JAZZ SAVIOUR

Kamasi Washington doesn’t want to save jazz. He just wants you to give it a chance. In the same way that the perception of country music is saddled with layers of exaggerated twang, jazz has been pigeon-holed into the living rooms of audiophiles with squillion-dollar hi-fis, and quiet dinner-date background music. “Musicians in the past suffered from the word jazz having this bad reputation,” figured the saxophonist, who draws a lineage of jazz from early big band, through James Brown — “not the name, but the music, absolutely,” — to hip hop. “People putting words on jazz music and call it hip-hop. That’s been doing well,” he said. “Ask most R ’n’ B musicians and producers what they like, and they all love Herbie Hancock and Stevie Wonder. It’s jazz, the word, that’s been having a hard go of it, and it’s affected a lot of musicians who strongly associate themselves with that word. When people give the music a chance it’s such a freeing, spontaneous, soothing-to-your-soul music.”

Washington himself doesn’t like all jazz: “If you get introduced to John Coltrane, you’re not automatically going to like Count Basie. Same thing with hip-hop; you hear Kendrick and love it, but you may not like a DJ Luke song. I don’t know that my music can all of a sudden make people like jazz, what I hope it does is make people more open-minded so when they come across something labelled as jazz, they’re no longer saying, ‘I’m not listening to that!’ That’s what happened to jazz for a long time.”