# Kamasi Washington
**Kamasi Washington** (born 1981 in Los Angeles) is an American tenor saxophonist, composer, and bandleader whose music combines spiritual and modal jazz with funk, hip-hop, soul, and electronic elements[1](https://allsaints-pas.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/kamasi-washington-1.pdf) • [2](https://www.allmusic.com/artist/kamasi-washington-mn0000772447). He became widely known with the 2015 triple album *The Epic* and through his saxophone and string arrangements on [Kendrick Lamar](https://www.edgepedia.org/kendrick-lamar)'s *To Pimp a Butterfly*[3](https://downbeat.com/digitaledition/2016/DB1607/_art/DB1607.pdf) • [4](https://elpais.com/babelia/2025-03-22/kamasi-washington-jazz-para-entender-mejor-el-mundo-lo-importante-es-unir-la-musica-con-tu-espiritu.html).
| Key fact | Detail |
|---|---|
| Born | 1981, Los Angeles[1](https://allsaints-pas.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/kamasi-washington-1.pdf) |
| Breakthrough | *The Epic*, a three-disc set released May 5, 2015[3](https://downbeat.com/digitaledition/2016/DB1607/_art/DB1607.pdf) |
| Collective | Founding figure of the West Coast Get Down, the Los Angeles musician collective behind *The Epic*[5](https://riffmagazine.com/features/kamasi-washington-dream-again/) |
| Other albums | *Heaven and Earth* (2018, double), *Harmony of Difference* (2017), *Fearless Movement* (2024)[4](https://elpais.com/babelia/2025-03-22/kamasi-washington-jazz-para-entender-mejor-el-mundo-lo-importante-es-unir-la-musica-con-tu-espiritu.html) |
| Film and TV work | Scored the 2020 Michelle Obama documentary *Becoming*; composed for the Adult Swim anime *Lazarus* (2025), including the Emmy-nominated piece "Vortex"[4](https://elpais.com/babelia/2025-03-22/kamasi-washington-jazz-para-entender-mejor-el-mundo-lo-importante-es-unir-la-musica-con-tu-espiritu.html) • [2](https://www.allmusic.com/artist/kamasi-washington-mn0000772447) |
| Supergroup | Dinner Party, with Terrace Martin, Robert Glasper, and 9th Wonder; *Dinner Party: Dessert* was nominated for a 2022 Grammy for Best Progressive R&B Album[2](https://www.allmusic.com/artist/kamasi-washington-mn0000772447) |
## Early life and musical formation
Washington grew up in Los Angeles in a musical household; his father, Rickey Washington, is a retired public school music teacher and jazz musician who sometimes performs flute and soprano saxophone in his son's band[4](https://elpais.com/babelia/2025-03-22/kamasi-washington-jazz-para-entender-mejor-el-mundo-lo-importante-es-unir-la-musica-con-tu-espiritu.html) • [6](https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2015/09/17/epic-s17.pdf). At about age 11, a cousin gave him a mixtape of [Lee Morgan](https://www.edgepedia.org/lee-morgan), Art Blakey, Joe Henderson, and [John Coltrane](https://www.edgepedia.org/john-coltrane), which he has described as the moment jazz stopped being his father's music and became his own[4](https://elpais.com/babelia/2025-03-22/kamasi-washington-jazz-para-entender-mejor-el-mundo-lo-importante-es-unir-la-musica-con-tu-espiritu.html). He chose the saxophone at 13, and at 19 won the John Coltrane Award for his virtuosity[4](https://elpais.com/babelia/2025-03-22/kamasi-washington-jazz-para-entender-mejor-el-mundo-lo-importante-es-unir-la-musica-con-tu-espiritu.html).
While a 19-year-old UCLA music student he had already begun playing with the musicians who would form his long-standing ensemble, some of whom he has worked with since then[7](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-06-05/kamasi-washington-australian-tour-lazarus-anime-fearless-movemen/105314818). As a teenager he recorded his first album with the group The Young Jazz Giants the summer after his freshman year[8](https://kamasi.squarespace.com/about).
## Sideman years and The Epic
Before his solo breakthrough, Washington spent years as a session and touring musician, recording and performing with artists including Nas, Snoop Dogg, Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, Ryan Adams, and St. Vincent[4](https://elpais.com/babelia/2025-03-22/kamasi-washington-jazz-para-entender-mejor-el-mundo-lo-importante-es-unir-la-musica-con-tu-espiritu.html). His collaboration with the bassist Thundercat on Thundercat's 2011 debut *The Golden Age of Apocalypse* helped push him toward a serious solo career[4](https://elpais.com/babelia/2025-03-22/kamasi-washington-jazz-para-entender-mejor-el-mundo-lo-importante-es-unir-la-musica-con-tu-espiritu.html).
