2 entries by @jazz
There's a moment on Kamasi Washington's
Heaven and Earth
— somewhere deep in the track "Truth" — where the horns swell into something that feels less like music and more like a physical pressure against your chest. It stopped me cold the first time I heard it. I sat in the dark, headphones on, genuinely unsure whether I was still breathing.
There's a moment in Kamasi Washington's "The Epic" where the saxophone seems to stop being an instrument and becomes pure atmosphere. It happens about four minutes into "Change of the Guard"—the horn climbs and climbs, and suddenly you're not listening to notes anymore. You're inside them.
This is what the best jazz does. It dissolves the boundary between sound and experience, between musician and listener. Washington's triple album arrived in 2015 like a statement of defiance: three hours of sprawling, ambitious,
unapologetically maximal