Kamasi Washington Takes Spiritual Jazz In a New Direction

When Kamasi Washington named his new single after a video game, it became even clearer that he represents a new face of modern jazz. The song “Street Fighter Mas” is part of his new 144-minute opus, Heaven and Earth, a critically-acclaimed album that shows the 37-year-old is nothing sort of a legend in the making.

Last week, we were lucky enough to witness his greatness live in Seminyak, Bali, as part of a VICE x Potato Head Bali collaboration. Washington and his seven-piece band (including two drummers!) brought the audience along on a spiritual journey, playing song after song from his three albums with the beautiful Batu Belig beach as the backdrop. Washington even surprised the already hypnotized crowd by bringing his dad and mentor, Rickey Washington, on stage for two numbers.

Hours before the show, VICE sat with Washington in his hotel to talk about how pop culture influences jazz, the story behind his new album, and the traditional Indonesian ensemble music gamelan, which coincidentally was playing in the room next door.

VICE: Judging from the music video for “Street Fighter Mas,” Blanka must be your favorite character from Street Fighter.
Kamasi Washington: Blanka is my one of my go-to guys. But Ryu is my classic character that I’ve used for the longest.

Did you play in a lot of arcades growing up?
Yeah, all I did was play Street Fighter and Tekken when I was a kid. When I grew up, they used to have Street Fighter machines, arcade machines, at liquor stores and 7-Elevens. So we would go and hang out there and just play all day.

Your dad was a music teacher, but did you click with jazz right away?
When I was really young, I never disliked jazz, but I was more into hip-hop. When I was about 11, this was when I really got into jazz and really felt that this wasn’t just the music my dad was into, but my music, you know.

I basically had an older cousin who I looked up to. He played trumpet, and I started on drums and I played piano, but I wasn’t really into it then. I started playing clarinet and got pretty good on it and found out that I could read music. I had this thick music book that had all jazz songs on it. He didn’t know how to read music but he liked jazz. So he had me come over to his house and show him how to play songs out of the book. I thought that was cool because you know, when you’re the little brother, the big cousins don’t want you hanging out with them. All of a sudden I had a pass to hang out with them. He gave me this Art Blakey mixtape and he told me to go and see my dad’s record collection to see if he had any Art Blakey records that weren’t on this tape. That Art Blakey tape really got me into jazz. I started digging through my dad’s record collection and listened to them and switching to saxophone. Thats when jazz really became my heart. So it’s not like out of the womb [laughs].

Did you listen to hip-hop as a way to rebel against your dad’s music taste?
I don’t think my dad was against hip-hop. He was just oblivious to it [laughs]. You know, hip-hop was the sound of my generation, what my friends were listening to. That music was the foundation of the music that I like. It opened me up to jazz and once I started really listening to it, you feel the spirit, the energy of jazz. Once you open yourself to it, it really attaches to you. You get a bit deep into it. So yeah, it wasn’t so much rebelling against my dad, but more of wanting my own thing.

Before you landed gigs as a session musician with Snoop Dogg and all these other big names, did you ever have to do odd jobs?
You know, I’ve never had a day job. I was doing gigs, playing music, making money when I was 14, 15. It was pretty early on. When I was way younger, I’d cut the lawn, or wash someone’s car for a few bucks. But nah, I’ve never had an employer, other than music.

You’ve done a lot of collaborations, with people in and outside your band. Do you feel like you’re still learning something new every time?
Yeah, I hope I’ll never stop learning. How boring would the world be if I knew everything, you know? We went to see a gamelan group last night. The teacher of like this youth group was teaching us a song that his son wrote. So you know, it’s like, there’s so much to life on this planet that there’s always something to learn so yes, hopefully I’ll keep learning.

Speaking of gamelan, I remember seeing you in a “What’s In My Bag” video where you talk about your interest in the instrument. Will we see some gamelan action on your future album?
When I went to college I was a ethnomusicology major, and that’s how I got introduced to gamelan music. I’m definitely open to adding the actual instruments but the musical part of it, the scales, the melodic concepts, the style of it, I already use a lot of it in my music. It’s something that stuck with me.

Sweet. Let’s talk about Heaven and Earth. Can you talk about this concept of duality the album seems to be about?
It’s a metaphor for two different perceptions of reality. It’s like how you imagine things and how you experience them. Right now we’re talking and we’re having an experience, but before we had this meeting, I had a notion of what it would be like and after the meeting, I’ll have a memory of what it was.

So to me, that’s the reality that your mind creates. What you think, how you imagine this meeting is going affects how it’s going now and how you remember it affects what’s happening now. That’s kinda the duality I’m talking about. For me that was the seed of what made the album.

And for me, in my own life, in my own experience, I always believe in that. The cool part of the journey is that as you go through it, you realize that with that, we have more control of reality than we thought. The reality is no one can really affect the whole world, but each of us can affect our small part of the world. And if we focus on that, and realize we have the responsibility to make our small pocket of the world a beautiful place, then the whole world will start to become more beautiful.

The term “spiritual jazz” has been used a lot to describe your music. What do you think about that?
I definitely love all the musicians they put me with [laughs]. I like the guys in my box! But I never believe in musically fitting in a box. I don’t think you can fully encompass the music of someone like John Coltrane with the word spiritual jazz. I think that his music is his music. His music shares a relationship with someone like Pharoah Sanders or someone like Sun Ra but they’re different, you know. Music is profoundly an individual expression. It really comes from the person. You’re really sharing who you are. So on one hand, yeah it’s cool, I’m definitely not mad at anyone associating me with those great musicians, but I guess it depends on what each individual thinks spiritual jazz is. If spiritual jazz includes a song about video games, then yeah [laughs].

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.