Amazon Film Shows Kamasi Washington’s Big Band At the Apollo

Jazz saxophonist, Kamasi Washington’s movie on his jazz performance at the Apollo, is a featured release on Amazon Prime Music this Thursday

By Kevin C. Peterson

The sonic ferocity that emanates from the fulcrum of Kumasi Washington’s big jazz band has deservedly garnered him accolade as an enormous talent who has managed to lift from the music’s long archival narrative a galvanizing gradient of sound that is at once highly reverential and truly future bending.

Gifted with a nous and talent for large, progressive encompassing presentation, Washington has captured, through his agility on the saxophone, the sensibilities of the current generation listening to jazz. These days he travels constantly across the nation appearing in small venues and larger concert halls, radio and TV shows, music festivals and universities where he advances his ever-expansive worldview with declarative intensity.

The properties of Washington’s sound can be generalized (at the risk taken by the jazz critic) as having superlatively immersive and propelling preponderant qualities that render listeners into meditative mindsets; it is a sound that collars them at the junctures of whatever previous knowledge they may have possessed about jazz — ushering them, with warm welcome, into yet another territory.

There are clear dimensions of Washington body of work. As a now emergent artist, Washington regularly explores the caverns of the…