Schedule
Friday, August 8, 2025 at 8:00 pm (Main Stage)
At the very heart of what we strive to do is to gift your ears and mind with era-defining jazz-centric music. Like all music and art forms, jazz is constantly evolving, leaning into multiple genres, kicking down doors, looking to the past and projecting into the future. Jazz just doesn’t sit still. And so, by bringing Kamasi Washington to these mountains, we are thrilled to share one of the artform’s most exceptional composers, a purveyor of unexpected inspiration and a musician whose talent is sought out by countless of his peers.
The Las Angeles native is an extraordinary tenor sax player who studied ethnomusicology at UCLA. And college was where he was mentored by Billy Higgins as he worked with his quartet, a band comprised of Cameron Graves on piano with the rhythm section of Stephen “Thundercat” and Ronald Bruner. The Bruner brothers remain onboard.
It’s simpler to state who Kamasi has not played with in his fruitful career. His sideman gigs include collaborations with Chaka Khan, Wayne Shorter, George Duke, St. Vincent, Flying Lotus, Run the Jewels, Snoop Dogg, the Pan Afrikaan People's Orchestra and Raphael Saadiq. Kamasi, Terence Martin, Robert Glasper and 9th Wonder combined forces for the sublime Dinner Party release of 2020, and improbably, (but why wouldn’t he?), he contributed a cover of Metallica’s My Friend of Misery to the Metallica tribute album, The Metallica Blacklist.
The year 2024 saw the release of Fearless Movement, a new collection of musical explorations, including a song whose melody was penned by his young daughter. Fatherhood has given Kamasi the kind of life-altering insights that impact all new parents, reflections that are imbued in the new record’s compositions. “Being a father means the horizon of your life all of a sudden shows up. My mortality became more apparent to me, but also my immortality — realizing that my daughter is going to live on and see things that I’m never going to see. I had to become comfortable with this, and that affected the music that I was making.”
This is music that not only stretches the artist, but also the listener. In Kamasi Washington, we see ways to not only find and create community by looking in every direction of time, but to celebrate our shared humanity. There’s a track (with George Clinton, no less) on Fearless Movement called Get Lit. That’s what’s going to happen on our stage this year.