ALBUM OF THE WEEK 24 June-30 June 2018
Well Heaven & Earth does not disappoint at all and I know that there is a lot of hype. I am not going to compare this latest album from Kamasi Washington with The Epic. That would be fatuous.
Actually there is very little new here another reason why its success is also so remarkable. For a long time I suppose we have all looked for innovation as the key factor in jazz. The innovative thing here is the way musicianship is embraced and allowed space.
What I find slightly curious is how and why Kamasi has connected with the wider non-jazz audience mainly because this is a proper jazz album, the sort of album that usually does not register a flicker beyond hard core fans.
Yes it is very good and as a saxophonist Washington is first rate but no better or worse than many jazz saxophonists who are successful in jazz but do not appeal to a wider public.
Rather than dumb down the jazz head in Washington triumphs and expresses itself at considerable length (each track is like an album!) at the centre of a band who read his thoughts and he reads theirs. Rolling Stone have wrongly deemed the album “A sprawling, eclectic set that ranges from the slightly tepid to the truly transcendent'”. There is nothing tepid here, try Summer Horns and its sequel for slightly tepid and I am being very kind.
The most encouraging thing is that this is an album with a whole lot of jazz content. Purists cannot claim otherwise. ‘Tiffakonkae’ if pressed is my favourite, the blissed out sense you get from a McCoy Tyner record although Washington does not sound anything like Coltrane, his sound is more a cross between Gato Barbieri and Pharoah Sanders and yet that is imprecise, his sense of attack and phrasing completely his own.
The improvising goes somewhere, it is not simply paraphrasing or a limited palette of vamps and modalities. The audio production is radically different to what we usually hear on jazz records, it is somehow more tactile and immersive so the album is more than the sum of its parts because that adds to the enjoyment. There is a succinctness at play arrived at paradoxically by verbosity because there is a lot to say and set free. The method in Black Panther year is maximalist and a fantasy and so are the rewards. Sheer escapism, oh, and Heaven & Earth is about love. When was the last time that happened so convincingly? SG
Live this summer: Wilderness.