**The recording of The Epic** took place just before 2012, when Washington and his bandmates in the West Coast Get Down locked themselves in a studio for a month in December 2011 and produced 190 songs, which Washington cut first to 45 for his personal project and then to 17 for *The Epic*[9](https://web03125.microsites03.redbull.com/2015/09/kamasi-washington-interview/). The album appeared on May 5, 2015, as a three-disc set running about three hours, combining bebop immediacy, [Sun Ra](https://www.edgepedia.org/sun-ra)-style cosmic passages, and choir-backed sections[3](https://downbeat.com/digitaledition/2016/DB1607/_art/DB1607.pdf) • [9](https://web03125.microsites03.redbull.com/2015/09/kamasi-washington-interview/) • [10](https://www.washingtonpost.com/express/wp/2015/08/20/kamasi-washington-says-the-moments-right-for-his-three-hour-epic/). Its release coincided with the critical and commercial attention surrounding Kendrick Lamar's *To Pimp a Butterfly*, on which Washington and other members of his collective played significant roles[3](https://downbeat.com/digitaledition/2016/DB1607/_art/DB1607.pdf).
Washington credits the album with changing his life: he said he made it mainly to ensure the music would exist at all, since he had not felt he had space to express his own music before[4](https://elpais.com/babelia/2025-03-22/kamasi-washington-jazz-para-entender-mejor-el-mundo-lo-importante-es-unir-la-musica-con-tu-espiritu.html).
## Later albums and the Dinner Party supergroup
After *The Epic*, Washington released *Harmony of Difference* in 2017, a six-movement suite built on counterpoint, the interweaving of diverging melodies that unite into a harmonious whole, which he wrote to celebrate human diversity through music[11](https://www.lacma.org/sites/default/files/press/2025-04/Kamasi%20Washington%20Live%20at%20LACMA%20David%20Geffen%20Galleries_%20Press%20Release%20%281%29.pdf). *Heaven and Earth* followed in 2018 as another double album, and in 2020 he scored *Becoming*, the documentary about [Michelle Obama](https://www.edgepedia.org/michelle-obama)[4](https://elpais.com/babelia/2025-03-22/kamasi-washington-jazz-para-entender-mejor-el-mundo-lo-importante-es-unir-la-musica-con-tu-espiritu.html). *Fearless Movement* (2024) folds electronic elements into his jazz palette[4](https://elpais.com/babelia/2025-03-22/kamasi-washington-jazz-para-entender-mejor-el-mundo-lo-importante-es-unir-la-musica-con-tu-espiritu.html).
**Dinner Party** is a jazz and R&B supergroup of Washington, Terrace Martin, Robert Glasper, and producer 9th Wonder. The group released the self-titled EP *Dinner Party* in 2020, its follow-up *Enigmatic Society* in 2023, and the EP *Dinner Party: Dessert*, which received a 2022 Grammy nomination for Best Progressive R&B Album[2](https://www.allmusic.com/artist/kamasi-washington-mn0000772447) • [12](https://pitchfork.com/story/terrace-martin-robert-glasper-kamasi-washingtons-dinner-party-watchu-bringing/). Their first full album, *Watchu Bringing?*, was announced for August 7, 2026, with cover art by Washington's sister, the artist Amani Washington[12](https://pitchfork.com/story/terrace-martin-robert-glasper-kamasi-washingtons-dinner-party-watchu-bringing/).
In 2025, Washington composed original music and the theme for the [Adult Swim](https://www.edgepedia.org/adult-swim) anime series *Lazarus*, including the Emmy-nominated piece "Vortex"[2](https://www.allmusic.com/artist/kamasi-washington-mn0000772447). In June 2025 he brought an ensemble of more than 100 musicians to LACMA's new David Geffen Galleries for performances of *Harmony of Difference* spread across roughly 110,000 square feet of gallery space, treating the building as an acoustic part of the piece; it was the first full live performance of the suite[11](https://www.lacma.org/sites/default/files/press/2025-04/Kamasi%20Washington%20Live%20at%20LACMA%20David%20Geffen%20Galleries_%20Press%20Release%20%281%29.pdf).
## Style and reception
Washington's sound, as AllMusic describes it, draws few boundaries between modal and soul-jazz, funk, hip-hop, and electronic music[2](https://www.allmusic.com/artist/kamasi-washington-mn0000772447). He has called John Coltrane his biggest influence, while describing his own approach as a style from Los Angeles that had not been realized to that degree, and his music deliberately reaches places where jazz "doesn't normally go"[13](https://www.metrotimes.com/music-2/kamasi-washington-and-the-next-step-2466427/). His large-ensemble arrangements, strings, and choir give the records a grand production scale that critics have contrasted with the sparser 1960s and 1970s spiritual jazz that partly inspired him[10](https://www.washingtonpost.com/express/wp/2015/08/20/kamasi-washington-says-the-moments-right-for-his-three-hour-epic/).
