Kamasi Washington - 'Final Thought'

It's not that this record sounds, in any specific regional identity sort of way, like Los Angeles. If anything, it sounds like dislocation and amalgam: like '70s modal swing, like Donald Byrd's A New Perspective meets Charlie Parker With Strings, like the last half century of black popular music. But L.A. is integral to its existence. It's where saxophonist and composer Kamasi Washington, now 34, met his bandmates in high school or before. It's where they found various gigs with pop stars, set up residencies in clubs that would have them, lived in actual houses where they can jam and pooled their money to book a recording studio for a month. The first fruit from that collective undertaking is overkill: 17 songs, nearly three hours, horns, a double rhythm section, strings, vocal chorus. It's gloriously so, an imposing collection that first overwhelms with volume and energy and ecstatic solos and reveals its depth of color and hummable melodies as you begin to process it. It's proof that you can both go big and go home. —Patrick Jarenwattananon, US National Public Radio