Lesanu

"Lesanu" means "our language" in Amharic, and the piece enacts its title by constructing a sonic vocabulary that draws from Ethiopian musical tradition, Black American jazz, and the spiritual jazz lineage in a way that suggests these are not separate languages but dialects of a single deeper tongue. The Ethiopian melodic material shapes the saxophone phrases with characteristically unusual intervals, the scale creating a modal atmosphere that sits outside Western major-minor conventions without feeling merely exotic. The production is dense with texture — percussion patterns carrying African rhythmic logic sitting beneath a jazz rhythm section, strings and choir weaving between them. Washington's improvisational sections treat the Ethiopian melodic material as genuinely generative rather than decorative, developing motifs with the same structural seriousness he brings to post-bop jazz heads. The emotional register is both specific and universal — celebrating a particular cultural inheritance while insisting on its connectivity to human experience at large. There's something moving about the title's first-person plural: "our language," not "a foreign language," claiming affiliation across geography and time. This is music that models cultural solidarity through musical practice rather than simply asserting it.