The Epic Turns 10

Would I be as devoted to left-of-center sounds as I am today without Brainfeeder? While it's impossible to say for sure, I doubt it. Flying Lotus' skunky, grotesque label spent the 2010s emphasizing the gray area between jazz, hip-hop, and electronic experimentation. It uplifted a sphere of woozy California weirdos delivering what, at the time, was truly mind-boggling material. Artists including Teebs, Daedelus, and Ras G beamed utopian melodies through layers of warbled chords and trippy effects, evoking thick smoke wafting through a Venice Beach apartment. Obsessing over Brainfeeder releases as a teenager took me somewhere deeply cosmic and a little seedy — a universe far more alluring than that of my bedroom in Northern Virginia.

Reflecting on the state of Brainfeeder in 2015, it remains key to an era in which all eyes were locked on SoCal. Decade-defining records such as Frank Ocean's Channel Orange and Kendrick Lamar's good kid, m.A.A.d city conjured a regional allure that landed between the surf documentary The Endless Summer and the Bret Easton Ellis novel Less Than Zero. It seemed as if, just behind Hollywood's closed doors, FlyLo and his associates were deviously lingering with weed pens in hand, itching to usher you through the tunnels of Downtown Los Angeles and into a Cronenberg-esque bacchanal. It's miraculous how well the Brainfeeder milieu straddled the underground and mainstream. They rode weekday Low End Theory club nights at the Airliner into a buzz that yielded collaborations with Thom Yorke and Panda Bear. A string of Best New Music designations from Pitchfork thrust these stoner oddballs out of dive bars and into the Hollywood Bowl — the storied 17,500-capacity amphitheater where I half-lucidly witnessed Parliament Funkadelic warm up the stage for FlyLo and Thundercat in 2016.

Near the heart of this scene was prodigious jazz saxophonist Kamasi Washington. Raised by musician parents in Inglewood, he was admitted to the Academy of Music at Hamilton High School and came up as a member of the West Coast Get Down collective — a crew of long-term friends who eventually located mass exposure playing on Lamar's 2015 funk-rap opus To Pimp A Butterfly. Jam sessions in his family shed, nicknamed the Shack, granted Washington precocious vision and purpose. He went on to study in UCLA's ethnomusicology program, which lent him opportunities to work under prestigious instructors like Kenny Burrell and Gerald Wilson when he was still shy of drinking age. By the time Washington reached his second year of college, he had already toured with Snoop Dogg. It culminated in an eclectic vantage point, equally steeped in modernity and tradition, accessibility and the avant-garde.

Having built an even more diverse CV by the age of 34, it was difficult to predict how Washington's full-length solo debut might manifest. Issued by Brainfeeder 10 years ago today, The Epic stood in contrast to the work of Washington's electronic labelmates by leaning into swirling, organic live performance. The album sparked as part of a voracious creative spurt for the West Coast Get Down cohort at large. "We all just decided to just take a month, and just not do anything else — we didn't take any other gigs, we didn't do any other tours. We had to tell everybody for a whole month, December 2011, and we just recorded everyone's music. So we were just in there crazy hours. We would get in at 10 in the morning and leave at two in the morning every day," Washington reminisced in a 2015 NPR interview. Some of those outtakes were fine-tuned later, but the majority of The Epic is an unvarnished product of that period of intense focus.

Washington's tenor saxophone bursts and flitters take the spotlight on The Epic, but a 32-person backing orchestra and 20-member choir blossoms around him. The record's liner notes illustrate the martial arts story of a battle between ancient warriors, tied into slumber and the circle of life. However, the record is more climactic than it is combative. Washington's predecessors, such as Ornette Coleman and Sun Ra, are obvious touchstones. Yet The Epic eschews their spiky murk for introspective brightness — calling to mind Weather Report in its peaks and Vijay Iyer at its most aloof. Spanning three discs and clocking in at just under three hours, it never feels like an exercise in indulgence. Instead, The Epic stands as a testament to a brilliance that can occur when immaculately oiled musicians let their playing wander into untangled realms.

For Washington, traversing the tightrope between excess and narrative came down to spontaneity in a fruitful moment. "Most of these are one-take versions of the songs. I didn't try so hard to push it this way or that way, I just let it be what it is. That is an important aspect of music: You have to understand that, as a musician, you can't force it. You have to let it be what it is or search out what it is," he told Spectrum Culture surrounding The Epic’s release. Opener "Change Of The Guard" draws from a series of dreams Washington had, centered on an old man fighting three opponents to a graceful death. The rest of the album conveys a similar sense of psychedelic gravity. From the cathartic free improvisation of "Final Thought" to a breezy interpretation of Claude DeBussy's "Clair de Lune," The Epic ascends far into the heavens. Choral lines come and go, filtered with muted timbres that recall otherworldly AM radio transmissions. These 17 sprawling tracks bleed together, the trinity of discs painted in a palette of gold and Pacific blue.

With The Epic, Washington became one of 2015's most celebrated new artists across any genre. It didn't take long for him to ride this critical acclaim as a bandleader into bigger wins. The Epic’s follow up EP, Harmony Of Difference, released on Young in 2017, clocked in at a palatable 38 minutes. It signaled a turning point in which Washington went from an if-you-know-you-know favorite to an artist who could perform on Coachella-sized stages as a solo artist, not merely a session player. Even his two-and-a-half-hour sophomore full-length, 2018's Heaven And Earth, thrums with sunniness and intent. In the 10 years following The Epic, Washington has racked up millions of monthly Spotify listeners, earned two Grammy nominations, and scored the Michelle Obama Netflix documentary Becoming. Though nothing will top The Epic for me, Washington's evolution into a 21st century saxophone titan — during an era in which that path has largely been swept away — is commendable.

When I was 18, I moved from the DC suburbs to Orange County for college. In my mind, the jump West would be a launchpad for something more glamorous than higher education. I truly believed I would enmesh myself in the dwindling beat scene boom and drop out after a few months to produce for major rappers and collaborate with jazz greats full time.

In true teenage fantasy fashion, it all went a lot less sexy than imagined. It's bittersweet how tempered versions of aspirations end up actually panning out as one settles into the matter-of-fact flow of adult life. Relistening to The Epic puts me back in a hopeful, wonderfully delusional headspace, in which the promise of secretive Los Angeles studios represented a lifetime of escape via forces more mystical than music.