Kamasi Washington: Brilliant Playing, Murky Sound

When

14 June 2026

Where

Royal Festival Hall, London

Who

Kamasi Washington (tenor saxophone, director, who is going to have a China tour this upcoming October), with Patrice Quinn (vocals), Cameron Graves (piano), Miles Mosley (upright bass), Brandon Coleman (keyboards), Tony Austin (drums), and a second bassist and trumpeter completing the line-up

What

Harry Styles’ Meltdown Festival

"Muddy" stage of Royal Festival Hall Photo: Wu Yiyao

Live Notes

Kamasi Washington came to the Royal Festival Hall on the back of a reputation few in contemporary jazz can match, and with a band, drawn from the Los Angeles circle he has worked with for the better part of two decades, that is by all accounts one of the tightest touring units around. The repertoire was the now-established Washington programme—Street Fighter Mas, The Rhythm Changes, and the band’s frenetic reworking of Piazzolla’s Prologue, the closer from Fearless Movement. The musicians, when one could hear them clearly, were excellent. The trouble is that for long stretches one could not, and that single fact shaped the evening more than anything the band actually played.

The problem was clarity, and it announced itself within the first few minutes. Washington’s music leans, by design, toward the expansive and the cosmic: thick reverb, banks of electronics, and a large ensemble—nine players on stage, six or more of them often going at once. That density needs a room and a desk that can hold it apart, and on this night neither did. The mix, whether the hall’s doing or the sheer pile-up of effected signals, collapsed into a wash in which individual lines simply would not separate. Picking the actual notes out of the surrounding cloud of echo and half-formed fragments became the work of the evening, which is not how one wants to spend a concert. From a seat in the middle of the auditorium there was the added oddity of speakers slung high above the stage, so that the sound arrived detached from the people making it.

Miles Mosley and Tony Austin © Pete Woodhead

What made this genuinely frustrating, rather than merely disappointing, is how good the playing clearly was underneath it. Cameron Graves was handed a single solo, right at the top of the show, and then more or less disappeared into the texture. It was enough to show what he does better than almost anyone—those parallel octave runs tumbling through both hands at once—but it left you wanting far more of him than the night was prepared to give. Miles Mosley fared better, and earned it. He had the crowd before he touched a string, beret, shades and all, and then justified the attention with several genuinely convincing solos that moved freely between pizzicato, bowed lines, and the wah and effects work that has become his calling card. The most interesting thing all evening was the relationship between Mosley and the second, electric bassist: the two traded comping, leaned on each other, and at points pushed their exchanges into something close to a duel—and, tellingly, those were among the few moments the texture thinned enough to let real conversation through.

The trumpeter was harder to warm to. He was the most outwardly animated presence on the stage, but the playing didn't match the showmanship—mostly staccato jabs and an attempt to build solos out of small motivic cells that never quite added up to a line. Worse, he leaned heavily on a harmoniser, which in an already overcrowded mix only thickened things further into mud. And mud, in the end, was the theme of the night.

Kamasi Washington and the band © Pete Woodhead

It would be unfair to blame the players for all of this. The likeliest explanation is an unhappy collision between the band’s deliberately reverberant aesthetic, the hall’s mixing, and the sheer number of people on stage. But a listener can only judge what reaches them, and what reached the middle of the Royal Festival Hall was a fraction of what was evidently being played. The comparison that kept coming to mind was Hiromi’s recital at the Barbican earlier this year—clear, precise, every detail present in the room. Washington’s musicians are at least that accomplished; almost none of it survived the journey to the seats. The earlier of his two shows that day was reportedly well received, but it is hard to believe the sound was any different.

So this was a frustrating evening more than a bad one: a strong band, a handful of real soloists, and music of genuine ambition, undone by a sound that hid more than it let through. In a style that lives or dies on texture and atmosphere, the handling of that texture isn’t a technical afterthought—it is the performance, and here it worked against the players instead of for them.