The Neurology of Jazz: Kamasi Washington's The Epic and Movement Disorders
Kamasi Washington’s The Epic is masterpiece of sound that truly defines what modern jazz sounds like. This album consists of 3 volumes and spans about 3 full hours. Even though it was released in 2015, it still is one of my favorite pieces of music to date. While recently listening to the album, I thought about how each of the tracks is so dynamic that they could represent various movement disorders in neurology. Some tracks were much easier to correlate to a neurologic movement disorder, but other tracks I had to give repeated listens to and really struggle to pick out features that could match a disorder. https://youtu.be/NtQRBzSN9Vw The title track “Change of Guard” can only be described as organized chaos. The track starts with what will be a recurring motif and the main theme of the track. To me, this represents the aura that can precede complex partial seizures. These seizures tend to have automatisms associated with them. There are several parts of
