← The New Yorker Radio Hour
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Brazil, Bruce Lee, and Black Lives in the Music of Kamasi Washington, and the Uncertain Future of the Democratic Party
00:29:39
Benjamin Wallace-Wells provides a survey of some key midterm races and considers what they tell us about the direction of the Democratic Party. And David Remnick speaks with the saxophonist and bandleader Kamasi Washington. For anyone who thinks of jazz as just classic compositions played in dimly lit clubs, Washington’s music will come as a surprise and revelation. His concerts are like dance parties. And his albums draws on influences from Coltrane to Stravinsky to Fela Kuti to N.W.A. His eclectic style has made him a star in the jazz world, and has attracted some high-profile collaborators, including Lauryn Hill, Snoop Dogg and Kendrick Lamar. And the political message of some of his music led one critic to call him “the jazz voice of Black Lives Matter.” “The major effect that music has is it connects people,” Washington tells David Remnick, “That’s kind of the extent of what the music can do. In the end, the world changes as people decide to change.”
Loading summary
Transcript80 lines
- [00:01]
Narrator/Producer
From One World Trade center in Manhattan, this is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co production of WNYC Studios and the New Yorker.
- [00:12]
David Remnick
Welcome to the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. On the show today, saxophonist and band leader Kamasi Washington. If the name sounds familiar, it's because he's a composer who performs at pop festivals like Coachella, and he writes music for jazz bands and orchestras and hip hop, too. But if you don't know his name or his music, you're in for a treat that's later this hour. While it may be what's come to be called an off year election, the anticipation for the 2018 midterms is building every day. Ben Wallace Wells has been writing about primary races across the country, and he sat down with the New Yorker's executive editor, Dorothy Wickenden earlier this week to talk about what he's been seeing.
- [00:58]
Dorothy Wickenden
Ben There are a lot of insurgent primary campaigns in the Democratic Party this cycle, but Alexandria Ocasio Cortez's bid against Joseph Crowley has gotten probably the most attention of all so far. Why is that? And how did she win?
- [01:15]
Ben Wallace Wells
I think part of it is something to do with more than tactics. There's a kind of romance around her. I think that, you know, Democrats have been looking for something to get excited about, somebody who suggests some possibility of the future. And for a time at least, Ocasio Cortez came to sort of embody that. She's 28. She was a bar as of eight months ago. She was a bartender. She's an activist. She is Puerto Rican. I think a lot of it had to do with her district, which is half Hispanic and was represented by an older white man, Joseph Crowley. I think part of it also had to do with Crowley himself, who, who not only was, you know, fourth in the Democratic leadership in the House of Representatives in Washington, but was also the longtime chair of the Queen's Democratic Party and so had run, you know, a pretty traditional Democratic machine.
- [02:08]
Dorothy Wickenden
You know, we've seen her victory and then her quick embrace by the party afterward did repeat a pattern that we've seen since the middle of the Obama years where the Democratic establishment quickly, you know, adopts left wing protest movements from Occupy to Black Lives Matter matter, the Parkland students, you know, and on and on. And yet the establishment still is kind of holding firm. So Bernie Sanders did end up pushing Hillary Clinton to the left. Has Sanders and have these other sort of grassroots movements continued to push the party further left?
- [02:48]
Ben Wallace Wells
Yeah, I think further left even than they were at the end of 2016. One way to measure this is just to look at the kind of signal figures who, you might say, sort of represent the Clinton kind of wing of the establishment, the standard bearers. You know, you see Kristen Gillibrand, the senator from New York, Cory Booker, the senator from New Jersey, both figures with presidential ambitions themselves. And they've embraced not only, you know, Medicare for all, not only the $15 minimum wage. They've even gone so far as to support in tentative form a federal jobs guarantee, which is something that, you know, until very recently was. Was pretty far out on the fringe of policy. And part of the question is whether the grassroots will be satisfied with that, whether they'll think that is enough, or whether whether what they have in mind is sort of a broader change in who leads the party.
