A classically trained jazz saxophonist who wins a Grammy for Best Rap Song, scores a Japanese anime series, gets name-checked in one of the biggest hip-hop anthems of the decade, and records a Metallica cover sounds impossible on paper. This episode explains how Kamasi Washington did all of it without abandoning jazz. Born in Los Angeles in 1981, he studied at the Academy of Music at Hamilton High School and then in UCLA’s Department of Ethnomusicology, where faculty members Kenny Burrell, Gerald Wilson and Billy Higgins mentored a quartet that included Cameron Graves, Stephen Bruner (Thundercat) and Ronald Bruner Jr. That group debuted as the Young Jazz Giants in 2004.

The discussion covers his years as a sideman for Snoop Dogg and Flying Lotus, the catalytic year of 2015 when he played on and arranged strings for Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly, contributed to Thundercat’s Them Changes, and released his nearly three-hour debut The Epic with a 32-piece orchestra, 20-person choir and two drummers. From there the hosts follow the West Coast Get Down collective, Harmony of Difference, Heaven and Earth, Fearless Movement, the Dinner Party supergroup with Terrace Martin, Robert Glasper and 9th Wonder, and collaborations ranging from Herbie Hancock and Wayne Shorter to St. Vincent, Run the Jewels and a Metallica tribute. Later chapters examine his Emmy- and Grammy-nominated score for the Michelle Obama documentary Becoming, the Lazarus anime soundtrack with Bonobo and Floating Points, and the 2026 Grammy wins for TV Off and Luther.

• What an ethnomusicology degree gave Washington that conservatory training would not have
• How ego suppression as a sideman prepared him for arranging strings on Mortal Man
• Why The Epic turned live jazz shows into something closer to a rock festival
• The shared DNA between heavy metal and vanguard jazz that made My Friend of Misery work
• The decade-long Kendrick Lamar arc from To Pimp a Butterfly to a Best Rap Song Grammy