Get Lit

Washington strips away the orchestral apparatus here and delivers something closer to hard funk, the rhythm section locked into a groove that owes something to James Brown's JBs and something to the hip-hop production that has always been part of the West Coast Get Down's sonic vocabulary. The result is immediate and physical in a way that some of his more expansive work is not — you feel it in the body before the mind has processed it. His saxophone here is earthier, the tone less polished and more insistent, playing phrases that repeat and accumulate in the manner of a great gospel or soul performance building toward release. The bass is prominent and fat, the drums cracking with satisfying snap, the arrangement serving the groove rather than the other way around. There's humor here too — a self-awareness about the tension between Washington's reputation for spiritual elevation and the simple demand this music makes, which is to make people move and feel good. This belongs at the kind of gathering where the spiritual and the corporeal aren't understood as opposites — a celebration that is also, unmistakably, a praise.