- [03:41]
Dorothy Wickenden
In New York, Governor Andrew Cuomo is being challenged by Cynthia Nixon, the Sex and the City actress. And that poses real problems for him. So how is he dealing with her? Do you see substantive ways that Nixon's candidacy has changed how Cuomo is governing?
- [03:59]
Ben Wallace Wells
Yeah, I think on minimum wage, certainly. I think in kind of his embrace of unions and their priorities, there has been some substantive movement. It's worth noting that, you know, she's still down to Cuomo by 25, 30 points, depending on what poll you look at. So, you know, we're still looking at whether the kind of progressive ideas that, you know, moved through the Sanders campaign and very obviously animated the Ocasio, Cortez, the success, whether those will play in a broader stage.
- [04:29]
Dorothy Wickenden
Right now, Ocasio, Cortez and Nixon are part of this wave we keep hearing about of female candidates, many of them young and new to politics. Talk a little bit about the reasons for that and sort of how they're affecting the party overall.
- [04:45]
Ben Wallace Wells
You know, when you look at the landscape of candidates, there is undoubtedly a huge, huge influx of women. You know, we've seen changes in, in the way campaign commercials run. Early in the cycle, there was a spate of campaign commercials with, with women breastfeeding on camera to demonstrate their enthusiasm for family friendly policies. You know, we've seen people talking about histories of their own personal abuse, female candidates, Democratic candidates in campaign commercials, the fact of the Trump presidency. And I think, you know, now we're going to see with the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh for Supreme Court justice, an increased emphasis, I think, on the threats to reproductive rights and particularly Roe versus Wade. Part of what we're seeing in primaries sort of again and again is a sharpening distinction between how women are voting and how men are voting.
- [05:45]
Dorothy Wickenden
There is also a broader generational change going on in the party. Tell us just a little bit about this tug in the party between bringing in the newer generation and sweeping out the old. Nancy Pelosi. There's a big battle going on about Nancy Pelosi's seat.
- [06:02]
Ben Wallace Wells
Yes, it does feel like in 10 years, maybe even five years, maybe even one year, the leadership of the Democratic Party is going to look both ideologically and in terms of who is leading it, quite different. Just to have a party that is, in a way that it hasn't been for at least a generation, on policy, sort of a forthright, progressive party, and yet at the same time have it still be dependent on, you know, a huge amount of campaign funding from. From billionaires and. And dependent, therefore, on the party leaders who can draw that money. There's an obvious tension and a problem there. It increasingly seems that, you know, even if Pelosi lasts and the leadership team around her lasts through this election, a bigger change is coming.
- [06:51]
Dorothy Wickenden
You know, I want to ask you about the Midwest, which is going to be key both in 2018 and 2020. Wisconsin seems like a really interesting way to examine what's going on as, like, a group of candidates who are taking on Governor Scott Walker.
- [07:06]
Ben Wallace Wells
Yeah, I mean, Wisconsin has an obvious historic and symbolic resonance. It's where the Tea Party revolution and then the, you know, kind of Republican capitulation to that insurgency. It's where that whole sequence of events really got started. And so there are 10 candidates for governor, and not a single one has really emerged as a front runner. And so part of the idea that we had a year ago about this coming set of midterms was that this fight between the Clinton wing and. And the Sanders wing of the party would be won and lost, and that there would be a kind of clear view of what the Democratic Party was. That isn't really the case. You know, the party has definitely moved left on policy. It's not so clear that it has sort of toppled the powers that be. And in Wisconsin, I think you see a particularly clear case of that where, you know, the party just isn't yet sure really like where it's going.
- [08:05]
Dorothy Wickenden
You've been to many parts of the country as you cover the midterm races, what do you find the issues are that voters are responding to. What should Democrats be focusing on?
- [08:15]
Ben Wallace Wells
I think that both core Democratic voters and people who Democrats want to sway want to think of what they are taking part in as a popular movement against conservative elites that There was this revolution in the country politically, but that things have not changed, that the basic dynamics of power have not shifted, that people's lives have not been improved. I think that's, you know, where the voters that Democrats want to win are. He's for the really rich guys. He's not for the poor guys. It was a lie all along.
