Kamasi Washington - The Epic

Kamasi Washington – The Epic (Brainfeeder)

 ‘Tis the season for jazz festivals, and anyone who tells you the genre is dead clearly isn’t looking hard enough. Sure, it’s now a niche in terms of sales, but there is no shortage of artists dedicated to sustaining and expanding the most creative musical movement of the last 100 years—whether it sounds like what you consider jazz or not, like the improvisational magic of Tanya Tagaq and her band.

And then there’s a superstar like rapper Kendrick Lamar, whose 2015 album To Pimp a Butterfly—which has sold more than half a million copies so far—draws heavily on jazz. And not polite, cocktail-bar jazz that fits easily into a bumping 4/4 beat, either. Lamar uses jazz as music of struggle and expression and freedom. In order to do that, he called on Kamasi Washington, who grew up in the same neighbourhood, South Central L.A., that Lamar did.

Who is Kamasi Washington? This is the 32-year-old tenor saxphonist’s debut album. He’s been a sideman for everyone from Herbie Hancock to Snoop Dogg to Raphael Saadiq. He runs with Flying Lotus, who perhaps more than anyone is bringing a jazz sensibility to electronic music. They share a bassist, a man known only as Thundercat (who’s also from South Central, as is Washington’s entire band). But let’s run some numbers here. In addition to the core band—which involves two bassists, two drummers, two keyboardists and a trombonist, with Washington on tenor sax—this album has a 32-piece orchestra on it, and a 20-person choir. If you buy a physical copy, it’s a three-record set. It’s 172 minutes long. There are 17 songs. Epic? You bet. In this case, there is definitely strength in numbers.

Its most compelling moments are, of course, when the full cast in on display, and those are the tracks that will first convince you that this is something far beyond any jazz record you’re likely to have heard in recent memory. But three hours of that would be exhausting, of course. Washington’s consistently strong melodies provide a tether for casual listeners. Washington’s many moods involve a bit of swing, some sparse, delicate ballads, and the soothing presence of traditional jazz vocalist Patrice Quinn on several tracks. Naturally, he lets every member of his band stretch out considerably—notably organist Brandon Coleman on “Isabelle” and a stunning bowed-bass solo on “Miss Understanding” by Miles Mosley. On “Re Run Home,” Coleman breaks out his wah-pedal and his clavinet, and with the help of full percussion section, drives a 14-minute jazz-funk excursion that is likely your best gateway drug to reveal the rest of this glorious world of sound.

Listeners might be led in the door by Washington’s more famous employers, but Washington is second-fiddle to no one. If you’re the kind of jazz appreciator who only buys one modern jazz album every year (or decade), well, this would be the one.

Download: “Re Run Home,” “Miss Understanding,” “Changing of the Guard”

Kendrick Lamar - To Pimp a Butterfly

Kendrick Lamar – To Pimp a Butterfly (Universal)

To Pimp a Butterfly, which suddenly went on sale March 16, in no way lends itself to 140-character reviews on the day of release: this is multi-layered, intense and—while still providing visceral pleasures, like singles “King Kunta” and “i”—demands to be studied as literature, as jazz, as a time capsule of Black America in 2015.

Start with the music. Lamar’s sonic vision is even more expansive than Kanye West’s, drawing from the futuristic electronic jazz of his L.A. neighbours Flying Lotus and Thundercat as well as vintage jazz and fusion and funk and rock and abstract tone poems. This is a headphone record, best absorbed in a sitting. It’s as ambitious as Janelle Monae or Shabazz Palaces or D’Angelo or the Roots, but is on a whole other trip of its own.

Like Drake, Lamar has a complicated relationship to his newfound fame. Unlike Drake, Lamar takes his self-reflection to fascinating places, and drops enough references to 400 years of African-American history, literature and culture along the way to fill a university course (or a Spike Lee film—and this album’s mash-up of jazz and hip-hop and history fiery politics makes it this generation’s Do The Right Thing).

He’s not just wrestling with his own demons; he’s wrestling with the devil itself (known here as “Lucy,” or Lucifer). He’s worried that he’s turning his back on his friends on the tough L.A. streets of Compton, where his friends are dying, the same neighbourhood that birthed West Coast gangsta rap. He reflects on a visit to South Africa last year, which informs many of the musings here. “The ghost of Mandela, hope my flows they propel it,” he sings. Can you imagine Bono trying to get away with that line? (Wait, don’t answer that). But coming as it does, from Lamar, near the end of a lyrically and musically dense masterpiece, it’s as honest as the self-lacerating missives from a depressive state in which Lamar wrote most of the album.

Ah yes, depression: real pain, real misery. Not whining about mo’ money, mo’ problems (see: Drake). So much of hip-hop—hell, pop music in general—is about masking depression, pretending it doesn’t exist or willing it away. Lamar stares it in the face and gives it a voice, a character, a flow. Other than Lucinda Williams’s 2007 album West, I can’t recall an album that gets this dark, this inquisitive, this honest about the invisible disease.

But that’s only part of the picture. To Pimp a Butterfly is about Lamar’s ability to connect his personal struggles to the state of his neighbourhood to the state of America to the state of the world that sets him apart. Throughout, he balances reflection and vitriol, repeatedly calls himself a hypocrite, and crafts a hook out of the phrase: “Shit don’t change until you wash your ass.”

In a year when activists, in response to police shootings, coined the phrase “Black lives matter,” Lamar raps: “It’s evident that I’m irrelevant to society / that’s what you’re telling me.” Except, of course, that Lamar is anything but. He’s a badly needed social critic, a poet, an experimental artists and a pop star. A rare and essential combination.

Download: “The Blacker the Berry,” “King Kunta,” “i”