Collection: Cameron Graves

Cameron Graves grew up in Los Angeles absorbing hip-hop, rock, heavy metal, classical music and jazz simultaneously, and never subsequently treated them as separate territories. His father Carl Graves was a soul singer. He formed an R&B and fusion duo called The Graves Brothers with his brother Taylor. He worked as a film and television composer, which brought him into contact with Stanley Clarke, who became a mentor alongside Chick Corea and Herbie Hancock, both of whom told the West Coast Get Down musicians directly, as Graves has described it, that they needed to carry forward the jazz-rock fusion legacy that the Mahavishnu Orchestra, Weather Report and Return to Forever had built. Graves describes his own music as "thrash-jazz." Kamasi Washington describes it as "an almost unbelievable combination of modal jazz, romantic era European classical music, and mathematical death metal." His debut solo album was "Planetary Prince" (Mack Avenue, 2017), named after his pseudonym which in turn comes from the Urantia Book, a cosmological spiritual text that also influenced Jaco Pastorius's "Havona" on Weather Report's "Heavy Weather". The follow-up "Seven" (Mack Avenue, 2019) pushed further into the jazz-rock fusion direction, with guest guitarists including Andy Timmons and Alex Skolnick alongside the WCGD rhythm section. He remains active and Los Angeles-based.