Welcome to the New York Times your volcanic and searing horn explosion of music news and criticism.

I'm your host, John Caramonica. Oh, That was a little bit of not miss-independent but misunderstanding. That is coming from Camassee

Washington. Camassee Washington is a saxophone player from Los Angeles.

Ben Ratliff has been tracking him ruthlessly for nigh 12 months at this point.

That's true.

The Excomache Washington story that that is coming out in Arts and Leisure. I have been hearing whispers of it

of its impending magic for quite some time and we are now blessed with it and in

those 12 months a lot of interesting things have been happening for Camassee Washington.

Ben why don't you set us up for who Camassee is and what's the world that he's coming from?

Because he may seem like an outlier,

but that is false, it seems, if you look

within the depths of Los Angeles.

Well, Kamasi Washington is 34, and he's a tenor saxophone player, and he's from South

Los Angeles, as are a bunch of the people in his little circle. The Los Angeles Jazz the currently I mean it has it has been in the past but but the whole story of

jazz in Los Angeles is is kind of tricky because that's not the center of

jazz performance it's the center of you know film soundtracks and TV

studios and that's where a lot of musicians get their work. A lot of session work

right. There's also a strange culture of of jazz out there and always has been since the 40s and 50s.

Those people stay there. They tend to stay there.

And you go out to LA and you talk to jazz musicians and they give you names of people who they believe

are the greatest musicians ever to play jazz and sometimes you've never heard of these names.

And that's kind of amazing, you know?

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