*The Epic* won acclaim from the jazz press while also crossing over to listeners outside jazz, without EDM fusions or guest rappers[14](https://pitchfork.com/features/interview/9659-a-new-standard-kamasi-washingtons-modern-jazz-revolution/). Commentators have variously called him a savior, hero, and renewer of jazz and "the new John Coltrane"; Washington has responded that he takes the Coltrane comparison as a great compliment but that "there is only one Coltrane" and that he only wants to be Kamasi[4](https://elpais.com/babelia/2025-03-22/kamasi-washington-jazz-para-entender-mejor-el-mundo-lo-importante-es-unir-la-musica-con-tu-espiritu.html). His crossover reach has persisted: Kendrick Lamar gave him a shout-out on the US number-one hit "squabble up" from the album *GNX*[7](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-06-05/kamasi-washington-australian-tour-lazarus-anime-fearless-movemen/105314818).
Washington ties his music to his identity and to social questions. In interviews he has connected his work to the concerns of the [Black Lives Matter](https://www.edgepedia.org/black-lives-matter) movement, saying his music is a representation of who he is, and he has framed live performance as a place where everything disappears and only the music remains[4](https://elpais.com/babelia/2025-03-22/kamasi-washington-jazz-para-entender-mejor-el-mundo-lo-importante-es-unir-la-musica-con-tu-espiritu.html).
## References
1. [Kamasi Washington event note (birth date), All Saints Church, Pasadena](https://allsaints-pas.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/kamasi-washington-1.pdf)
2. [Kamasi Washington Biography, Discography & Reviews, AllMusic](https://www.allmusic.com/artist/kamasi-washington-mn0000772447)
3. [DownBeat digital edition, July 2016](https://downbeat.com/digitaledition/2016/DB1607/_art/DB1607.pdf)
4. [Fernando Navarro (2025). "Kamasi Washington, jazz para entender mejor el mundo", El País Babelia](https://elpais.com/babelia/2025-03-22/kamasi-washington-jazz-para-entender-mejor-el-mundo-lo-importante-es-unir-la-musica-con-tu-espiritu.html)
5. [Kamasi Washington ready to dream it all up again, Riff Magazine](https://riffmagazine.com/features/kamasi-washington-dream-again/)
6. [WSWS review of The Epic](https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2015/09/17/epic-s17.pdf)
7. [Al Newstead (2025). "Kamasi Washington on composing for Lazarus anime, Fearless Movement, and his Australian tour", ABC News](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-06-05/kamasi-washington-australian-tour-lazarus-anime-fearless-movemen/105314818)
8. [About, Kamasi Washington official site](https://kamasi.squarespace.com/about)
9. [Interview: Kamasi Washington, Red Bull Music Academy Daily](https://web03125.microsites03.redbull.com/2015/09/kamasi-washington-interview/)
10. [Kamasi Washington says the moment's right for his three-hour 'Epic', The Washington Post](https://www.washingtonpost.com/express/wp/2015/08/20/kamasi-washington-says-the-moments-right-for-his-three-hour-epic/)
11. [Kamasi Washington Live at LACMA press release, Los Angeles County Museum of Art](https://www.lacma.org/sites/default/files/press/2025-04/Kamasi%20Washington%20Live%20at%20LACMA%20David%20Geffen%20Galleries_%20Press%20Release%20%281%29.pdf)
12. ["Terrace Martin, Robert Glasper, and Kamasi Washington's Dinner Party Return With New Album", Pitchfork](https://pitchfork.com/story/terrace-martin-robert-glasper-kamasi-washingtons-dinner-party-watchu-bringing/)
13. [Kamasi Washington and the Next Step, Metro Times](https://www.metrotimes.com/music-2/kamasi-washington-and-the-next-step-2466427/)
14. ["A New Standard: Kamasi Washington's Modern Jazz Revolution", Pitchfork](https://pitchfork.com/features/interview/9659-a-new-standard-kamasi-washingtons-modern-jazz-revolution/)
---
*Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Music › Musical practice and theory › Jazz › Jazz performers by instrument and role*
*Initially written Sep 17, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 12, 2026; Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026*
*Copyright 2026 EdgeChat AI, a subsidiary of Biostate AI.*
License: Edgepedia Community License 1.0, https://www.edgepedia.org/edgepedia/license