Photo by Dean Budnick
Kamasi Washington —saxophonist, bandleader and emerging face of modern experimental jazz music—came on the scene with his sprawling, three-volume debut The Epic in the spring of 2015, just a couple months after his name appeared in the credits of near-consensus album of the year, Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly.
Now, Washington and his band, which includes several musicians that he came up with as a young artist in Los Angeles, have a new EP, Harmony of Difference, which was originally conceived for the biennial celebration of New York’s Whitney Museum. And although it doesn’t match The Epic in length, the effort continues Washington’s streak of culturally significant work. While on tour in support of the EP, Washington speaks on the record’s origins and celebration of diversity, the importance of jazz to both modern musicians and modern music lovers, getting to play with The Meters on Jam Cruise and more.
I know you came up with a lot of guys from California—the West Coast Get Down—and some of them have toured with you and played on The Epic.. Did you have the same crew for Harmony of Difference ?
Yup, I’ve still got the same band. Well, Dontae Winslow was on trumpet, instead of Igmar Thomas. But for the most part it was the same band.
How important is it to you to play and record with those guys that you’ve been around for so long?
There’s a language that we all speak in our musical community, kind of like a dialect. We all speak the same language. It especially helps with communication and just allowing the music to be fluid and not rigid. You don’t have to give a lot of instruction. It allows the music to be more free.
And do you guys write together, or is it more you bringing in an idea and you guys playing off of that? Or does it come out in the studio?
My stuff is usually pretty much written out. But I always leave a lot of space to interpret.
Speaking of that group language—when you guys bring in another musician, is it difficult for them to come in, to get that dialect down?
Depends on the musician [laughs]. Sometimes guys come in and they can hang, but sometimes… We speak with a pretty wide vocabulary. So you kind of have to have studied and played a pretty wide range of music, or it may seem like stuff is all over the place, you know what I mean? You wouldn’t know what’s happening.
How do you deal with instances when the guest doesn’t really fit in, whether in the studio or on stage?
I can’t think of that really happening in the studio. At live shows, you kind of have to scale down to the lowest common denominator. It depends on what instrument they’re playing. If it’s a drummer or something like that, and they don’t understand certain moves, then you just can’t really go for them. So we adjust and we play to what they’re comfortable with.
I’ve seen you guys play, and I’m sure it’s not always an easy task, especially if you’re a drummer trying to keep up.
[Laughs] Yeah, yeah.
I’ve read that you wanted this EP to focus on the musical idea of counterpoint, and of course there’s the cultural idea implied by the title. Were you given any guidelines when the Whitney commissioned the music?
They pretty much left it wide open for me. I was kind of using counterpoint as a bit of a metaphor for a celebration of diversity, trying to take it a step beyond what counterpoint really is—that they’re individual songs, not just melodic figures. But yeah, the Whitney pretty much let me do whatever I wanted. I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do, and it was around the time that the reality of Donald Trump was setting in. All this talk of walls, bans, just a lot of negativity—“If you believe this thing, then we don’t like you. If you live in this place, we don’t like you. If you look this way, we don’t like you.” Growing up in L.A., there’s so many people from so many cultures, and you realize that the most beautiful aspect of the country is the fact that we have different groups and different cultures living together, which makes our culture so rich.
The EP is split up into the five movements and then comes together with “The Truth.” Each track is a kind of virtue—did you try to match the music to those titles, or did the titles come later?
