“Shall we eat or shall we play?” asks Kamasi Washington, clutching his carved wooden cane in one bejewelled hand, his brushed gold saxophone in the other. He and his band are sitting cramped around one of the tiny tables of Le Baiser Salé, a jazz club in Paris’s Marais district, where three grey-haired men in smart trousers are thrumming away on stage. It’s the early hours and Washington has come here after playing a full show at the 1,500-capacity Bataclan; now he and his bandmates are facing a familiar conundrum: wind down or give in to the irresistible urge to get back on stage right here.
Unsurprisingly, music wins. The club’s in-house band apprehensively welcome Washington, flanked by his drummer Tony Austin and keys player Brandon Coleman. Then a sort of friendly duel ensues. It’s intriguing to watch the old guard – talented but stiff Parisian trads – figure out how to interlock notes with the new wave, a crew of California cats dressed like they’ve stepped off a Funkadelic record cover, freewheeling through the standards, fizzing with a bold new language.
The next day, Washington laughs when I suggest that most musicians would rather party or pass out than find somewhere else to play after a big gig. “It’s just fun,” says the 37-year-old in a laidback drawl, clinking the silver rings adorning his fingers. “It’s chill.” Two weeks ago, he performed with a 40-strong choir and orchestra at Coachella, one of America’s major music festivals. It makes no difference to him and his band – most of whom he’s known since childhood – whether their audience is 20 or 20,000. “If we were stuck on a desert island with no people or no money,” he says, “we would still play music the whole time.”
For now, however, Washington is the man credited with leading a jazz revival in the past few years, usually in a dashiki tunic and an array of medallions. He was one of the leading instrumentalists who contributed to Kendrick Lamar’s landmark album To Pimp a Butterfly in 2015, which helped bring contemporary jazz to a new audience. Washington’s own debut, a triple-disc album fittingly called The Epic, swiftly followed, continuing Lamar’s themes of black American identity and leading one critic to write that Washington is “the jazz voice of Black Lives Matter”. He’s also been called a jazz celebrity, who has the star power to launch an EP with an installation at a venerable museum (last year’s Harmony of Difference, at the Whitney in New York).
In person, Washington is warm, witty and as breezy as his approach to genre. His maximalist fusions pull liberally from hip-hop, Afrobeat, funk and electro-funk; from the spiritual jazz skronking of elders such as John Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders, the cosmic ideas of collective improvisation laid down by Sun Ra, and the theatricality of 60s and 70s film soundtracks. As a result, he doesn’t much like the term “jazz”; instead he says “the music is the music”. “It’s like if all of a sudden I gave a different name to your hair than I gave to you, it wouldn’t make your hair a separate thing,” he says. “If I call your hair ‘Dilly’” – he laughs again – “like, ‘Hey, Dilly!’, it’s still you. I look at all this music as part of my heritage. Jazz is a part of me.”
The cheerful ease with which he can bowl into a club and take over the stage is partly down to these links with jazz’s legacy. Up-and-coming musicians in the field often talk of the pressure they feel to not only appease the gatekeepers of tradition but to live up to the greats. Washington never felt daunted. “It wasn’t alien to us,” he explains. “[Jazz] comes from poor black neighbourhoods, so because of that foundation we thought of it as a support. It feels more like a horse that you can ride out on than a weight, the horse that’s taken all your forefathers around the world and allowed you to express yourself.”
Washington grew up in South Central Los Angeles, which after the 1992 riots became a shorthand for “ghetto”. His mother is a science teacher, his father a music teacher, and he started playing sax at 13 (his dad also plays flute in his son’s touring band). Washington and Ronald Bruner Jr – one of his two drummers and the brother of bassist/songwriter/vocalist Thundercat – would call each other on the phone to boast about how much they’d each practised that day. “There’s a sense of urgency that you get growing up where we grew up,” says Washington. “I hate to talk about it in that sense because it’s a really beautiful place but there’s pressure to become a gangster, or to be poor.”
Music, he says, was “one of the paths to success that you feel you have access to in my neighbourhood. Because it doesn’t always feel like you have access to all of them. When you find something that you’re good at, you definitely have a motivation to become great at it, because that’s your way to overcome these stereotypes.” A tight sense of community and a vibrant local music scene was influential, too. At the same time as listening to west coast hip-hop, Washington was hanging out in Leimert Park, a largely African area of LA, which is home to the nonprofit performing arts club World Stage, where he first saw Sanders play.
Washington continued to find deeper connections between hip-hop and jazz when, in 2009, he started working as a session musician for Snoop Dogg. At the same time, he began to forge a new fusion LA sound with the West Coast Get Down, the collective with whom he still plays. Dubbed “the Wu-Tang of jazz”, these musicians, including Coleman, Austin, Bruner Jr and double bassist Miles Mosley, pooled their money one December to buy 30 days of studio time and cut all their records (including The Epic) in one go. But it was the call to go into the studio with Kendrick Lamar that fast-tracked Washington into mainstream consciousness.
