The release
of Kamasi Washington's The Epic last year marked a seismic shift in the jazz
landscape and the game-changing arrival of the genre-blurring Los Angeles
collective West Coast Get Down. That evolution continues with the release of
Planetary Prince, the debut album by visionary pianist, keyboardist, composer
and WCGD founding member Cameron Graves.
The four
ambitious, progressive pieces on Planetary Prince were recorded during a
marathon 11-hour studio session (a second volume is due later this year), the
pressure-cooker intensity of which is reflected in its fiery, transcendent
playing. The core of the band is made up of fellow West Coast Get Down members,
whose musical and personal relationships with Graves stretch back to their high
school days: tenor saxophonist Kamasi Washington, trombonist Ryan Porter,
bassist Stephen "Thundercat" Bruner, and drummer Ronald Bruner Jr. To
their ranks are added trumpeter Philip Dizack and bassist Hadrien Feraud, both
key members of the groundbreaking modern L.A. jazz scene.
The title of Planetary Prince, which also serves as Graves' occasional pseudonym, comes from The Urantia Book, a spiritual tome that emerged from Chicago in the first half of the 20th century and that purports to reveal the truth of humanity through a combination of spiritual and cosmological ideas, including radical retellings of familiar stories from the Bible.
The title of Planetary Prince, which also serves as Graves' occasional pseudonym, comes from The Urantia Book, a spiritual tome that emerged from Chicago in the first half of the 20th century and that purports to reveal the truth of humanity through a combination of spiritual and cosmological ideas, including radical retellings of familiar stories from the Bible.
"That's
a really deep book," says Graves, whose interest in Urantia grew out of a
lifelong fascination with astronomy, astrology, spiritualism and meditation
reflected in both his music and his study of the ancient Chinese martial art
Xing Yi Chuan. "A lot of people might think it's sacrilegious, but it
makes so much sense about the breakdown of the universe and deities and Earth
and man."
The way that
The Urantia Book refracts religious traditions through the lens of science and
speculative philosophy has parallels with the ways in which Graves and his West
Coast Get Down compatriots have reimagined the jazz lineage with hip-hop and
prog rock inflections as well as interstellar ambitions. Graves makes a direct
connection between his music and the book with pieces like "Adam and
Eve" and the title track.
The other
two pieces - "Andromeda" and "Isle of Love" - aren't
directly inspired by Urantia but are no less cosmic in their inspiration. The
former was sparked by striking images of the Andromeda Galaxy, sister galaxy to
the Milky Way as our closest neighbor in the universe; while the latter is an
imagined destination populated by a race of pure love.
While those
mind-expanding concepts are key to the sprawling imagination of Graves' tunes,
they aren't responsible for the fervent, impassioned playing of Graves and his
ensemble. That comes from the members' nearly two decades of musical history
together. "I don't communicate the Urantia ideas to the band," Graves
says. "They just know that my song titles are kind of weird but the music
is really cool. I like to write a lot in odd rhythms, especially in seven,
which takes the music somewhere else and lets the cats build off of that."
Graves
initially met Washington, Porter and the Bruner brothers in his freshman year
at Locke High School in Los Angeles, when they'd rehearse together in school
band and spend recess listening to John Coltrane together. At only
16-years-old, Graves, along with Washington and the Bruners, made his recorded
debut with their collective group, the Young Jazz Giants. The group started
playing regularly at a local poetry spot called Doboy's Dozens, eventually
shifting to Fifth St. Dicks where they started experimenting with a ten piece
band.
"That's
when we started getting into our groove," Graves recalls. "We were
finding grooves, writing different songs, and learning from each other,
creating that chemistry that we have today."
In 2007,
bassist and WCGD founding member Miles Mosley discovered the Piano Bar, which
led to the now-legendary West Coast Get Down weekly series at the venue where
they further honed their collective sound and notorious energy, which they
channeled into the recording of
The Epic and
now Planetary Prince. "We've been playing this material with that kind of
intensity for a long time now," Graves says. "We all grew up
listening together to hip-hop and rock and metal and jazz, so we all know where
we're going and how to complement it. It's just intuition."
Graves has
also carved out a notable career apart from the WCGD. With his brother Taylor
he formed the R&B/fusion duo The Graves Brothers, releasing their debut,
Look to the Stars, in 2013. That project grew out of a British/American pop
group called The Score with which the brothers found enormous success in
England.
Graves was
also a key member of actress/musician Jada Pinkett Smith's nu-metal band Wicked
Wisdom, providing entrée into the world of film and television scoring through
the Pinkett Smith-directed film The Human Contract and TV series Hawthorne.
Through his soundtrack work Graves connected with Stanley Clarke, and is now a
member of the great bassist/composer's latest band.
Cameron
Graves · Planetary Prince
Release
Date: June 10, 2016
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