Thundercat is set to release his new album “It Is What It Is” on Brainfeeder Records on April 3, 2020. The album, produced by Flying Lotus and Thundercat, features musical contributions from Ty Dolla $ign, Childish Gambino, Lil B, Kamasi Washington, Steve Lacy, Steve Arrington, BADBADNOTGOOD, Louis Cole and Zack Fox.
NOT TiGHT is the long-awaited debut album from virtuosic Gen Z duo, DOMi and JD Beck, released on Anderson .Paak’s new label Apeshit in partnership with the legendary jazz label Blue Note Records. It features the likes of Thundercat, whose deadpan funk is their closest antecedent, Herbie Hancock, Snoop Dogg, Busta Rhymes, Mac DeMarco, Kurt Rosenwinkel, and .Paak himself. Their music finds both humour and greatness in harmonic complexity and rhythmic shiftiness, abruptly adopting and ditching tempos, toying with time signatures, and sneaking extra beats into bridges. They offer winking breaks and gleeful pivots, but the album is more composed than anything they’ve done before, toying with pop structures and pretty restraint. That befits their origin story. The duo first played together in a room full of blaring demos at a trade show, but they bonded over gauche keyboard FX and mom jokes. Over the next year and a half, they wrote and recorded much of the album at JD’s house in Dallas on drums and a 49-key MIDI board with just a few mics. Along the way, DOMi and JD Beck have sat in with Herbie Hancock and backed Thundercat, Ariana Grande, Eric André, and more; they also co-wrote “Skate” on .Paak’s Grammy-winning album with Bruno Mars as Silk Sonic.
On March 3, 2017, Grammy Award winning composer, producer, singer and drummer Ronald Bruner Jr. will present the megalithic debut album Triumph. Eleven cuts of deep fusion, soul, R&B, jazz and pop, Triumph was put together with Ronald’s brothers Stephen “Thundercat” Bruner and Jameel Bruner of The Internet. It was captured during the infamous KSL Sessions that produced Kamasi Washington’s The Epic and many other West Coast Get Down recordings.
Shot at WTTW’s Soundstage Studios in Chicago, Kenny Loggins invites his dear friends and colleagues Michael McDonald, David Foster, Jim Messina and Thundercat to join him in re-imagining his mega hits on the Soundstage stage.
Kamasi Washington releases his new album, Fearless Movement, via Young. Washington calls Fearless Movement his dance album. “It’s not literal,” Washington says. “Dance is movement and expression, and in a way it’s the same thing as music—expressing your spirit through your body. That’s what this album is pushing.” Dance as an embodied form of expression signals a shift in focus for Washington. Where previous albums dealt with cosmic ideas and existential concepts, Fearless Movement focuses in on the everyday, an exploration of life on earth. This change in scope is due in large part to the birth of Washington’s first child a few years ago.
t's tempting to hear Kamasi Washington's six-track Harmony of Difference suite as a follow-up to his sprawling, justifiably acclaimed three-hour debut The Epic. But this EP, at just over half-an-hour, is, in many ways, a standalone work. It was performed in New York at The Whitney Biennial as part of a show that included a film by director A.G. Rojas and paintings by Washington's sister Amani. According to the artist, it was composed to explore "the philosophical possibilities of the musical technique known as 'counterpoint.'" Washington defines it as "the art of balancing similarity and difference to create harmony between separate melodies." That description is, at least in this setting, akin to metaphor in the current socio-political-cultural era where flash point battles over issues of race, gender, sexual orientation, and cultural appropriation are being waged afresh.