its a mastermeme

its a memepiece

its a mememaster

>>64583072
>>64583091
>>64584764
Epic, simply Epic.

>>64584850
shut the fuck up

neither

masterpiece

It's pretty good. Not a masterpiece though.\

memesterpiece

Neither, just a not very good Jazz album. It tried way too hard to be Giant Steps with some of the technical ability and nearly none of the finesse. Kamasi was more concerned with impressing crowds than composing a diversified, complete work of art. Kamasi is a fantastic sax player, but the Epic exposes a glaring inability to songwrite and a difficulty with improvisation and band chemistry

>>64583052
>>64585774
The Epic is an album that is hard to criticize. It's obviously an amateur album: the easiest first sight of this is the label. Brainfeeder is not known for high level Jazz performers: the pseudo-Jazz of 2010's FlyLo and Thundercat is not exactly pivotal material. If Kamasi were a talented soloist, he would be on a real specialist label. So the album, in fact, was always destined to be mediocre. Its special features such as the chorus and of course the monumental length are notable, but the compositions strain for individuality yet end up sounding too much like an amateur copy of older styles than an earnest study and reinterpretation of them. But if we're charting the weak points of the record, the weakest of all would of course be Kamasi himself. Whereas his bandmates are able to pull off generally satisfactory solos (but the pianist and trombonist...ugh), he sticks to mostly one register, one scale, and often struggles to think of creative ideas in his improvisations.

So then, why is it hard to criticize? Well, as aforementioned, this was not destined to be some genius triumph, not destined for jazz-classic status. But more importantly, I think of it the same as Max Richter's mediocre recomposition of Vivaldi from years back. Just as kitsch, just as lacking in creativity. But, importantly, popular: it ranks with RYM's other AOTD picks in the 2010's chart. And something makes me at least want to believe that The Epic and Recomposed really will work as jumping off points for listeners, that they won't just settle for these token albums but rather dive into classical music or jazz eagerly and discover the true masterpieces of each genre. Perhaps that's overly optimistic and this is just more flavor-of-the-month crap. But I've never been one to be a pessimist.