Fearless Movement

Kamasi Washington

Released on 03-05-2024 by Young
Main artists: Kamasi Washington
Genre: Moderne jazz
Distinctions: Album of the week

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Kamasi Washington's first studio album in six years is shorter and more conceptually focused than the rep-cementing three-hour opuses (2015's The Epic and 2018's Heaven and Earth) that preceded it. But the ambition-exceeding spirit remains, and as a bandleader Washington has both gotten the most from his ensemble and integrated a cast of supporting characters that rise to and expand his vision of contemporary L.A. jazz. Fearless Movement has been described by Washington as a "dance album"—not in the genre sense (which it nods to a bit) but the metaphysical one, aiming to cultivate the symbiosis between sonic expression and the physical expressions that react to it. That interaction isn't hard to come by since this music is a real body motivator when it's upfront and close-quarters tactile when it's quiet. The more-hybrid-than-crossover integration of funk and hip-hop, characteristic of the importance of the last 40 years of L.A. musical tradition to his continuation of jazz, certainly helps the case. Nearly a half-century removed from Funkadelic asking "who says a jazz band can't play dance music?," George Clinton provides the elder-statesman trickster-genius harmonies alongside Inglewood's D Smoke and his brightly drawled every-gen g-funk meditations; the result is that the three-and-a-half-minute "Get Lit" is the closest Washington's come to something you could pinpoint as a could-be pop hit.

Since what these compositions do is acknowledge the integral evolution of what was called "soul jazz" in the '60s and add both a deeply spiritual ferocity and another couple generations' worth of developments in Black pop, the eclecticism in the album's collab-heavy first half feels more like a display of adaptability and communal gathering than a scattered exercise in genre-hopping. Careening from the mid-'60s Wayne Shorter evocations of opener "Lesanu" to the Thundercat-riddled Miles-to-Jaco continuum of fusion in "Ahsa the First" to a gracefully-exploding synths-and-pianos cover of none other than Zapp's "Computer Love" is a striking feat, and the surprise emergence of Andre 3000's flautist phase is given a nuanced yet indispensable presence on the rippling "Dream State." But it's in the back half of the album that the euphoria starts to feel truly physical, especially the omnidirectional pull of the drum/sax interplay in "Road to Self (KO)" and the stunningly declarative outburst of implacable uptempo closer "Prologue," where the horn solos expand like crystals that spontaneously keep growing new facets until they explode into glimmering shrapnel. As "dance music" goes, this is as close we'll ever get to the idea of '70s NYC "loft jazz," including David Mancuso's proto-disco alongside Sam Rivers' Studio Rivbea. It's music for dancing in and outside your head. © Nate Patrin/Qobuz

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Fearless Movement

Kamasi Washington

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Lesanu