Kamasi Washington

Kamasi Washington sits at the center of what, for lack of a cleaner term, can be called the contemporary jazz moment — the Los Angeles–rooted network of players, composers, and producers who spent the last fifteen years rebuilding the audience for large-ensemble, extended-form, spiritually-serious jazz in an era that the music-business narrative had written off. The work is worth describing. The records tend toward long-form — individual pieces that run past the ten-minute mark, albums that span multiple discs without apology. The ensembles are large. The arrangements braid modal jazz, gospel, hip-hop rhythm, West Coast funk, and orchestral writing. The whole project behaves as though the post-Coltrane spiritual-jazz tradition never went away. What is structurally important about the LA scene is that it produced a generation of players — Thundercat, Flying Lotus, Cameron Graves, Miles Mosley, Ronald Bruner Jr, Terrace Martin, Patrice Quinn — who are conversant in jazz, hip-hop, electronic, soul, and orchestral music to the same degree, and who treat the distinction between those categories as an artifact of previous decades. This is one of the few American music scenes operating now where musicians are trained inside the full tradition and allowed to use all of it. Nonesuch indexes Kamasi because serious American improvisational music has not disappeared. It has simply been consolidated inside a scene the mainstream music press did not know how to cover in time.