The video for Ami Taf Ras Song “How I Became A Madman” plays in a place that Kamasi Washington knows very well: In the Leimert Park in Los Angeles, in the 1990s he jam with his Posse The West Coast Get Down, “An island of Enlightenment” he still calls this place today when he talks about the time of the Gang Wars in South Central.
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The fact that the singer from Morocco and living in La conquers this island again is reminiscent of the healing power of the Come Together in public space. Washington’s musical ideas work through the debut album of Ami Taf Ra, the saxophone giant produced The Prophet and The Madman, musicians from his home band were involved in the recordings, Washington also played with (including in “Gnawa”).
In the music of Ami Taf Ra, we can now hear echos of those intoxicating sound trips that shaped Washington jazz manifest so that the artist also works on a fusion of cultures and languages-as a singer, which is rooted in the traditions of Arab vocalists. And here it goes deep into history, in several tracks that deal with the Lebanese poet and philosopher Khalil Gibran. But there are also songs in which a somewhat slimmer jazz radio breaks train, elsewhere Ami Taf Ras voices dominated landscapes dominated by gospel choirs, in the Outro “Speak to Us” she ends up somewhere in a musical running, and these sounds also manage to skip cultural limits.
This review was first published in the MusikExpress 09/25.