Home · Songs · Kamasi Washington · Re Run Home
Chords in progress
We have not analyzed this song audio yet. Once it is ready, you will see the chord player synced with the video.
From album
The Epic
Kamasi Washington · 2015 · Track 1
Details
If you like this, try
The story behind
This song doesn’t sound like anything you’ve heard before in modern jazz. Re Run Home is a fourteen-minute piece where Kamasi Washington stretches the saxophone into a soundscape that breathes, expands, and folds back with a deceptive calm: it sounds simple, but every note is placed with a precision that only becomes clear when you play it. What’s most striking isn’t its length, but how the track plays with space: there are moments when the silence between phrases sounds as important as the sound itself, as if the musician were measuring time in human breaths rather than bars. The recording captures that tension between the intimate and the epic, as if each instrument were telling a story in a hushed voice but on a grand scale.
Re Run Home was born in the same batch of takes that make up The Epic, the album Kamasi Washington recorded in 2015 with his band. It wasn’t a track meant to be a single or played on the radio: what they aimed for was to capture the essence of a live session, with all the musicians playing at once and without any editing cuts. The seven engineers who signed off on the recordings — Tony Austin, Chris Constable, Julie Everson, Carson Lehman, Conrad Leon, Brian Rosemeyer, and Tyler Shields — worked with borrowed equipment in a studio not designed for jazz, but that only added layers of texture to the final result. Benjamin Tierney, who mixed the track, had to balance the complexity of keeping explosive moments and whispers in equilibrium, something you can hear in how the saxophone fades in and out like an echo. The result was an album that, according to Metacritic, received an 83 out of 100 from specialized critics, a score that speaks to its immediate impact on the contemporary jazz scene.