Fearless Movement
by Kamasi Washington
Despite the convenience of calling saxophonist/composer Kamasi Washington a jazz musician, it’s limiting. When he was growing up in Los Angeles, he gravitated to jazz in his early teens but, as a kid of his generation, was also into hip-hop. At university he studied ethnomusicology.
He toured with Snoop Dogg and worked with musicians as diverse as jazz legend Herbie Hancock and Kendrick Lamar.
His 2015 breakthrough album – clocking in at almost three hours – was The Epic. It featured a 32-piece orchestra, 20-piece choir, various solo vocalists and his jazz ensemble. It tapped into jazz of all persuasions, notably the ambitious reach of Sun Ra, John Coltrane and post-bop players on the cusp of free jazz. And hip-hop.
As he told me, “In the beginning, [jazz] was influenced by blues and gospel … then it was influenced by rock’n’roll, boogaloo, funk in the 70s … to get the full picture of jazz you have to study all these styles.”
Since The Epic, 43-year-old Washington has continued as a boundary rider, working with artists across the spectrum, writing soundtracks and picking up awards. And now comes Fearless Movement, at a comparatively modest 86 minutes. It’s a dense meltdown of myriad influences, from spirituals on the swinging opener Lesanu to guest rappers Taj and Ras Austin on the hyperactively funky Asha The First driven by bassist Thundercat, and soul on Computer Love with singer Patrice Quinn.
George Clinton and rapper D Smoke weigh in on the funkadelic Get Lit and André 3000 adds elegant flute to the quietly mesmerising stand-out Dream State. Like Duke Ellington, Washington writes so his soloists and ensemble players can shine. Although, when he unleashes his post-bop sax on Prologue (ironically, the final piece, as if preparing for something else soon), he drives ahead and upward like Archie Shepp. Fearless Movement is another weighty, sometimes exacting epic from the unconstrained Washington, but evidence again of his skilful merger of seemingly disparate images from that “full picture of jazz”.
Funeral For Justice
by Mdou Moctar
The convenient shorthand for Mdou Moctar – the band fronted by singer-guitarist Mahamadou Souleymane AKA Mdou Moctar – means citing Jimi Hendrix. But where Hendrix largely avoided politics and aimed for the planets, Mdou Moctar have no such luxury. They come from Niger, where there was a military coup last year, and a legacy of French imperialism, Russian troops currently embedded, volatile Islamic fundamentalists and a subsistence existence.
Mdou Moctar are of the nomadic Berber people, the Tuareg, like the more familiar groups Tinariwen, Etran Finatawa, Tamikrest and others whose music has been labelled Sahara blues or desert blues.
Mdou Moctar, however, start with amps on overdrive and an unfiltered, righteous anger. From the title and cover art inward – with only a couple of more familiar Sahara blues pieces – this burns with white-hot intensity, the guitars deployed like rocket launchers.
You won’t understand a word but Funeral for Justice is utterly thrilling psychedelicised blues-rock. Essential for Guitar Player subscribers.
These albums are available digitally, on CD and vinyl.
