Kamasi Washington in the West Theater: the freedom of the expenditure

Katharsis or whatever it is that music makes a holy act, has a pious advocate in Kamasi Washington. He follows the dynamics of a gospel fair that formed him as a 13-year-old as a musician in every song-if he plays it live.

Accompanied by his seven -member band, to which his father Rickey Washington also belongs, the 44 -year -old saxophonist keeps waiting for the tilting point in the theater of the West on Monday, waiting behind the ecstasy and exhaustion – and the edges become blurred. This is an exciting moment. If the band reaches the energy wave to close it to demand more of yourself than you have “on it”, everyone is challenged equally. It is the step outside. Not everyone likes him.

Role models like John Coltrane

An American critic described this as “roar”. It was nuanced, but just loud, hot air. You can see it as follows: Washington language becomes rough and simple behind the threshold, loses elegance and also the binding to a jazz vocabulary that had role models such as John Coltrane, Wayne Shorter or Sonny Rollins back with a sophisticated turn to exit. Not so here, where Washington impulsive tones like screams or calls work in darkness.

The fact that it is so far is absolutely plausible for the spiritual dimension that makes music for Washington in the first place. Also around the price that it sounds simple -minded.

Imposing fulfillment

With its imposing abundance of physical physical stature, Washington has the physical stature in order to delay this point very far. While drums and bass create swirling whirlpools, Kamasi Washington blows the soul out of the neck. At some point, if it is enough and a calmness to spread out after the storm, he smiles happily.

“Now my heart is free / staring back at me,” says “Asha the First”. A knowledge that is a mantra over the evening.

Washington’s pioneering act in the form of the Tripple album “The Epic” was ten years ago. At that time it was read as a message to African -American society to be secure its roots. Since then, the tenor saxophonist has constantly refined its funds. He has long been aimed at all people he sees in a transcendental space.

Most recently, with “Fearless Movement”, his “dance album”, as he calls it, appeared a more than one-hour foray through radio and hardbop rhythms that do not want to hide their intellectual proximity to the R’n’B, with double-occupied drums, DJs and rappers such as D Smoke.

Radio and hardbop rhythms

Pieces from this also form the scaffolding of the Berlin concert, which was supposed to take place last autumn, but was postponed. Washington’s troops cleverly distances itself from the studio material when the inclusion of DJ BattleCAT is shown as a background backdrop and covered by the band in an act of reconquest.

In general, a lot takes place at several levels. The DJ deconstructs the jazz that fights for its shape on stage. Then again the musicians in the thunderstorms from electronic beats and pathetic wind sets communicate as casual and sensitive to each other as if the sky did not exactly work over them.

Washington wants to create lasting experiences. Something that does not immediately disappear like the one sung by Patrice Quinn „lines in the sand“. It is about cohesion that is not built on sand (“together”). Is a concert that began with an Orthodox Ethiopian prayer and was suitable in a tango by Astor Piazolla entitled “Prologue”? A forecost ‘for what?

Everyone probably has to find out for themselves. There is no doubt that he is, the “Garden Path”, the “Garden Path”.