Kamasi Washington - Heaven and Earth

Pitchfork 88

The latest from the saxophonist and bandleader is a multi-genre feast of musical ideas, his most sweeping and complete statement yet.

The Guardian 80

The US saxophonist has found his time and it is now: this excellent album connects politics with the jazz of the past to create an angrily inclusive new vision

Ten years ago, British saxophone legend Courtney Pine painted a sobering picture of life as a modern British jazz musician in an interview with the Guardian. For all the study involved in becoming one, most jazz musicians had no hope of making a living, unless they were one of the clean-cut vocalists content to ring-a-ding-ding their way through the great American songbook to the delight of Michael Parkinson: you could fully expect your weekends to be spent not exploring the outer limits of improvisation, but playing in a wedding band to make ends meet. “An incredible sale in this day and age is 3,000 copies,” he lamented.

Here was evidence of how modern jazz lurks on the very fringes of mainstream public consciousness. You could fill a book with ways jazz has influenced rock and pop – from post-punk’s skronk to the samples of hip-hop and trip-hop – but apart from the aforementioned ring-a-ding-dingers, no serious jazz musician has really crossed over to huge mainstream success since the 1970s, the era of Miles Davis’s Bitches Brew and the Mahavishnu Orchestra, of the super-smooth George Benson and Grover Washington Jr, and of Keith Jarrett’s Köln Concert wafting around in the background of dinner parties.

Related: Kamasi Washington, figurehead of the new jazz revival

The Guardian 80

(Young Turks)

Los Angeles saxophonist and band leader Kamasi Washington cuts a divisive figure in the jazz world. Some traditionalists consider his sound derivative, but for a new generation the Kendrick Lamar collaborator has catalysed interest in a scene that once felt inaccessible. His second LP, a conceptual double album exploring earth (reality) and heaven (idealisation), is perhaps unlikely to sway the old guard, but it pushes forward with a purposeful vitality that was at times missing from his debut album, The Epic. The gripping Earth side bursts to life with Fists of Fury, a Bruce Lee film score cover (with Patrice Quinn’s refrain: “Our time as victims is over/ We will no longer ask for justice/ Instead, we will take our retribution”), setting the scene for more political charge and soaring retro cinema stylings than before. While Earth finds Washington wielding his sax as a furious, necessary weapon, the indulgent, opulent cushion of Heaven serves as a dazzling balm, the choir transforming from theatrical to celestial. Final track Will You Sing? blends the urgency of the first half with the dreaminess of the second, fittingly closing an immersive call to realise Washington’s idealised, heavenly vision.