Kamasi Washington - The Epic

Can someone report back definitively on the vinyl pressing? I have this on hold at the store here and don't wanna drop $40 if it sounds worse than the CD I already have. Sure does look awesome though

Ive not heard the CD but its fine to me, but I appreciate my ears aren't one to trust

I agree it's initially a lot to process. I ended up working backwards: CD3 is perhaps the easiest to digest, so I stuck with that for a while and left CD1 to last. I also streamed "Re Run Home" and "Miss Understanding" over and over again until they became familiar, later doing the same for "Changing of the Guard" and "Askim". Hacking off little chunks and chewing on them, basically.

Cosmic Slop, have you also heard the album he's put out this year with Throtlle Elevator Music? Jazz sax over rock/punk/thrash, if you will. I also love "Them Changes", his track with Thundercat.

Awhile ago I put together a Spotify playlist of all his non-Epic material that I could round up - not just the Throttle Elevator Music albums (there are three), but the Young Jazz Giants album from about a decade ago and his sideman appearances on albums by George Duke, Stanley Clarke, Harvey Mason, etc. Here's the link.

the organ playing on "Isabelle" is one of my favorite things ever.

Mike I havent but will now thanks to phil's link. thanks!

i dunno about the vinyl, but i got to see him and his band up close in a tiny horse barn at Pickathon and it was life-changing, man. if you have a chance to see 'em, do so.

Only a couple songs in and now kicking myself for not catching his show at Icehouse on Eat Street a month ago.

Dude they were supposed to play until 12, I left at 1:30 and they were still going strong

didn't realise until reading this thread that there was a London gig imminent - sold out obv :(

this album reminds me of the 70s axelrod/adderley groove ..

sold

yeah and parts of it remind me of New Grass and other jazz goes pop thread touchstones

OK, bought the vinyl version today. If it sounds crummy I'm holding ILX responsible

Just kidding, I don't care that much, especially since the packaging looks so cool. Will report back

well, this is some moderately pleasant background music

truly remarkable in how it combines total wallpaper inoffensiveness with showboat egocentrism hero auteurism. and they said it couldn't be done!

They said it about your posts, mainly.

yeah its also what they said about banging your mom

well, this is some moderately pleasant background music

Lester bangs on 'a love supreme' amirite?

The emperor has no edge!

I tried to listen to this the other day but I couldn't really hear it through my tmi earwax storm (ongoing) - in this state all music induces the sensation of longing

http://i.ytimg.com/vi/IdgfFbvipsI/maxresdefault.jpg

imago what the hell kind of earwax problem do you have a couple visits to the doctor can't fix

sold on the cover alone

It's basically an ideal of how you want a jazz dude to look

yea cover art is what drew me in even before I heard his name, I th k it was actually on that noteworthy album covers thread

my pals who are not mere dabblers re: the past 40 years of "jazz" —which is what I am and I suspect every single poster here is— seem to be indifferent to this guy. I'm gonna listen, but this does seem like "oh yeah, I'm way into Kendrick and Dangelo, I'd like to listen to a current jazz dude and this is familiar enough…"

imago what the hell kind of earwax problem do you have a couple visits to the doctor can't fix

― ♛ LIL UNIT ♛ (thomp),

they dont like to syringe your ears here incase they damage the eardrum so they give you a bottle of almond oil and you wait 3 or 4 weeks for it to work.

or I could pour some smooth, smooth cosmic jazz into my ear; that should work more quickly

this is like the black crowes of "a Love supreme": this guy not only cops Coltrane's tone but arrangements of that record…

my pals who are not mere dabblers re: the past 40 years of "jazz" —which is what I am and I suspect every single poster here is— seem to be indifferent to this guy. I'm gonna listen, but this does seem like "oh yeah, I'm way into Kendrick and Dangelo, I'd like to listen to a current jazz dude and this is familiar enough…"

I don't think I'm a dabbler (been listening for 30 years, written almost as much about jazz - including 2 books - as about rock/metal over the last 20) and I think the album's great. Went out of my way not to mention Kendrick Lamar when reviewing it for Jazziz, precisely to avoid that whole co-signing phenomenon.

