The renaissance, as these things usually do, began in a parking lot.

For years before anyone outside Los Angeles knew their names, a loose collective of musicians called the West Coast Get Down held marathon residencies at a small club called the Piano Bar in Hollywood. Every Wednesday and Friday night, Kamasi Washington, his childhood friend and bassist Miles Mosley, trombonist Ryan Porter, and a rotating cast of players would descend and play for hours. Nobody signed them. Nobody was paying attention. “We still hadn’t made a name for ourselves yet as the West Coast Get Down,” Porter recalled later. “No one would take a chance on us.”

That changed in the spring of 2015, when two things happened in quick succession. Kendrick Lamar released To Pimp a Butterfly — a record built in large part on the playing and arrangements of Washington and his West Coast Get Down associates — and Washington released The Epic, a three-disc, three-hour saxophone fever dream on the hip-hop label Brainfeeder. Jazz, the thinking went, didn’t make records like this. Jazz didn’t play Coachella and Glastonbury. Jazz didn’t get profiled in Pitchfork and The Atlantic.

The thinking was wrong.

What Kendrick Actually Did

The conventional story of Kendrick Lamar’s impact on jazz focuses on the music — the saxophones, the modal vamps, the collective improvisation bleeding through the verses of King Kunta and These Walls. That part is true. But the more important thing Lamar did was structural: he gave jazz musicians permission to be fully themselves on a mainstream platform.

Washington has been direct about this. “Kendrick Lamar opened the door for the musicians on his records to express themselves without limitations,” he said. “He had a lot of jazz musicians working with him — the jazz elements in that record just came to the forefront.” This was different from the traditional relationship between jazz and hip-hop, in which jazz was a texture, a sample, a borrowed atmosphere. On To Pimp a Butterfly, the jazz was the architecture. Thundercat, Robert Glasper, Terrace Martin, Washington himself — these weren’t session players; they were co-authors.

Robert Glasper had been articulating this problem for years before Lamar solved it. “Jazz cats used to be the ones who got called for Marvin Gaye or Aretha Franklin sessions,” he said in 2013. “Now the whole thought of a jazz musician is that it’s not soulful anymore. I want to kill that.” By the end of the decade, it appeared dead. The studio relationships built through To Pimp a Butterfly remade how jazz musicians moved through the larger music industry, and the reverse was also true — hip-hop artists began reaching further into jazz’s harmonic and rhythmic vocabulary with a new seriousness.

The Epic and What It Proved

What The Epic proved was not that jazz could be popular — that was already known, and already complicated. What it proved was that an uncompromising, maximalist, spiritually earnest jazz record could find an audience in 2015, and that the audience was younger than anyone had predicted.

The seventeen songs on The Epic came from a month-long studio lockdown in December 2011, when Washington and his collective recorded 190 songs over four weeks. Flying Lotus, running his Brainfeeder label and mentoring Washington, helped shape the final selection. Washington had spent years paying bills through session work — arrangements for Kendrick, studio dates with Chaka Khan and Stanley Clarke — while the album sat in storage. When it finally came out, the timing was everything. A generation of listeners raised on hip-hop’s jazz samples were suddenly encountering the source material with fresh ears, and a saxophonist who’d spent fifteen years playing in parking lots was headlining major festivals.

The London Scene and Why It Mattered

The Los Angeles moment drew the most attention, but it was happening in parallel with something equally significant across the Atlantic. London in the 2010s produced some of the most adventurous jazz-rooted music on the planet, and it came from a fundamentally different place than the West Coast Get Down.

Where Washington’s music drew on spiritual jazz, orchestral ambition, and the cosmology of Sun Ra and Coltrane, the London scene — Shabaka Hutchings, Nubya Garcia, Moses Boyd, Makaya McCraven — was processing the city’s multicultural present. The children of immigrants from the Caribbean, West Africa, and South Asia were bringing grime, drum and bass, and electronic production into direct conversation with jazz improvisation. It was not fusion in the 1970s sense; it was something more organic, more politically charged, rooted in the specific social reality of contemporary Black British life.

Drummer and producer Makaya McCraven, whose 2018 album Universal Beings brought together musicians from both scenes — Hutchings and Nubya Garcia from London alongside American collaborators — described his process as something like beatmaking applied to live improvisation. Record the sessions, then edit, layer, and sculpt the results in post-production. The music sounds simultaneously spontaneous and constructed because it is both simultaneously.

What the Decade Left Behind

By the time the 2010s ended, jazz had recovered something it had been losing since the mid-1970s: relevance to young people who did not already self-identify as jazz fans. The mechanism was not institutional — it wasn’t jazz education programs or concert hall initiatives — it was the music itself, finding new contexts and refusing to stay in the places it had been assigned.

The consequences are still playing out. A generation of musicians who came up through this period now occupy the center of the conversation — Washington, McCraven, Mary Halvorson, Arooj Aftab, Cecilé McLorin Salvant — and the audiences they built still follow. Labels like Blue Note and ECM that had spent years wondering about their future found that future arriving on its own terms.

None of it was planned. The Piano Bar residencies were just musicians playing because they needed to play. The To Pimp a Butterfly sessions were a rapper following his instincts. The London scene was young people making music that reflected where they actually lived. The renaissance was, in the end, exactly what all jazz has always been: people doing what the moment required, without asking anyone’s permission first.