Your music is a reflection of who you are, so if you want your music to be a certain way, you have to be that way, otherwise it won’t feel authentic. | | | | Kamasi Washington in Berlin, May 25, 2018. "Heaven and Earth" is out today on Young Turks.
(Frank Hoensch/Redferns/Getty Images) | | | | |  | “Your music is a reflection of who you are, so if you want your music to be a certain way, you have to be that way, otherwise it won’t feel authentic.”
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| | rantnrave:// We are living in a time when KAMASI WASHINGTON is making records. This is reason to celebrate. Maybe you think music isn't what it used to be, maybe you think nothing is new or real anymore, maybe you yearn for FREDDIE HUBBARD or QUINCY JONES. But Kamasi Washington music that didn't exist yesterday exists today, and we should shout and wail with joy until our voices reach the ninth note of whatever scale we're on. Shout for orchestral jazz. For fusion. For Afrofuturism. For the sound of protest. For the affirmation of gospel. For the closeness of outer space. But music used to be better and there is no soul anymore, you say. Just like they said in 1987, right around the time PRINCE was making SIGN O' THE TIMES. And in 1998, when THE MISEDUCATION OF LAURYN HILL was being put to bed. They were still having the same conversation in 2010, the year of MY BEAUTIFUL DARK TWISTED FANTASY. They said it in 1958 and they're saying it in 2018. With allowances for the occasional dips and dives of human existence and the normal ebb and flow of the collective creative consciousness, they have always been wrong. There is good jazz and there is good pop and there is good soul and there is good rock. Right now. For heaven's sake, this exists. We are living in a time when JANELLE MONÁE and KENDRICK LAMAR and CHILDISH GAMBINO and SOPHIE and SONS OF KEMET and KACEY MUSGRAVES and MARY LATTIMORE and ICEAGE are making new music. And Kamasi Washington and his band are reaching somewhere beyond. "We will no longer ask for justice. Instead, we will ask for retribution," singers PATRICE QUINN and DWIGHT TRIBLE repeat, like an incantation, right after the bandleader's lengthy tenor solo on "FISTS OF FURY," a reimagination of the theme from the BRUCE LEE film FIST OF FURY that opens the "Earth" side of Washington's double album HEAVEN AND EARTH. The piano and the percussion the woodwinds wrap around them, protecting them, fighting for them, calling out to all of us from somewhere deep within... Please stop killing jazz radio... SIMON RATTLE bows out... Arrest in XXXTentacion murder... It's FRIDAY and that means new music not only from Kamasi Washington but also DEATH GRIPS, BEBE REXHA, TEYANA TAYLOR, NINE INCH NAILS, FREDDIE GIBBS, BEST COAST, LECRAE & ZAYTOVEN, DAWES, PROJECT PABLO, PANIC! AT THE DISCO, GUNPLAY, LERA LYNN, JAMES WILLIAMSON & THE PINK HEARTS, JEFFREY FOUCAULT, THE RECORD COMPANY, PRISCILLA RENEA, THE ORB, GANG GANG DANCE, SOULWAX, FUEGO, WESTSIDE GUNN, THIS WILD LIFE, FREEWAY, THE SEA WITHIN and JILL BARBER. | | | - Matty Karas, curator |
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