Kamasi Washington – Fearless Movement (2024) [FLAC 24bit/44,1kHz]

Kamasi Washington – Fearless Movement (2024)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/44,1 kHz | Time – 01:26:21 minutes | 991 MB | Genre: Jazz
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Young

Washington calls Fearless Movement his dance album. “It’s not literal,” Washington says. “Dance is movement and expression, and in a way it’s the same thing as music—expressing your spirit through your body. That’s what this album is pushing.” Dance as an embodied form of expression signals a shift in focus for Washington. Where previous albums dealt with cosmic ideas and existential concepts, Fearless Movement focuses in on the everyday, an exploration of life on earth. This change in scope is due in large part to the birth of Washington’s first child a few years ago. “Being a father means the horizon of your life all of a sudden shows up,” says Washington. “My mortality became more apparent to me, but also my immortality—realizing that my daughter is going to live on and see things that I’m never going to see. I had to become comfortable with this, and that affected the music that I was making.” The album features Washington’s daughter—who wrote the melody to “Asha The First” during some of her first experimentations on the piano—as well as a host of collaborators new and old. André 3000 appears on flute, George Clinton lends his voice, as do BJ The Chicago Kid, Inglewood rapper D-Smoke and Taj and Ras Austin of Coast Contra, the twin sons of West Coast legend Ras Kass. Washington further enlisted lifelong friends and collaborators Thundercat, Terrace Martin, Patrice Quinn, Brandon Coleman, DJ Battlecat and more. The album also features “The Garden Path,” a song Washington performed for the first time ever, making his late-night television debut, on “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon.” Kamasi Washington is a multi-instrumentalist, composer and bandleader born and raised in Los Angeles. His three bodies of work to date—The Epic; Harmony of Difference, an EP originally commissioned for the 2017 Whitney Biennial; and Heaven and Earth—are among the most acclaimed of this century. As Told To G/D Thyself, his short film companion to Heaven and Earth, debuted at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival to widespread acclaim. In 2020, Washington scored the Michelle Obama documentary Becoming, earning Emmy and Grammy nominations for his work. Also in 2020, Washington co-founded the supergroup Dinner Party with long-time friends and collaborators Terrace Martin, Robert Glasper and 9th Wonder—their EP Dinner Party (Dessert) was subsequently nominated for a Grammy for Best Progressive R&B Album. In 2021, he contributed a cover of Metallica’s “My Friend of Misery” to the band’s Metallica Blacklist covers project. Washington has toured the world over and collaborated and shared stages with Kendrick Lamar, Florence + the Machine, Herbie Hancock and many more.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

Tracklist:

1-1. Kamasi Washington – Lesanu (09:22)
1-2. Kamasi Washington – Asha The First (07:46)
1-3. Kamasi Washington – Computer Love (09:26)
1-4. Kamasi Washington – The Visionary (01:10)
1-5. Kamasi Washington – Get Lit (03:26)
1-6. Kamasi Washington – Dream State (08:39)
1-7. Kamasi Washington – Together (05:34)
1-8. Kamasi Washington – The Garden Path (06:40)
1-9. Kamasi Washington – Road to Self (KO) (13:25)
1-10. Kamasi Washington – Interstellar Peace (The Last Stance) (05:04)
1-11. Kamasi Washington – Lines in the Sand (07:25)
1-12. Kamasi Washington – Prologue (08:19)

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