Program Guide 2019 Program Guide | Page 63

The most talked-about jazz musician in recent memory. — ROLLING STONE The best way to experience the cleanse and burn of Kamasi Washington’s music is live. — THE NEW YORK TIMES Kamasi Washington Arts Centre Melbourne Hamer Hall Tue 8 October 8pm Approx 1 hr no interval   Tickets from $79 Eligible for Transaction fees may apply festival.melbourne Arts Centre Melbourne 1300 182 183 Some musicians blaze a trail so fiercely that others get caught up in the slipstream. Kamasi Washington is one, and there’s nothing left unchanged by his touch. Washington polished his craft playing as a session musician for artists ranging from Herbie Hancock to Snoop Dogg, but it was his work on Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly that saw him really turn heads. When he turned to composing, producing and performing with his own band, that promise erupted with a force beyond anyone’s imagining. His fertile, expansive style of jazz might have roots in Coltrane, Davis and Sun Ra but equally rips chunks of inspiration from Afro- beat, trance, electronica and soul. Intricate solos spill out into sweeping orchestration of a cinematic scale, conjuring vistas of an Afrofuturist utopia hovering on the horizon. 61