The Epic is the third studio album by American jazz saxophonist Kamasi Washington and his first to be released on a record label. It was released on May 5, 2015, by the Brainfeeder record label.
Contents
Background
Washington began assembling what would become his core musical collective, the West Coast Get Down, during his childhood in Los Angeles. He had known drummer Ronald Bruner Jr. since the age of three and grew up alongside many of the musicians who would later perform on The Epic. Washington is a graduate of the Academy of Music of Alexander Hamilton High School in Los Angeles and later studied ethnomusicology at UCLA, where he played with faculty members including Kenny Burrell, Billy Higgins, and bandleader Gerald Wilson.
The album's genesis can be traced to Washington's reconnection with producer Steven Ellison, known as Flying Lotus, whom he had met in the mid-1990s when Ellison attended a John Coltrane competition won by Washington's first band. Flying Lotus, whose family lineage includes Alice Coltrane, offered Washington the opportunity to record an album for his boundary-defying Brainfeeder label. Washington was given creative freedom to pursue his vision.
In December 2011, Washington and his collective of musicians pooled their resources to rent out Kingsize Soundlabs in Los Angeles for a month-long recording session. The sessions were densely packed, with multiple musicians placed in the same rooms due to space constraints. The core band, sometimes called "The Next Step," included two bassists (Miles Mosley and Thundercat), two drummers (Ronald Bruner Jr. and Tony Austin), two keyboard players (Cameron Graves and Brandon Coleman), a horn section, and vocalist Patrice Quinn, who sang from the control room. The collective recorded prolifically, producing approximately 190 songs across eight different projects during the month, of which 45 were Washington's own compositions.
The 17 songs that would become The Epic were selected from this wealth of material and augmented with a 32-piece orchestra and a 20-person choir, for which Washington wrote the arrangements. Washington developed a narrative concept for the album inspired by a recurring dream he experienced while writing the string and choir parts, which he described to Flying Lotus when presenting the music. To Washington's surprise, Lotus readily accepted the ambitious triple-album format.
Critical reception
Upon its release, The Epic was widely celebrated by music critics. At Metacritic, which assigns a normalized rating out of 100 to reviews from critics, the album received an average score of 83, which indicates "universal acclaim", based on 7 reviews. the AllMusic critic Thom Jurek described the album as "21st century jazz as accessible as it is virtuosic -- feel matters to Washington", and further wrote, "Holistic in breadth and deep in vision, it provides a way into this music for many, and challenges the cultural conversation about jazz without compromising or pandering." Russell Warfield of Drowned in Sound described the album as "wonderful stuff" and that the record "deserves a high score by any standards of evaluation".
The Guardian critic, John Fordham, who was positive in his assessment of the album, wrote, "Only a shortage of thematic surprises – given its extravagant length – keeps it from being quite the seismically jazz-changing departure that some admirers are claiming." Seth Colter Walls of Pitchfork awarded the album the "Best New Music" tag, writing, "The Epic actually makes good on its titular promise without bothering to make even a faint-hearted stab in the direction of fulfilling its pre-release hype."