cool, man! see above for what I think so far. I never read Jazziz, but I was still amused to learn that some wags called it "jazzisn't." probly wynton/stanley conservatives who coined it…

what would stanley think of this? it seems to be premised on the last pre-Wynton era that he approves of…but maybe by now, he's like "fuck youngsters, particularly them who play with those horrible rappers"

well, this is some moderately pleasant background music

― ♛ LIL UNIT ♛ (thomp), Sunday, October 4, 2015 12:26 AM (19 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

not sure how anyone with even the slightest understanding of jazz could call this "background music" of any kind, pleasant or otherwise, but I guess it takes all kinds

1# this guy's book is far from written yet
2# if you haven't seen him live I think there a lot you are missing
3# he's not a great soloist yet but there is a lot of potential
#4 it's OK to be excited that a jazz album is reaching out to regular folks!

#4 otm x a million

well, this is some moderately pleasant background music

― ♛ LIL UNIT ♛ (thomp), Saturday, October 3, 2015 11:26 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

truly remarkable in how it combines total wallpaper inoffensiveness with showboat egocentrism hero auteurism. and they said it couldn't be done!

― ♛ LIL UNIT ♛ (thomp), Saturday, October 3, 2015 11:28 PM (Yesterday)

yeah guys i dunno i played through some of this and it was just too boring to stick with, i had a hard time not hearing it in terms of kendrick's backing band and other recent LA-sound stuff that sometimes bums me out for its mushy studio muso-ness.

thomp otm iow

I've ignored this so far bc I assumed it was the latest iteration of spiritual hat jazz

"spiritual hat jazz"

What is it that is "reaching out to regular folks" other than its cool rapper friend marketing? Sincere question

"spiritual hat jazz"

― Wimmels, Sunday, October 4, 2015 8:52 PM (3 seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

This is a ref to a jazz poll thread about rockist jazz history rewriting

What is it that is "reaching out to regular folks" other than its cool rapper friend marketing? Sincere question

Lamar isn't on the record. There are no hip-hop elements to the music at all. It's a big, sprawling spiritual jazz record in the vein of early '70s Pharoah Sanders. If seeing the name "Kendrick Lamar" in every other review and feature on Washington gets this record into the hands of the curious, where's the harm? And if some of those people wind up throwing it behind the couch after a single listen, that won't be a big surprise - plenty of people who took Thurston Moore's word about Sun Ra back in the '90s were disappointed, too. But a lot of them weren't. And I think a reasonable number of people who buy this record because Washington worked with the rapper everyone simply must give a fuck about this year (disclosure: I hate the sound of Kendrick Lamar's voice and haven't made it through either of his albums) are gonna wind up liking it. I know for sure that the audience at his NYC shows was substantially younger and less jazz-knowledgeable than any crowd I've ever seen in a jazz club, and they came away converted.

Every once in a while, people wake up to the idea that jazz is actually enjoyable music that you can listen to for pleasure. Right now, the focus is on Kamasi Washington. Good for him.

i appreciate 誤訳侮辱 and ums's moderate takes itt

I've only listened to a couple of songs off of this so far, and frankly I'm not sure I'll ever listen to all of it, but it reminds me of an album I liked a few years back, Build an Ark Dawn, another LA-based soul-jazz project featuring New Age-y vocals.

i'm actually somewhat relieved to read ph1l's take, i've enjoyed it a great deal but it seemed so pitched to a specific kind of jazz i love (that's not esp contemporary) that i couldn't gauge what blindspots i had w/ it (ie black crowes comparison above stung) so i'm glad that someone who i'd trust to call bullshit on this is saying 'this isn't bullshit'. i listen to maybe ten new jazz albums a year so when something goes down this easy and owes such a clear debt to a lot of albums i already loved and gets reviewed by alot of outlets that generally don't have time for contemporary jazz (note: this is NOT a request that pitchfork review more jazz) there's a part of me that nags 'you're gonna find this pretty embarrassing in a few years'. i LOVED wynton marsalis' blue interlude when i was a kid so i'm speaking from experience there.

