In December 2011, Kamasi Washington and nine of his closest collaborators locked themselves into Kingsize Soundlabs in Echo Park, Los Angeles, and did not leave for thirty days. They arrived at ten in the morning and played until two in the morning, every day, pooling their own money to cover the studio time. When they emerged, they had recorded approximately 190 songs — eight separate albums' worth of material — across the entire West Coast Get Down collective. Washington's share of that session became "The Epic," released on May 5, 2015, on Flying Lotus's Brainfeeder label. The gap between those two moments, roughly three and a half years, is the real subject of the record: what it means to hold something finished and fully formed while the world catches up to it.
The album runs 172 minutes across three volumes. Volume 1 is titled "The Plan," Volume 2 "The Glorious Tale," and Volume 3 "The Historic Repetition." The opening track, "Change of the Guard," sets the terms immediately: a twelve-minute declaration of intent, unhurried and uncompromising, with Washington's tenor saxophone riding over a full string orchestra and a twenty-person choir. The 17 tracks that follow include originals like "Askim," "The Next Step," and "Miss Understanding," alongside a rapturous reading of Claude Debussy's "Clair de Lune" and a version of the 1938 Ray Noble standard "Cherokee." The closing track, "The Message," lands the album's spiritual and political weight with the kind of finality that only a three-hour build can earn.
Washington produced the album himself, and the self-production matters. The record carries no outside editorial hand, no label pressure to trim the solos or reduce the ensemble. The band he assembled for the sessions — dual drummers in Ronald Bruner Jr. and Tony Austin, dual bassists in Miles Mosley and Stephen "Thundercat" Bruner, pianist Cameron Graves, keyboardist Brandon Coleman, trombonist Ryan Porter, and trumpeter Igmar Thomas — had been playing together since they were teenagers, many of them first brought together in the early 1990s through a Watts after-school program called the Multi-School Jazz Band. Vocalist Patrice Quinn and vocalist Dwight Trible both appear on the record, and the string orchestra and choir give the whole thing the scale of a film score. Tony Austin, who also served as tracking engineer during the sessions, is credited on nearly every track.
The collective called themselves the West Coast Get Down, and the December 2011 sessions at Kingsize Soundlabs became known as the KSL Sessions. The logic of the month-long run was communal: each member contributed financially, and each member came away with recordings of their own. Miles Mosley's "Uprising," Ronald Bruner Jr.'s "Triumph," and Cameron Graves's "Planetary Prince" all trace back to the same thirty days. Washington later told NPR that the record had been playing in his dreams before the sessions began. "I would dream the whole three hour record," he said. "It tripped me out. I took it as a sign." That the finished album holds together as a single, coherent statement — rather than a collection of session outtakes — is a consequence of that prior dreaming, and of years of live performance. The West Coast Get Down had a twice-weekly residency at Hollywood's Piano Bar for years, and they had been playing the material from "The Epic" there long before it was released.
By the time the album came out in May 2015, Washington had already appeared on Kendrick Lamar's "To Pimp a Butterfly," released that March, contributing saxophone and string arrangements to one of the most discussed records of the decade. That visibility opened a door. Listeners who had followed Lamar's jazz-inflected record arrived at "The Epic" already primed for the connection between jazz and contemporary Black American music. The album reached number five on the Billboard Jazz Albums chart and number eighteen on the Billboard Independent Albums chart — strong numbers for a three-disc, nearly three-hour jazz release with no radio-friendly single.
The critical response was immediate and sustained. Pitchfork's Seth Colter Walls awarded the album Best New Music. AllMusic's Thom Jurek called it "21st century jazz as accessible as it is virtuosic." In 2016, "The Epic" won the inaugural American Music Prize, a $25,000 award recognizing the best debut album by an American artist — beating out, among others, Chris Stapleton's "Traveller" and Leon Bridges's "Coming Home." That Washington's record, a 172-minute jazz triple album, won a cross-genre prize over some of the most commercially successful debut albums of the year says something about the moment, and about the record.
What "The Epic" accomplished was not simply a revival of spiritual jazz in the tradition of John Coltrane or Pharoah Sanders, though those lineages are audible throughout. It demonstrated that a large ensemble, playing long-form compositions with full orchestral and choral support, could reach listeners who had never previously sought out jazz — and could do so without softening the music's demands. Washington's tenor saxophone solos on tracks like "Askim" push into the same intensity that Pharoah Sanders brought to his late-1960s recordings, and the album's rhythm section, with two drummers and two bassists driving simultaneously, generates a density that owes as much to funk and soul as to post-bop. The three-volume structure gives the listener room to enter the music gradually, and the decision to include covers of Debussy and Ray Noble alongside Washington's originals signals that the album's frame of reference is wide enough to hold anything.
The thirty days at Kingsize Soundlabs in December 2011 produced something that took years to reach the public, and the wait was part of the story. Washington and his collaborators had been playing this music for years before they recorded it, and they went on playing it for years before most people heard it. "The Epic" arrived in 2015 already fully inhabited, the sound of musicians who had lived inside these compositions long enough to stop performing them and simply play.