The idea of using counterpoint to celebrate diversity came first, and the names came second. I thought of the name Harmony of Difference, and then “Truth.” In the back of my brain, I was thinking, “What am I really searching for?” And I feel like what we really gain from learning from other cultures and other languages, accepting people’s different ways of living is a level of truth, or wisdom, or enlightenment. So I came up with “Truth.” Then the other five titles are what I feel are the steps to truth. That first step to gaining truth is “Desire.” You have to want it; you have to be searching for it. You have to desire it. And then the second step is you have to have “Humility.” You have to be able to accept the fact that you don’t have, that you don’t know. Then the third part is “Knowledge.” That’s a big part of it—going out and learning and having experiences, and gaining knowledge. And then the fourth one is “Perspective.” Knowledge can be manipulated, more so than truth or wisdom, and it’s perspective that really gives your knowledge power—understanding how the information that you have pertains to your particular circumstances. And then the fifth part is “Integrity.” In order to have that truth, you have to accept it, regardless of the way you want it to be.
I saw you on Jam Cruise earlier this year, which is such a unique festival experience since most of the artists stick around for the full cruise. I’m curious your thoughts on the collaborative nature of it.
I liked it. It was my first Jam Cruise. I’m always interested in the music—one of my favorite things to do is hear music that I haven’t before. And like, getting to sit in with the Meters…
I was going to ask what that was like. It was pretty incredible to watch. Was that something that had been planned before?
I ran into them when they came on the ship. And they were like, “Man, we’re playing tonight. You wanna come play?” And I was like, “Yeah!” [Laughs]
So did you do some quick preparation, or did you already know the songs?
I knew a lot of their songs already. And so I just came in.
Your music is very expansive and has a lot of different things going on in it—there’s almost a sacred quality to it. When I see you guys play, you’re obviously having a lot of fun. So you take your music seriously, but you still have a lot of fun with it. I think that’s important, especially in playing jazz for today’s audiences.
Well, I love music, so it’s a joyous experience. Even when it gets heavy, it’s still joyous for me. I don’t necessarily associate with stoic-ness or seriousness—I don’t think you have to be stiff or serious. I can’t help it, the music feels good, it sounds good, and it makes me happy [laughs]. I feel like jazz—and music in general—is so interwoven, and I think we sometimes over-exaggerate the reality of genres. The word “jazz” is associated with such a wide range of music. I don’t know that there are very many people that would like everything that’s associated with jazz, or dislike everything that’s associated with it. But most people come to a conclusion in their mind of what they think something is just by the name of it. I think jazz has suffered more from an image problem than a musical problem. I don’t meet too many people that have opened themselves up to jazz that don’t like it. You don’t meet somebody that’s like, “I used to be into jazz when I was a kid, but I don’t like it anymore.” The reality is, if you’re into hip-hop or funk—even R&B or rock-and-roll—in a lot of ways you are into jazz.
In that vein, could you speak to the importance of cross-genre collaborations, like what you did with Kendrick Lamar on To Pimp a Butterfly, in bringing jazz or experimental music to the mainstream?
I look at myself as being more of a musician than necessarily being a jazz musician. I think jazz is my foundation in music. But working with someone like Kendrick—I think it’s great to work with serious musicians, regardless of what the title of their genre is. But I do think that audiences being open to jazz and jazz musicians—being open to other forms of music—is good, overall, for everyone. There’s such a freedom and expressive nature to jazz that if audiences open themselves up to that, it’ll make their musical experience enriched. And it’ll make their lives enriched. For jazz musicians, sometimes we take this stuff so seriously, looking at the music like it has to be some kind of test or something like that, not with the purpose of enriching the soul, but for pleasing the mind. It’s bigger than that. It’s not a competition. It’s not a class. It’s our most sacred form of expression. And it’s our most powerful tool of connection. So being open to other forms of connection, other forms of expression, will only make jazz music better.
You obviously got a lot of notoriety from The Epic and from working with Kendrick. Did you feel any pressure to follow it up with this EP, or the stuff that you’re doing in the future?
It’s more like opportunity. I’m more happy to know that my music has a home, than feeling any pressure. In the end, I can only make the music that comes to me. I’m not really trying to prove anything. I’m not trying to show anything. If it comes to me, I try to develop it the best I can, and then share it. I feel like that’s the best I can do. I could try to make something that I think people want, but it won’t be as good as the music that I actually have.