- [08:55]
Dorothy Wickenden
Thank you so much, Ben.
- [08:57]
Ben Wallace Wells
Thanks, Dorothy. It's good to talk.
- [09:03]
David Remnick
That was the New Yorker's Dorothy Wickenden talking with Ben Wallace Wells. You can find all of Ben's writing on politics@newyorker.com Ahead this hour, the saxophonist Kamasi Washington takes me through his audacious new album. That's in a minute on the New Yorker Radio Hour. Welcome back to the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. You don't generally hear the words celebrity and jazz musician in the same sentence nowadays, but the saxophonist Kamasi Washington has come to be both. Washington released his first album in 2015, and it was called the Epic, and the title was pretty fitting. The album featured a full orchestra, choir, multiple jazz ensembles, and it was quite long. The Epic was a hit, though, and Washington was soon being compared to great performers across the genres from Sun Ra to John Coltrane. He was hailed as a visionary musician who was bringing the political fusion jazz styles of the 60s and 70s into the 21st century. Washington just released a new album called Heaven and Earth, and it's the kind of record you can get totally lost in hearing something new every time you listen. When I sat down with Kamasi Washington in the studio, I asked his help in decoding it. With such an epical album like this, how does it begin? In what form? And this is the second really long and involved and thematic record that you've done. Does it start out as musical ideas, bits and phrases, or is it.
- [11:06]
Kamasi Washington
Well, it starts off as songs, I mean, and each song starts off as a musical idea where I'll have an idea, but it's not really, I don't really know what it's supposed to be.
- [11:17]
David Remnick
You know, give me an example of that.
- [11:22]
Kamasi Washington
So, like the song on Heaven, vilu will be Sold, it started off just as a rhythm. I met someone in Brazil and she was a really kind of interesting person. Like she, she was walking around just kind of tapping this rhythm and, and talking to the moon. And that rhythm stuck with me. And then I was stuck on the rhythm trying to talk to the moon. And eventually that rhythm turned into that bass line.
- [12:14]
David Remnick
Now, Heaven and Earth is a collection of songs, obviously, but at some point, something suggests itself that there's a coherent thematic thing going on. What was going on in your life that you think, or in terms of events or out in the world that really grounded this record.
- [12:33]
Kamasi Washington
I mean, I was at a place where I was living the life that I always dreamed of living, you know, And I kind of had the experience of, like, when in 2015, I decided that I could do it. It happened. Whereas my whole life I've been making music and wanting to do something that I kind of was on the fence as to whether or not it was possible. And then at a certain point, I said, well, I don't care if it's possible or not. I'm going to do it. You know, which kind of is a sense of me kind of deciding that.
- [13:07]
David Remnick
It can be that you give yourself permission to be a professional performing, recording musician.
- [13:13]
Kamasi Washington
Well, I was already a professional performing musician, but I gave myself the confidence to know that I could make my career about my own music instead of just about me helping other people make their music.
- [13:36]
David Remnick
Now, the first track is Fists of Fury, which is a cover of the theme song to a Bruce Lee film. I don't remember that movie. What was it about?
- [13:48]
Kamasi Washington
It was originally called Chinese Connection, and basically he's. Bruce Lee is portraying the pupil of a really great martial artist who gets murdered during World War II, basically when the Japanese occupation of China and Chinese people were being abused by the. By the establishment. And this guy decides that he's just gonna not allow it anymore and he's gonna stop it himself and he's gonna avenge his teacher. And, you know, there's a whole plot of him, you know, kind of going there and taking things into his own hands. And, you know, I won't ruin the movie.
- [14:31]
David Remnick
Yeah, but at one point in your song, the vocalists Patrice Quinn and Dwight Tribble, they chant a refrain.
- [14:42]
Ben Wallace Wells
Victims is over.