“I went in and I didn’t really know what he wanted me to do,” he remembers of the Butterfly sessions. “It was pretty hush-hush. I felt like I was going to go meet Barack Obama or something.” Still, he knew instinctively that Lamar’s expansive meditation on black identity was going to make an impact. “There’s this notion that music has to be confined to some small, simple place to be popular, something I never believed,” he says. “And when I heard that record I was like, he’s about to dispel that myth, he’s trying to open people up.”
Lamar’s record was also a lightning rod for the Black Lives Matter movement and, even if instrumental music is more open to interpretation, Washington says his own music can’t help but also reflect his experience as an African American. “It’s a reality that I’m living in,” he says, “a reality I’ve lived with since way before there was a term ‘Black Lives Matter’, that black people all around the world have lived with for a long time. This idea that because of the colour of your skin your life is not valued at the [level] that other people’s lives are. And so my music is a representation of who I am. When you’re making music, you’re creeping up on your heart and pouring it out into something.”
His music, he says, can’t help but be politically charged “because I’m living on this earth. I don’t know how you can live on this planet, with all the information that is so readily accessible, and not be concerned with what people are doing. I feel like we’re at a crossroads where society’s going to choose to either go in a direction that’s going to lead to the world being a more universally fair place, or less, or it’s going to go backwards, to what we did in the past. Society’s pushing towards this idea of fairness, love and compassion. But then we have, you know, Trump and Brexit. As musicians we have one of the greatest tools of bringing people together in music. So, I wouldn’t say [it’s a] responsibility but we have an opportunity to sway things one way or the other, you know?”
We move on to discussing police brutality. “It’s not just the police,” he says. “It’s not just the fact that police officers are committing violent acts… on innocent black people, it’s that our society, these juries, these judges, these prosecuting attorneys, these people who are not part of the police department are deeming these acts to be lawful. If it’s lawful for you to take my life because of my skin colour, there’s something wrong.”
Washington’s second LP, Heaven and Earth, is another vast concept album that oscillates between idealism and realism. Sounding like part stoner novel, part Plato metaphysics, it is, he says, about creating new realities: Earth is “the world that we’re in [and] is what we imagine it to be” and Heaven is one where “what we think it’s going to be, it ends up becoming”.
“I was looking to take this journey where we start off [with the] understanding that what we think and what we imagine affects our experience,” Washington continues. “If my thoughts and dreams can affect the world, that means essentially I am making my own world for myself. The world isn’t what the ‘world leaders’ want it to be; it’s what we all make it to be. Those people don’t really have power, we give them their power. If we all took that mentality of, ‘I’m going to make the world the way it’s supposed to be, to the best extent that I can do it’, true change could happen.”
This is why he’s kicked off his album with the rallying cry of Fists of Fury, a cover of a Bruce Lee theme track that adds charged lyrics sung by Patrice Quinn into his musical mix: “Our time as victims is over/ We will no longer ask for justice/ Instead, we will take our retribution”. It is, Washington says, “a recognition of the reality that life is this never-ending struggle. I always have something on my plate, but to overcome it you [need to have] the mentality that you can overtake it.
“I know that this grander scheme of thinking, the idea that we make the earth what we want it to be, can seem a bit naive, but that song, to me, is about not waiting for someone to do things for us but to do them for ourselves. One of the biggest problems we have is letting other people think for you. I listen to everyone, but I only believe myself.”
I wonder what Washington is thinking when he wields his instrument, eyes closed. How does he communicate musically with his band?
“It’s like being at a party. You meet someone and you try to find common ground,” he says. “You fish around a little bit. ‘Do you like sports? OK, so what kind of sports are you into? You’re into basketball. Are you into politics? Are you reading any books or watching any shows?’ And then you start to get a gist of who the person you’re talking to is. You’re constantly figuring it out.”
There’s no doubting the renewed interest in jazz, but does it have the kind of crossover appeal to reach pop audiences? “I think so,” says Washington. “I’ve always felt there’s a misconception of jazz, that it requires some type of superiority to be appreciated. The idea of a music that connects you to your inner self – that connection is something that most people would enjoy if they tried.”
Washington says jazz will continue to shape modern music, as it has been doing for decades. But can he see a future where Rihanna has a mean sax solo in the middle of a song? “Yeah, if she wants her show to be great,” he says, laughing. “I mean, I think it’s already [begun]. Even at Coachella, seeing Beyoncé with a brass marching band, people are learning the value of what jazz represents: ideas of musicianship and allowing multitudes of people to express themselves within your show. It’s growing. Once you kind of get a taste of that, it’s hard to go back.”
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