Kamasi Washington released The Epic on May 5, 2015, and Shabaka Hutchings brought Your Queen Is a Reptile to Impulse! Records on March 30, 2018. Three years and an ocean apart, these two records are the twin poles of the same revival, and understanding what connects them tells you more about where jazz actually went in the 2010s than any single narrative about either artist alone. The link is not just that both men play tenor saxophone, or that both cite Pharoah Sanders as a touchstone. The link is structural: both made the decision to treat spiritual jazz as a grammar to extend, and both extended it into the specific sound of their own city.
Washington came up inside a collective that had been rehearsing in a backyard shack in Inglewood since its members were barely teenagers. That group, known alternately as the Next Step and the West Coast Get Down, became the engine of The Epic: a 172-minute triple album involving a 32-piece orchestra and choir conducted by Miguel Atwood-Ferguson, with Thundercat on electric bass, Cameron Graves on piano and organ, Miles Mosley on acoustic and electric bass, and two drummers, Tony Austin and Ronald Bruner Jr., trading and overlapping across 17 tracks. The opening movement, "Change of the Guard," sets the terms immediately: the orchestra is decoration for nothing, and the choir, featuring Patrice Quinn and Dwight Trible, carries weight. Washington's tenor sax moves through the ensemble the way Coltrane moved through the Classic Quartet, as the voice that names what the collective is feeling. "Seven Prayers," the fourth track of Volume 2, is the clearest evidence of the Sanders inheritance: freeform music with the quality of incantation, the kind of track that deepens rather than develops. The Epic peaked at number three on Billboard's Jazz Albums chart, but its real achievement was the audience it found: listeners raised on hip-hop and R&B who had no idea this was what they'd been looking for.
Hutchings arrived at a parallel destination by a completely different route. Born in London in 1984, he moved to Birmingham at age two, then to Barbados at six, carrying Caribbean rhythms, hip-hop verses, and the island's Crop Over festival inside him alongside the conservatory training that followed. Sons of Kemet, which he formed in 2011, used a configuration that had almost no precedent in the jazz tradition: saxophone, tuba, and two drummers. No piano, no guitar, no harmonic center in the conventional sense. The tuba player, Theon Cross, was asked to carry the bass function and the harmonic function simultaneously, while Tom Skinner, Seb Rochford, and Eddie Hick built polyrhythmic structures that drew on soca, dub, and grime as readily as they drew on jazz. Your Queen Is a Reptile, recorded at Total Refreshment Centre and Livingstone Studios in London and produced by Sons of Kemet and co-produced by Hutchings and engineer Dilip Harris, structured its nine tracks as dedications to Black women: "My Queen Is Ada Eastman," "My Queen Is Harriet Tubman," "My Queen Is Angela Davis." The album's politics were inseparable from its sound. Poet Joshua Idehen appeared on the opening track, and the music underneath him grooved in raw energy while Hutchings' saxophone conducted the proceedings. The move to Impulse!, the label that housed John Coltrane, Alice Coltrane, and Pharoah Sanders, was deliberate. Hutchings acknowledged the lineage directly when he announced the signing, calling it an honor to join the family of his musical heroes.
What separates the two artists is precisely what makes the comparison productive. Washington's vision is orchestral and expansive, rooted in the idea that jazz can carry the weight of a full cinematic arc. The Epic's Volume 3 includes a version of Claude Debussy's "Clair de Lune" and a piece called "Malcolm's Theme," built around the eulogy delivered by Ossie Davis at Malcolm X's funeral in February 1965. The range of reference is enormous, but it is held together by Washington's conviction that all of it belongs to the same continuous tradition. Hutchings' vision is leaner and more confrontational. Sons of Kemet's stripped instrumentation is itself an argument: that the music does not need the harmonic furniture of the Western jazz tradition to carry spiritual weight. Where Washington adds strings and choir to deepen the sound, Hutchings subtracts until only the essentials remain, and then pushes those essentials hard into the rhythms of the African diaspora.
The communities each artist built around himself illuminate the difference further. Washington's West Coast Get Down grew from a shared geography and a shared adolescence in South Central Los Angeles; the collective's coherence comes from years of playing together before anyone was listening. Hutchings' London scene grew from Tomorrow's Warriors, the not-for-profit jazz education organisation co-founded by Janine Irons and bassist Gary Crosby in 1991, which became the proving ground for Hutchings, Nubya Garcia, Moses Boyd, Theon Cross, and the members of Ezra Collective. That programme created a generation of musicians who played on each other's records and shared stages before they had solo careers, which is why the London scene has the texture of a genuine community rather than a collection of parallel solo projects. Ezra Collective, whose drummer Femi Koleoso and keyboardist Joe Armon-Jones both collaborate closely with Garcia, won the Mercury Music Prize in 2023 and became the first jazz band to win the Brit Award for Group of the Year in 2025. The scene that Tomorrow's Warriors seeded has now reached the center of British music culture.
The deepest connection between Washington and Hutchings is the one they share with the listener they are both trying to reach: someone for whom jazz is a living pressure rather than a historical obligation. Washington found that listener through Flying Lotus's Brainfeeder label and through his contribution to Kendrick Lamar's To Pimp a Butterfly, which placed his saxophone inside one of the decade's most discussed albums. Hutchings found that listener through the clubs and festivals of London, where the audience at a Sons of Kemet show was likely to include people who had come straight from a grime night. Both men understood that the spiritual jazz inheritance, the searching quality of Sanders, the cosmic patience of Alice Coltrane, was a need alive in people who had never heard the word "Impulse!" They played, and the rooms filled up, and the music kept moving.
