The Message

The Message sounds like a journey that starts in the living room of an ordinary house and ends in the sky. It’s not jazz that stays on the staff: here the saxophones stretch like sunflowers seeking light, the drums hit with an urgency that doesn’t ask for permission, and the strings get tangled in a dialogue where no one gives in. The piece is built on a hypnotic groove that doesn’t resolve in four measures, but expands like a long, almost disordered sigh, yet with a precision that only appears when the band breathes in unison. The most curious thing is how that apparent chaos ends up being the backbone: there are no abrupt cuts or forced transitions, just a current that drags everything in its path.

They recorded it in 2015, at a time when The Epic —the album that contains it— became Kamasi Washington's first record to be released by Brainfeeder, a label that at that time already smelled of revolution. The engineers —among them Tony Austin, Chris Constable, and Julie Everson— let the microphones capture every breath of the musicians, without editing the mistakes or polishing the edges. The result is a live take where even the sweat of the fingers on the strings sounds intentional. Benjamin Tierney, the one who mixed it, managed to make Washington's sax float above the rest without drowning it, as if the sound itself had weight and lightness at the same time. The eleven-minute duration is not a whim: it is the right amount of time for the song to breathe, disassemble, and reassemble without haste.