The year 2015 was the year some critics regard as the watershed for jazz to become accessible to a wider audience. Yussef Dayes and Kamasi Williams played at the Gilles Peterson's Worldwide Awards, they released Black Focus the year after. Ever since then Dayes' drumming added a commercial texture context, so enojyable to watch and listen to that South London became the new hotbed of modern jazz. And on the other side of the Atlantic ocean, it was the album "Epic" that Kamasi Washington brought him to perform at Coachella, a music circuit that had no presence of jazz music historically.
 
"Epic" offers a mx of hip hop, beats and jazz that loosened up the perimeter of jazz. In fact, in a number of occassions, Washington would shy away from labeing his music as jazz. To him, it is just a name.
 
What makes "Harmony of Difference" interesting, when the world was awaiting a response to his own success, is an EP of six songs working off the same melodies, with each track interpreting differently. Compared to the "Epic", "Harmony of Difference" was even more poppy and accessible. Some even criticized that he was not that much of an improviser but just riffing out a lot of noodling. It remains unknown whether this was Washington's attempt to reach out to a much wider audience beyond the west coast or this was his transition to the Afro-centric "Heaven and Earth". But for sure this album was helping to fuel this new era of modern jazz. What followed on the west coast during the subsequent years were as exciting as ever, Sam Gendel, Sam Wilkes, just to name a few.