- [14:47]
Dorothy Wickenden
We will no longer ask.
- [14:49]
Kamasi Washington
We will no longer Justice. Ask for justice. Instead we will take our. We will. Our time will as Take our retribution.
- [15:10]
David Remnick
It's over.
- [15:12]
Kamasi Washington
We'll take our retribution. Yes, we will. We will no longer ask.
- [15:16]
David Remnick
We will no longer ask for justice. Instead we will take our retribution. And to me, that sounds a little bit less like Bruce Lee than it does somebody like Malcolm X. Were you channeling Malcolm X somehow in those lines?
- [15:27]
Kamasi Washington
Well, I mean, yeah, but it's definitely in that Bruce Lee movie for sure. I mean, there's a. There's a moment where he says, you know, where he basically makes a decision that he's not going to wait for Justice. He's going to take justice. I think that's something that all the people in the world that want the world to be a just place are going to have to do. You know, there's a certain place where you get to. Where you understand that the justice that we've all been asking for, those who we're asking for it from don't necessarily want us to have it. It doesn't make sense to ask someone for something that they don't want you to have.
- [16:04]
David Remnick
Kamasi, you've written political songs. You've worked on political songs with Kendrick Lamar and others. I wonder what you think. There's a long tradition of this in jazz and rock and roll and hip hop. What can a song do in the political world? What effect can it have, and what are its limits, do you think?
- [16:25]
Kamasi Washington
Well, I mean, I think the major effect that music has, the biggest thing that it does is connects people, and that's kind of the extent of what the music can do. You know, in the end, the world changes as people decide that it changed. But as a musician, what we can do is kind of, like, show people that they're not alone, you know, and kind of, like, bring them together and say, like, look, this. This idea, this thought that you have, all these people have it as well, you know, and to understand. And that can promote belief, which I do think it's something that is really important, and that as people believe that the world is a certain way, when they truly believe it to be that way, they'll start to make it that way.
- [17:05]
David Remnick
When people think of jazz musicians in the traditional sense, they think of a trio or a quartet or a quintet dressed either sharply or conservatively or dully, and they play. And sometimes the back is to the audience, and sometimes it's to the front. But show is not a big part of it. Spectacle is not a big part of it. When you play, spectacle is part of the experience, part of the live experience in the way that it was with Sun Ra and some other bands, certainly in the 70s and other times. What's your approach to stage presence and spectacle?
- [17:44]
Kamasi Washington
I try to just be myself on stage, you know, I try to. I mean, because there's a degree of showmanship to even that. Like, the idea of being completely, like, aloof or uninterested in what's happening, you.
- [17:58]
David Remnick
Know, in the Miles Davis way.
- [18:00]
Kamasi Washington
I mean, I think Miles Davis was coming up in a different generation. I think his. His reasoning behind doing what he was doing was a bit different, in that, you know, he's Playing in clubs where he wasn't allowed to walk in the front door, you know, so for him to turn his back then on an audience, you know, it was kind of a. A act of rebellion, you know, to where he was at and where the world was. I feel like myself, I mean, I try to just kind of in general, when I'm playing music, I'm trying to. I'm really trying to connect with the musicians and everyone that's there. So anything that's happening on stage is that really. I don't have a lot of premeditated things. You know, I'm not the best dancer and, you know, I don't, you know, I haven't quite got my six pack together, so I can't rip my shirt off or anything like that.
- [18:56]
David Remnick
Now, your father was a musician and that was an immense influence on you. How did that father son relationship work in terms of music? He gave you your first saxophone after you, after you sang for him a Charlie Parker solo.
- [19:13]
Kamasi Washington
Yeah, you know, I started off on drums and then I started playing piano and then I switched over to clarinet. And, you know, my dad's, you know, he grew up as a Saxophonist in the 70s. And back then, if you were going to be a saxophone player, you really needed to be a doubler, which meant you needed to play saxophone, flute and clarinet at least, and really also oboe.
- [19:35]
David Remnick
In order to work.
