Mike Park
Washington’s new album delivers a message of unity.
Kamasi Washington is hitting his stride. The L.A.-based jazz saxophonist just released Harmony of Difference, the follow-up to his epic three-disc 2015 debut titled, appropriately, The Epic. During the initial phase of his career, Washington played as a session man and touring band member for such artists as Kendrick Lamar, Run the Jewels and Snoop Dogg. Now his solo career is taking off, and he’s being hailed as the The Next Big Thing. A 2016 headline in LA Weekly declared “Kamasi Washington Has Conquered the Jazz World. What Does He Do Next?” What’s next is Washington headlining his own worldwide tour, which brings him to the Majestic on Nov. 8.
“In the past, playing with other people, I’d get to really stretch it out maybe five or 10 shows a year,” Washington says. “Now I’m playing my own music every night and having the freedom to play whatever I want in hundreds of shows a year. So I feel like I’m finally tapping into what I have internally. That’s something I’ve been reaching for my whole life and I’m closer to that now than I’ve ever been.”
The 36-year-old composer has been devoted to jazz since he became serious about music at age 11, and he’s also known for his ability to connect the dots between genres. “There’s such a freedom of expression in jazz that once you open yourself up to it, it never goes away,” he says. “When I was playing other styles of music, I was always bringing jazz to that music and taking qualities of other music and bringing it to jazz. I never really looked at the genres as being separate. Different styles of music are all related and connected. Like when I was playing with Snoop and his band, half the time during soundchecks we’d end up playing ‘Giant Steps’ and stuff like that.”
The new record, Harmony of Difference, is a profound personal thesis that resonates like a prophecy in our sharply divided political and social climate. The first five tracks — “Desire,” “Humility,” “Knowledge,” “Perspective” and “Integrity” — are meditations on virtues. Elements of all five tracks are pieced together for the album’s final track, a 13-minute opus titled “Truth.”
“The first step to understanding what’s really going on in the world is to have a desire to learn,” Washington says. “Then you have to be humble enough to know that part of the journey is reaching out to find those answers. Then knowledge really starts to come to you, and you start having a perspective that just because someone perceives something differently from the way you perceive it, doesn’t necessarily mean it’s wrong.”
Washington conceived of the album as he observed the divisive messaging in politics and contrasted it with his own experience of touring and learning about other cultures. “These ideas of bigotry and fear of other people, other ways of thinking, other ways of living, are a step backward for humanity. What I wanted to do was shine a light on the idea that our differences are what give us the ability to move forward, to grow.”
