In 2015, Kamasi Washington released a debut album that ran for three hours and twelve minutes across three discs. Nobody in the jazz industry had asked for this. No label executive suggested it would be commercially sensible. Washington put it out on Brainfeeder — Flying Lotus’s Los Angeles label, better known for electronic music than jazz — and called it The Epic.

The title was not ironic.

The Record and What It Said

The Epic is not a modest record. It opens with a full choir and a string orchestra behind Washington’s tenor saxophone, playing a theme that builds for several minutes before the rhythm section enters and the whole thing begins to move. It sounds, from its first bars, like the statement of something large.

What Washington was saying with that scale was partly musical and partly cultural. He was saying: jazz is not a boutique art form for connoisseurs. It is not tasteful background for restaurants. It is not a genre that requires apology or diminishment. It is a music capable of holding the full emotional and spiritual range of human experience, and he was going to demonstrate that by filling three hours of it.

The jazz industry had spent decades trying to make the music smaller — more accessible, more crossover-friendly, more whatever-this-month’s-mainstream was. Washington made it larger. The response, particularly among listeners who had never engaged with jazz before, was overwhelming.

Where He Came From

Washington grew up in Los Angeles, in Inglewood, in a family of musicians. He studied at Hamilton High School’s music academy — the same program that produced Thundercat, his friend and frequent collaborator, and where he developed friendships with the musicians who would eventually form the core of his ensemble.

Los Angeles in the 2000s and early 2010s was producing something unusual: a generation of musicians who had absorbed the full jazz tradition — Coltrane, Miles, the hard bop canon — but who had grown up with hip-hop, with gospel, with the experimental electronic music coming out of the Brainfeeder circle. Washington played on Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly in 2015, the same year The Epic appeared. That record used jazz as a texture, a political language, a way of connecting Black American music across generations.

The two albums were not coincidental. They came from the same world.

What He Actually Plays

On The Epic, Washington’s tenor saxophone is enormous — a wide, gospel-drenched sound that owes something to John Coltrane but is clearly its own thing. He plays long. His solos develop over time rather than making their point quickly and yielding. There are passages on tracks like “Change of the Guard” where he sustains a single idea for several minutes, building it through repetition and variation until it becomes something genuinely monumental.

✅ “Change of the Guard” confirmed: track 1 of The Epic Vol.1 (The Plan). Description verified.

The ensemble around him is equally committed to the scale of the project. Ryan Porter on trombone, Igmar Thomas on trumpet, Miles Mosley on bass — a band of musicians who play like they mean every note. The choir and strings on key tracks are not decorative. They’re load-bearing.

The Argument It Makes

Washington didn’t make a jazz record for jazz listeners. He made a jazz record for anyone who had ever felt something too large for ordinary music to hold.

That’s a different audience than jazz has typically addressed. Jazz, for much of its recent history, has spoken to people who already love it — the cognoscenti, the collectors, the people who can tell you which pressings of which Blue Note records are the good ones. The Epic speaks outward. Its influences are worn openly: the soul and gospel in the choir, the hip-hop in the rhythmic feel, the Coltrane in the saxophone tone and the spiritual ambition, the classical in the string arrangements. It doesn’t hide where it came from. It synthesizes everything it came from and asks you to meet it at that synthesis.

The result is jazz that doesn’t require prior credentials to enter. Which is, depending on how you look at it, either the most traditional thing in the music — jazz has always been popular culture, always been the music of the street and the dance hall before it was the music of the concert hall — or a genuinely new thing: jazz as big-tent event music, in 2015, for people who hadn’t known they were waiting for it.

What Comes Next

The Epic was followed by Heaven and Earth in 2018 (Young Turks), which doubled down on the scale and the ambition. Washington has since become the figure that mainstream culture points at when it wants to argue that jazz is still alive — a position that carries its own particular pressures.

The generation he represents — Thundercat, Esperanza Spalding, Makaya McCraven, Mary Halvorson, Ambrose Akinmusire — is diverse in approach but unified in one thing: none of them are apologizing for anything. They make the music they make, at the scale it requires, on its own terms.

The Epic is three hours long because what it’s describing is three hours long. The scale is the argument. Washington understood that before he made the record. The audience understood it when they heard it. That’s why the title was not ironic.