A ROUND midnight most evenings, Kamasi Washington will sit down at the piano in the living room of his home in Inglewood, Los Angeles, and begin to compose. Despite being synonymous with the saxophone, he only ever writes on piano, which goes some way towards explaining the harmonic richness of his music. “The piano is so much more versatile as far as being able to play the different parts and hear the song in its entirety,” he explains. “I played piano before I played saxophone, so it was always the logical choice. The saxophone is the racehorse, but the piano is the workhorse.”
He never tends to get much written during the day. “When the world gets quieter, it’s easier to focus. There’s rarely something I have to do at one in the morning.” But there’s another reason for his nocturnal schedule: lately his piano has been monopolised by a different, smaller pair of hands. Born during lockdown in 2020, his daughter has already shown aptitude for the family business, even writing one of the songs on his new album, Fearless Movement. “She’s very musical,” beams Washington. “She would get up every morning and go play piano. Sometimes she wouldn’t let me get on! Normally she’d play a bit more random, but one time she was playing this melody over and over again. Luckily, technology’s cool – pulled my phone out and recorded it. Then I started messin’ around with it, slowed it down, added some chords to it. And it made the record!”
The simple, rousing chorus of “Asha The First” – along with some funkier rhythms and a clutch of star cameos – helps to make Kamasi Washington’s fifth solo albumof work. Washington hasn’t become the most celebrated saxophonist of his generation by crossing over, dumbing down or condensing his vision into Spotify-sized snippets. Instead, he’s flourished as a radical maximalist, making music that’s vast in sound and scope, without losing sight of where he’s from. Indeed, at the heart of each record is the same tight-knit core of musicians, most of whom have been together since their teens, jamming in the garage between bouts of .