(note: this is NOT a request that pitchfork review more jazz)

lol

oh man

d-40 i had never looked at your performance on the jazz poll thread before. sterling work

I hope you're being sarcastic. Deej was in 100% wounded narcissist identity politics posturing mode. As someone who listens to a lot of unfashionable trad jazz and loves eg Mary Lou Williams, and as someone who can see how reissue culture and rockist revisionism has skewed perceptions of the jazz canon, I still found deej's self-aggrandizing tantrum annoying and alienating. I can far more relate to the neophyte with 5 Sun Ra records than the guy who lets the tastes and mores of the contemporary jazz audience influence how he feels about the music he loves.

i think part of my resistance w/ Ra too is that like when i was learning abt jazz i was the only person i knew who really fucked w/ his stuff really heavy, & i kind of liked that about it? that he was a weird, outside artist for ppl who identified w/ weird, outside artists. but seeing him shifted to the center of the canon is just weird

― D-40, Friday, 2 September 2011 19:34 (4 years ago) Permalink

^^^Like this is a guy for whom music is beside the point.

It is? I'm still a sun ra fan, obviously where it stands in the canon doesn't impact whether or not I enjoy something. I just think it's corny when ppl act like record collector music was more central to jazz as a great recorded art than duke Ellington

At any rate I didn't even coin "spiritual hat jazz" but it's a fair critique of a trend in criticism not of music itself. Reading reviews of this album has been frustrating, as I feel as if they rarely dive into what it does rather than adding it up as a collection of influences that just so happen to be extraordinarily trendy. I'm willing to believe this project is totally great! Just that I'm not sold by the writing it's inspired. When I have four hours to finally give it a real listen I'll do that

https://img0.etsystatic.com/196/0/16650390/il_340x270.1469520110_18v6.jpg

oh yeah fist of fury is amazing, totally different from his usual mode (but retaining a lot of his favorite harmonies and melodic flourishes, of course)

This is so great, and I wasn't that much of a fan of the last one.

Love the choirs & strings on these, really gives it that lost '70s artifact vibe (same for how low the drums are mixed, which I don't love but it works here)

I reviewed the new album for Stereogum. (I forgot to mention that his dad was playing flute at the Forest Hills Stadium show on Friday night.)

Apparently the new album contains a hidden bonus disc, making it 3 CDs or 5 LPs. (The music on the bonus disc was not serviced to reviewers, so now I'm really excited for my pre-order to arrive.)

https://www.discogs.com/Kamasi-Washington-Heaven-And-Earth/release/12135022

5 LPS??? dang

lmao it looks like they did it with the LP version too, requiring you to unearth it?!

The CD packaging is bizarre. The third CD is hidden within the centre section of the gatefold. The only way to free it is to take the extreme tip of a very sharp knife, and slit along the perforations on one side or the other. The CD isn't protected in a slip case, there's just a square sheet of printed paper with it - so you have to take great care not to scratch it while trying to get hold of it. I managed this, but the central section of the gatefold does now look a bit battered. Conceptual.

It's not as bad as all that. I was able to pop the perforations with just my fingers, no knife, and the CD and one-sheet insert came out with no problems. Also, there's a peel-away adhesive strip inside that allows you to seal the packaging up again, making it into a narrow pocket for when you want to replace the third disc.

I've had a close look at the (£43) vinyl sleeve and I can't see a dashiki under the space suit. No credibility.

Is it me or is Heaven & Earth miles better than the older stuff, this shit is awesome

It's great but I don't see it as superior to his other stuff. I like Harmony of Difference the most of all his stuff.

yeah me neither, this and the Epic feel v similar and of a piece

I think there's definitely been improvement from record to record. The arrangements are better on the new record, and the synths are proggier and weirder, which is a plus as far as I'm concerned.

I think that's it tbh

it has a certain zeul-ish-ness for sure

I felt like it had that fusion-y vibe of the 70s, which I liked.

new album coming may 3rd, "prologue" out now

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c8cKN1rbJl4

Digging both the new songs quite a bit, actually. Can't wait for the full thing.

It's not streaming on Bandcamp yet, but "The Garden Path" from this is also on Spotify (and presumably other services, though I haven't checked).

I haven't listened to the whole thing yet (busy, busy, busy) but I was sent a promo stream. It's a 2CD set, about 82 minutes of music, I think? I've pre-ordered the physical version.

I'm assuming his tour will expand eventually, he definitely owes Raleigh a show, I had tickets to see him in 2022 (or maybe it was last year?) and he canceled the date.

I do respect how hard that tune goes in our time of ambient jazz.