you are, and I love what you are even though it’s not what I am. I’m also going to protect you, and you’re going to protect me. We’re going to work to make the world what we want it to be.”
Track Listing:
Disc 1
1. Fists of Fury (Joseph Koo / James Wong) 9:43
2. Can You Hear Him (Kamasi Washington) 8:54
3. Hub-Tones (Freddie Hubbard) 9:10
4. Connections (Kamasi Washington) 8:24
5. Tiffakonkae (Kamasi Washington) 9:24
6. The Invincible Youth (Kamasi Washington) 9:53
7. Testify (Patrice Quinn / Kamasi Washington) 5:44
8. One of One (Kamasi Washington) 9:50
Disc 2
1. The Space Traveler’s Lullaby (Kamasi Washington) 10:31
2. Vi Lua Vi Sol (Kamasi Washington) 11:07
3. Street Fighter Mas (Kamasi Washington) 5:58
4. Songs for the Fallen (Kamasi Washington) 12:41
5. Journey (Patrice Quinn / Kamasi Washington) 8:51
6. The Psalmist (Ryan Porter) 7:18
7. Show Us the Way (Kamasi Washington) 6:51
8. Will You Sing (Kamasi Washington) 10:13
Personnel:
Kamasi Washington: tenor saxophone
Ricky Washington: tenor saxophone
Terrace Martin: alto saxophone
Dontae Winslow: trumpet
Chris Gray: trumpet
Ryan Porter: trombone
Cameron Graves: piano, keyboards, organ
Jameal Dean: piano
Brandon Coleman: keyboards
Carlitos Del Puerto: upright bass, electric bass
Miles Mosely: upright bass, electric bass
Stephen “Thundercat” Bruner: electric bass
Gabe Noel: upright bass, electric bass
Tony Austin: drums
Ronald Bruner Jr: drums
Robert Miller: drums
Jonathan Pinson: drums
Robert “Sput” Searight: drums
Chris “Daddy” Dave: drums
Kahil Cummings: percussion
Allakoi Peete: percussion
Patrice Quinn: lead vocals
Dwight Trible: lead vocals
Steve Wayne: lead vocals
Matachi Nwosu: lead vocals
Orchestra
Paul Cartwright: violin
Jen Simone: violin
Yvette Devereaux: violin
Martino: violin
Ray Suen: violin
Yvette Holzwarth: violin
Rocio Marron: violin
Reiko Nakano: violin
Molly Rogers: viola
Britanny Cotto: viola
Chad Jackson: viola
Tom Lea: viola
Morgan Matadero: viola
Caroline Buckman: viola
Landon Jones: viola
Peter Jacobson: cello
Ginger Murphy: cello
Adrienne Woods: cello
Dominic Thiroux: double bass
Amy Sanchez: French horn
Laura Brenes: French horn
Greg Martin: oboe
Tracy Wannomae: clarinet
Rickey Washington: flute
Amber Joy Wyman: bassoon
Marc T. Bolin: tuba
Choir (vocals): Doctor Dawn Norfleet, Mashica Winslowdynasty, Thalma De Freitas, Taylor Graves, Nia Andrews, Sonnet Simmons, Jackie Fiske, Patrice Quinn, Amaya Washington, Dustin Warren, Steven Wayne, Cameron Graves, Angelo Johnson
Recorded at Electro-Vox Recording; Henson Recording Studio; Stagg Street Studio
Produced by Kamasi Washington
Recorded by Michael Harris, Tony Austin and Benjamin Tierney
Mixed by Russell Elevado
Mastered by Kevin “Daddy Kev” Moo
Photography by Mike Park
Review:
Ten years ago, British saxophone legend Courtney Pine painted a sobering picture of life as a modern British jazz musician in an interview with the Guardian. For all the study involved in becoming one, most jazz musicians had no hope of making a living, unless they were one of the clean-cut vocalists content to ring-a-ding-ding their way through the great American songbook to the delight of Michael Parkinson: you could fully expect your weekends to be spent not exploring the outer limits of improvisation, but playing in a wedding band to make ends meet. “An incredible sale in this day and age is 3,000 copies,” he lamented.