- [19:37]
Kamasi Washington
In order to work. And so the clarinet is the most difficult of those instruments. And so he really wanted me to stick with the clarinet for a while and get better at that before I switched to the saxophone. And so I snuck and just took his saxophone and I was just, I was kind of learning it on my own. And that's when he was like, well, if you're really serious about the music, I don't think. He didn't think I could do it. Basically he was saying, you didn't think.
- [20:08]
David Remnick
You could make it.
- [20:10]
Kamasi Washington
He didn't think I could sing the Charlie Parker song. That was his way of kind of keeping me from playing this album.
- [20:14]
David Remnick
What was the Charlie Parker tune?
- [20:16]
Kamasi Washington
I think it was now is the Time.
- [20:18]
David Remnick
How does it go? How does it. Can you do it now?
- [20:21]
Kamasi Washington
You can get me singing on the radio.
- [20:23]
David Remnick
Yeah, that's what the radio's for.
- [20:26]
Kamasi Washington
I sing for you. We'll go have a drink or something like that and I'll sing it for you.
- [20:36]
Ben Wallace Wells
So what happened?
- [20:36]
David Remnick
You nailed it. And he gave you a sense.
- [20:38]
Kamasi Washington
I nailed it, I nailed it. And he was surprised. I sang not just the melody, I sang the solo for him. Too. And that's when he realized, oh, it's, you know, he didn't need to do something, like, not let me play the instrument that I wanted to play if I was really serious about music.
- [20:54]
David Remnick
Your first experience as a collaborator with a hip hop artist was with Snoop Dogg. I have to say, listening to your albums, I wouldn't have guessed that. What did you learn from Snoop Dogg? What was that collaboration like?
- [21:07]
Kamasi Washington
It was really important. I was really young and really, I was probably when I first started playing with Snoop, probably 20, 21, 20, 20, 19, 20. Yeah, you know, it was. It was my first time going on any tour, so. And I hadn't really traveled much at all outside of California. And then when I went to play with Snoop, you know, at that point in my life, you know, I. I had listened to a lot of hip hop, but I had never really played it, you know, I never really, like, performed it. All of a sudden I'm in this band and I'm with these musicians who really understand another style of music at a much deeper level than I did. And so I really learned a lot about placement and groove and understanding.
- [21:53]
David Remnick
What does placement mean here?
- [21:55]
Kamasi Washington
Placement means where and how you play something. So, like, within a beat, if you. If you think of a beat, like, you think of a song that's going like, 1, 2, 3, 4. 1, 2, 3, 4. So in. In between those 1, 2, 3, 4, you can divide that into hundreds of places. And when you play a rhythm, you can put your notes on, you know, closer to, like, between one and two. It can be close to two or three, closer to one. And you can imagine that they kind of hear it as almost like thousands of places. And, like, where you put the notes is where the groove is.
- [22:44]
David Remnick
It's funny, you know, you're one of the few jazz acts I've ever been privileged enough to see where people are dancing. That does not always happen. And do you think your experience with Snoop and the way you learned that sense of time, that's. That sense of placement adds to that impulse in the audience?
- [23:04]
Kamasi Washington
Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah, because it's. And it's. It's something that, like, once I understood, it totally affected the way I played my own music. And. And you get addicted to it. You want everything to have a groove, you know, it's like, even when we're playing free, there's. There's a kind of a groove, you know?
- [23:26]
David Remnick
Well, Kamasi, thank you very much. And I release you into the. Into the world. You can go back to the stage or wherever it Is Take care. Be well.
- [23:33]
Kamasi Washington
Oh, yeah. Thank you.
- [23:46]
David Remnick
That was Kamasi Washington. His new album Heaven and Earth, as well as the bonus disc the Choice is out now. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Carmen Maria Machado has written for the New Yorker since 2013, and last year she published her first book, a collection of stories called Her Body and Other Parties, and it was a finalist for the National Book Award. The stories borrow heavily from horror and fantasy, and they're all connected by a common thread. Women struggle for control in a world that doesn't see their bodies as their own. Machado lives in Philadelphia, and she took us on a short trip back home to Allentown, Pennsylvania, to visit one of her favorite childhood haunts.
