The floor never shook, but the air did. As if frequencies too wide for measurement were folding the room in half, rearranging particles, adjusting time. Kamasi stood not at the centre of the stage, but in the centre of something older. A ceremonial geometry. Sax poised like an invocation, not an instrument. You surrender to “Lesanu,” —language untangles, tongues loosen, and suddenly you remember your own body as percussion. The crowd claps, not with rhythm, but with awe. This is pure tectonics.
No one speaks. Then again, everyone does. Every foot shuffle, every micro-sway, every involuntary vocal eruption is a line in the call-and-response. The horn spirals upward and downward in the same instant, like trying to pray and riot at once. “Lines in the Sand” begins, the downbeat lands like a courtroom gavel, but the melodies plead no contest. It’s sermon and protest. A groove shaped like an open wound.
The band—there’s too many of them, and not enough. Two drummers, cymbals glitter like shrapnel from a collapsed constellation. A bassline burrows under the soles of your feet like ancestral memory. The keyboard is a shimmer, a smudge, a ghost. And somewhere in the thick of it, the trombone yawns open like grief that’s learned to dance.
“Asha the First” floats in like a memory you didn’t know was yours. Joy isn’t the word—it’s closer to weightlessness. A lullaby for a planet still worth saving. Something small, human, tender in the way the melody loops itself, as if hesitant to leave. Kamasi looks out—not to connect, not to perform—but to witness. And the room quiets, knees unlocked, breath collective. Every note a cradle. Every silence a confession.
Then rupture. “Get Lit” doesn’t request permission. DJ Battlecat slices through the atmosphere like he’s been bottling lightning for this exact moment. Hip-hop coiling around jazz like a double helix, sacred and street. Kamasi steps back in reverence—he knows this is the ritual’s ecstatic break. The room jumps, and in the chaos, you catch a smile flicker between drummer and bassist—like they just summoned something neither of them expected to survive.
“Together” opens, no solos here—only weaving. One voice lifts the other, and the next, and the next. The audience are deep inside, there’s a woman in the back sobbing quietly. A man in front holding still like stillness is a form of praise. Kamasi’s horn dances amongst the vocals.
And then—was it “Vi Lua Vi Sol”?—the one with the vocodered vocals that sounded like love whispered underwater. It doesn’t matter. Time folds, song order disintegrates. You feel heat behind the eyes, but no sadness. Just revelation. The kind that catches you at a traffic light weeks later. There was a moment, maybe there wasn’t, where the music stopped and no one clapped, because no one believed it could be over.
The room breathes like a living organism. Not metaphor. Fact. Sweat condenses into something ritualistic. Bodies sway not in sync but in sympathy. You start to feel what the music feels about you. That you are more than your inbox. That breath has tempo. That freedom isn’t volume, it’s vibration. “Prologue (Reprise)” returns like it’s been waiting backstage the whole time, watching. It doesn’t close the set—it seals it, like a wax stamp on a letter you can’t send.
And still something unfinished. A trailing sax line lingers like incense, hard to track, harder to forget. It touches your ribs on the way out, as if to say: the real show begins when you leave.
You try to recall it later, but it doesn’t come back in order. It comes back in flashes: the drums before they knew they were drums, the voices stitched together like protest quilts, the horn, the horn, the horn—sometimes screaming, sometimes listening, always testifying. And in the centre of it, Kamasi Washington, unshaken, unwavering, pulling galaxies from wood and breath like it’s the most natural thing in the world.
No encore. No goodbye. Just departure. As if he knew the last note would still be playing in someone’s chest long after the lights came up.
Words & Photos by Richard Isaac
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