Here was evidence of how modern jazz lurks on the very fringes of mainstream public consciousness. You could fill a book with ways jazz has influenced rock and pop – from post-punk’s skronk to the samples of hip-hop and trip-hop – but apart from the aforementioned ring-a-ding-dingers, no serious jazz musician has really crossed over to huge mainstream success since the 1970s, the era of Miles Davis’s Bitches Brew and the Mahavishnu Orchestra, of the super-smooth George Benson and Grover Washington Jr, and of Keith Jarrett’s Köln Concert wafting around in the background of dinner parties.
All of which makes Kamasi Washington faintly extraordinary. His last London gig was not at the intimate Servant Jazz Quarters, but the Roundhouse, a venue at which the audience was clearly not comprised of longstanding jazz buffs. He records for Young Turks – home of the xx, FKA twigs and Sampha – and is reviewed in the kind of places jazz artists seldom get a mention. It all seems to have been achieved without pragmatic compromise. The record that catapulted him from self-releasing CDs in amateurish home-made sleeves, 2015’s The Epic, was a three-hour-long concept album.
Various theories exist as to how Washington has pulled this off, all of which are supported by The Epic’s full-length follow-up, Heaven and Earth (by Washington’s standards, this is a work of economy, clocking in at a mere two-and-a-half hours). One is that the time is simply right: his guest appearances on Kendrick Lamar’s epochal To Pimp a Butterfly didn’t merely elevate his profile, they established him as “the jazz voice of Black Lives Matter”, in a grand tradition of jazz as black protest.
Heaven and Earth frequently appears to be a furious state-of-America address. You can hear portentous anger in everything from its track titles – Street Fighter Mas, Song for the Fallen – to its astonishing opening cover of the theme from 1972 kung fu movie Fists of Fury, which arrives not merely extended to 10 minutes, but with additional lyrics: “Our time as victims is over / We will no longer ask for justice.” Washington’s sound tends to the maximalist – he is not a man afraid of breaking out the orchestra and choir – but on the album’s closing tracks Show Us the Way and Will You Sing it doesn’t feel dense so much as tumultuous, the former heaving and yawing behind a high-drama choral arrangement, the latter calmer, but with its ostensibly positive message of empowerment and change underscored by noticeable darkness. It sounds more like storm clouds gathering than sunlight breaking through.
Another theory is that his sound is audibly rooted in the kind of old jazz texts that non-jazz buffs tend to recognise, the kind of thing that gets collected on hipster-friendly compilations released by Soul Jazz and Strut: the spiritual jazz of John Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders, Sun Ra’s big band Afrofuturism, the political funk of Archie Shepp’s Attica Blues, the synth experiments of Herbie Hancock and Joe Zawinul. They’re all present here, further smoothed with ample references to early 70s soul and funk, not least the ambitious, orchestrated psychedelia of Rotary Connection. But what’s striking about Heaven and Earth is how expansive and ever-changing it is, its musical focus shifting constantly from lavish grandiosity to perspiration-soaked Latin rhythms to concentrated improvisation, from the edge of chaos to the lushly melodic – sometimes within the same track, as on The Invincible Youth. It never lingers in one place long enough for its running time to seem gruelling. Instead, Heaven and Earth feels writhingly alive and passionate, angrily of the moment but inclusive. If describing Heaven and Earth as “jazz for people who don’t like jazz” sounds pejorative, it isn’t meant to be. Rather, it’s simply to indicate that on Heaven and Earth, Washington continues to explore a sweet spot between artistry and approachability. Whether his success will lead audiences to further explore music that usually exists on the fringes is an interesting question. What is more certain is the quality and accessibility of his own music.
Alexis Petridis (The Guardian)
