#1737 Kamasi Washington - The Epic

Coming in epic-sized at 3 hours: 3 discs packed with 15 minute jazz tunes. Yikes.

Rock
The way Washington tears open his sax on the more frantic tracks is pure Hendrix, total rock and roll distortion. Hear that freakout at the heart of Final Thought and hear guitars that aren't even there, feel the way the songs stretch until they look like Zappa jams and prog rock opuses.

Classical
Or to even skip the prog step, feel that reach for import and scope and masterpiece, even more so than the big Davis/Coltrane epics.

Exotica
And those operatic space-voyage backing vocals, those little odd-instument flourishes, those big cushions of strings, it all has that transportive quality of the 50's exotica I've been up into.

Jazz
And yes, jazz, all kinds of jazz, most obviously the hourlong genre-expanders of the 60's.

Everything
The worst thing about this album is that it tries to do too much. Those backing strings in particular seem like a new-for-its-own-sake shortcut to spicing up the tonal palette - they intrude, feeling ornamental and heavyhanded. And the vocal tracks like The Rhythm Changes are out of place, seemingly there just to check the box.

And that grasp is also the best thing about this album. I mentioned the 60's and it has that feel, of trying to see how far we can take this thing, of drawing on everything insight to find a cranny of new, and that kind of adventurousness and grasping is refreshing right about now.

And for a style-spanning, massive-length, truly epic album, in a genre not exactly known for its accessibility, it's actually not a particularly difficult listen. It's a journey, but you've got guides and snacks and you can kind of just let the alien landscape roil onto itself in the distance 3.5/5