KAMASI WASHINGTON
Rickey Washington has told the story more times than he can count. He was a young college student, almost completely ignorant of the history and culture of West Africa, the first time he went to Ghana on a school-building mission in 1975. It was there that he heard a story that stuck with him: In West Africa there were two kings who each wanted their respective kingdoms to be seen as the spiritual and cultural center of the region, and so they entered a wager. They would each plant a seed from a kuma tree, and the tree that grew largest would determine which town deserved such a designation. The town of Kumasi—meaning “a place where people come together,” he says—was the winner. From then on, the people met under the branches of the kuma tree that served as a symbol of their town. Taken by this story, Rickey wrote in his journal that he would someday have a son he would name Kamasi—his preferred variation on the town’s name—and his son would become for his community what that tree was for the people in the story.
“I prayed that he’d be a person who would bring people together and that he would be able to be a person to unify,” Rickey explains. “And I gave him the name Kamasi, and I told him that. I sent him to cultural school when he was 12, so that he would know that his purpose was to change the world and do positive things. And he listened. That’s in the heart and soul of what he’s doing.”
In 2018, no one else in popular music is doing what Kamasi Washington is doing. No musician is able to draw together hip-hop fans who know him from his work with Kendrick Lamar, indie rock Millennials and Gen Xers who know him from the glowing reviews he gets in nearly every significant music publication, and traditional jazz fans who recognize him as the latest in a continuum spanning the whole history of the genre. No other jazz artist can pack out rock clubs and take the stage at Coachella, Bonnaroo, and Lollapalooza. No composer, jazz or otherwise, is making albums of the scope and ambition of 2015’s The Epic, Washington’s breakthrough triple-LP that brought together choirs, strings, West Coast funk, classic R&B, and experimental jazz. Along the way he was dubbed “the jazz voice of Black Lives Matter” and inspired an untold number of think-pieces that speculated on what it means to be a jazz artist in the 21st century.
Arguably the biggest sensation in jazz in the last 25 years, Washington has now set his ambitions even higher. With his follow-up, Heaven and Earth, he has made an album that is not only designed to expand upon the musical palette of his debut, but also to be a rallying cry for the oppressed and dispossessed of the world, as well as those who would stand alongside them in their struggle. With “Fists of Fury,” a reworking of the theme of the Bruce Lee film of the same name, Washington made his clearest statement yet.
“What this album is about is empowerment, of understanding if you’re waiting for someone to make your world the way you want it to be, it will never be that,” Washington says a few hours before he’ll take the stage in Prague. “It will only be what you make it. So that’s what that song is about, these ideas of ‘I’m waiting for someone to give me justice. I’m waiting for someone to give me human rights.’ You’re waiting for someone to give you something that only you can give yourself—that was the tone of the whole album. Especially for people who have been oppressed for a long time, at a certain point you have to stop waiting and start doing.”
Soft-spoken and unfailingly polite, the Los Angeles born and raised tenor saxophonist has livedhelped him along the way—his father, his numerous music teachers, the group of collaborators he has played with since his teenage years—but there is no false modesty in him. He has the quiet confidence of someone who has spent his life working tirelessly on his craft, struggling to find an audience, and ultimately finding more listeners than anyone could have expected.
