SIX YEARS after winning MOJO’s Album Of The Year award for his 183-minute existential epic Heaven And Earth, Kamasi Washington is back with something completely different. While it’s relatively svelte at 80 minutes (“a two-course meal,” he jokes), the as-yet-untitled opus is also the tenor saxophonist’s most deeply felt too, inspired by a new arrival in the Washington household.
“I became a father while making this record and within that I felt the greatest joy, but also the greatest levels of apprehension,” he says from his home in Los Angeles. “There’s a lot of duality. It’s my most grounded record in my most grounded state, where I’m really seeing the beauty in the world, the light in the darkness, through a different lens. It was difficult to make because it was so personal.”
Partly written during lockdown in Amsterdam, Washington was relieved to start recording again with his regular band of old schoolfriends, when sessions started in 2022. “It’s a very rhythmic record. It’s about connection, about how rhythm and music connects to people, how it affects us and how life can steer us. People in the band wrote for this one too.” However, he’s tight-lipped about its special guests. “I think people will be very excited about it. I’m very excited. We’re talking legends, let’s put it like that.”
While his band work fast (“Sometimes we get four songs in one day, sometimes none”), many tracks morphed during recording. “To me, a song is similar to a person. We’re all born with certain things but what we end up becoming is based off the life we live. When I write I often think I’ve got a little doctor in my hands, but find out it’s really a comedian or an artist or a lawyer. I try to keep my mind as open as possible in the studio, I don’t want to close off any possibilities. If we can figure out what a song is, we can breathe life into it.”
The last few years have proved reflective for Washington. “I’ve lost a few mentors and friends,” he says. “You get to that point in life where you almost see the horizon of your own mortality. Your priorities start to switch up a bit.” And with a surplus of unused songs, he suggests the new LP may just be the tip of the iceberg, release-wise.
“I definitely think it will be a productive few years for me. I feel a desire to complete things. My natural impulse is to sit on things. For decades I had my studio in my dad’s garage. The song The Rhythm Changes [from 2015’s The Epic] lived on a Post-It note on my piano. My bass player, Miles Mosley, is a really organised guy. He was like, ‘That’s really great’, and I was like, Yeah, I’m just missing something with the bridge. He would see that Post-It note and be like, , ‘It’s giving me so much anxiety that this song only lives here’. Now all those Post-It songs are getting charts. Everybody’s being put in the game a little quicker.”
Portrait: Russell Hamilton
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