- [24:50]
Carmen Maria Machado
We are at the Allentown Farmers Market, which is on the Allentown Fairgrounds. That building over there at the end of the parking lot is where I was born. Not like the farmer's market. That would be amazing. But, no, I was born in that hospital. Let's go inside. Oh, it smells so good in here. It looks exactly as I remember it. These signs are so old. I just sort of distinctly remember my mother bringing me here. And I guess it sort of triggered this, like, lifelong love of markets. Like indoor markets. It's one. Cause it's like there's a high ceiling, but then the individual little shops have their own mini ceilings or mini roofs. Each little one has its own little sign. Chicken pies made fresh. O' Brien's fresh bread. Salads say hello. You guys need anything else today? I'm very particular. My great grandmother and my grandmother are Austrian, and they're very. Just so, very fussy. My own mama, God bless her, she would like refold napkins for use later. And everything just had its place. And everything was very just so. And I am that way, for better or for worse.
- [26:12]
Kamasi Washington
Good morning.
- [26:13]
David Remnick
What a beautiful day. Oh, my goodness. What a beautiful day. I'd like to tell you about a.
- [26:18]
Kamasi Washington
Bunch of great questions going on around.
- [26:23]
Carmen Maria Machado
Dilly beans. Okay. That's okay. They're like pickled green beans, and they're amazing. Okay. Hi. Can I please have a raspberry bear claw?
- [26:35]
Kamasi Washington
Cheese Danish are the best.
- [26:37]
Carmen Maria Machado
He's pushing my cheese Danish. Well, these look beautiful. Anything else?
- [26:43]
Narrator/Producer
175.
- [26:46]
Kamasi Washington
Mm. Oh, my God.
- [26:48]
Carmen Maria Machado
You know what? That tastes like church. I've always sort of taken pleasure in, like, the specific aesthetic experiences of places like this. Like, I'm really interested in sensory details. And I think that people who have read my work or become familiar with my work are like, yes. Like, sentences and details are, like, so specific, and that's not like, artificial. It's like I go in and I'm like, I must make this detail pop. But rather the way that I perceive the world is this very, like, these heightened sort of aesthetic beats or pulses. I don't know if it's like, you can trace it back to here or just like, this was the first time in my life that I can remember having that really strong aesthetic reaction to a place.
- [27:38]
David Remnick
Have a good day. Enjoy it.
- [27:41]
Carmen Maria Machado
My guess is if you were to, like, strap, like, sensors to me, I would react to a place like this the way I would react to dogs. It's like I'm just flooded with serotonin and I feel like when I'm in here, like, I'm like, oh, this is so nice. So it's this, like, very weird combination of, like, stimulation and relaxation. Maybe this is like my church. I'm not religious anymore, but I do. I'm like, maybe this is how church felt. I don't remember. It's been a long time, but there's something about this space that, yeah, it just makes me feel just content. Like, I don't believe in heaven, but if I did believe in heaven, I bet it'd be like a giant farmer's market where you have infinite money and you're always a little hungry, but, like, not too hungry. And there's lots of pickle stands. That's what I think.
- [28:42]
David Remnick
Carmen Maria Machado at the Allentown Farmer's Market. Her book of short stories is called Her Body and Other Parties. You can find some of Machado's essays and even a recipe for eggnog from last christmas@newyorker.com and that's it for the New Yorker Radio Hour today. I hope you enjoyed the show. Until next week. Follow us on Twitter New Yorker Radio.
- [29:09]
Narrator/Producer
The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co production of WNYC Studios and the New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Meryl Garbus of Tune Yards, with additional music by Alexis Cuadrado. This episode was produced with help from Jonny Vin 7, Trent Williamson, Michelle Moses, Emily Mann and Jessica Henderson. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Turina Endowment Fund.