Street Fighter Mas

"Street Fighter Mas" introduces a Caribbean dimension into Washington's musical world that feels less like stylistic borrowing and more like an honest accounting of the full breadth of the African diaspora's musical inheritance. The rhythm has the celebratory propulsion of carnival — mas being the festival tradition — with horns deployed in a way that is both stately and completely irresistible to the body. The piece moves with a kind of proud joy, a communal energy that the more individually focused spiritual jazz pieces don't quite reach. Washington's saxophone here plays with the crowd as much as above it, the melody lines designed to be felt in the chest and the hips simultaneously. There is something deliberately inclusive about the piece's structure — it arrives at you rather than waiting for you to come to it. The production layers the percussion with a density that gives the groove a three-dimensional quality, as if the rhythm section extends outward from the speakers rather than sitting behind them. It belongs to that long tradition of jazz musicians — from Dizzy Gillespie's Afro-Cuban experiments forward — who understood that the music had more room than its American jazz-club context often allowed it. Reach for this when you need your body to remember that joy is not a shallow thing, that celebration has as much spiritual weight as grief.