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Los Angeles Jazz With Kamasi Washington and Others

Kamasi Washington at the Sayers Club in Los Angeles.Credit...Annie Tritt for The New York Times

A few weeks ago, the jazz tenor saxophonist Kamasi Washington stood onstage at a club in Hermosa Beach, Calif., with his band, the Next Step, ending a version of the ballad standard “My One and Only Love” with an improvised closing tag, like a group cadenza.

But it sprung open a whole new chapter of the song. Mr. Washington’s playing spread through the group into a sustained volcanic surge, with a front line of two saxophones and trombone; Miles Mosley’s upright bass and Brandon Coleman’s keyboards run through distortion and wah-wah pedals; and two drummers, Ronald Bruner and Tony Austin, making enfolded, clattering patterns. A series of melodies and rhythms developed on the fly, with Mr. Washington building up to hoarse, Pharoah Sanders-like cries, and then the tailing off commenced Mr. Washington finished last. He closed up his solo in whispers, removed the horn from his mouth and pulled on the loose curls in his hair, smiling absent-mindedly.

The unusual circumstances — a surf-side rock club, a performance during a motley tribute concert — suggested a test case. Jazz in Los Angeles doesn’t have much cultural capital outside a small cohort, and this was not Mr. Washington’s crowd. The audience members acted indifferent at first; then they tuned in, cheering at the catharsis points, quieting at the silences.

It might have tuned in sooner if it had known it was watching the leading figure in a new Los Angeles jazz scene, who is about to release a triple-disc debut called, factually, “The Epic.” (It comes out May 5 on the label Brainfeeder.) Or that his work as a soloist and arranger helps define the sound of Kendrick Lamar’s “To Pimp a Butterfly,” one of the most important hip-hop records of the last several years. Or that this group represents a special resource of the area: it’s one of the best jazz groups I’ve heard in a long time, and has hardly performed outside of California.

As of now, if you want to see them, you have to go to Los Angeles.

There is an old story about the lack of broader recognition around Los Angeles jazz musicians, stretching back to the 1960s and before, to the time of the saxophonists Teddy Edwards and Eric Dolphy (before he moved to New York), the big-band composer Gerald Wilson, and Horace Tapscott, leader of the Pan-Afrikan Peoples Arkestra. It has to do with New York being the center of the jazz-performance business, and Los Angeles, the center of the soundtrack and television business. But it also has to do with the temper of life in Los Angeles, the possibility for working in a less-pressured and lifelong artistic community, the artist’s sense of security against New York hustle.

“You know the lackadaisical thing people talk about out here?” Mr. Washington said in a talk we had a year ago, at Mr. Mosley’s house in Marina del Rey. “When you’re focused, that lackadaisical thing turns into freedom. You can do what you want. No one’s going to put a label on you.”

A true, intuitive, cross-listening, family-like sound at this level is rare enough in jazz to be exciting; it’s the thing sought for. Most developing groups don’t perform regularly enough to achieve that coherence. The lack of demand affects supply.

But over the last few years, Mr. Washington, 34, and a dozen or so other musicians in their early 30s — most of whom come from the same general area of South Los Angeles, playing in the same school ensemble and in one another’s church bands — have figured out their solution to the problem. They formed a cooperative group called the West Coast Get Down, and created residencies for themselves over the past four years, first in the Leimert Park neighborhood and later in Hollywood spots including the Piano Bar, where they tend to play twice a week. The coherence of the band, all those coordinated surges, sounds emphatic in a cultural scene that otherwise can feel transient.

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Kamasi Washington performing at the Sayers Club.Credit...Annie Tritt for The New York Times

“Los Angeles is a large city, sprawled out, and we’re all in our cars,” Mr. Mosley said. “The likelihood of you stumbling across a scene is unlikely, which is why we’ve done so well in our residencies. You go there, and it doesn’t feel like the L.A. you’ve signed up to experience.”

In late 2011, they pooled their resources for a gargantuan recording session at a bare-bones studio in Echo Park: For about a month, 10 players made seven albums with sub-groupings of various sizes, each one featuring a different leader. (Mr. Austin, the drummer, doubled as the engineer.) They were forgoing other work, too: Most of them make livings as sidemen. Mr. Washington plays with Chaka Khan, Mr. Coleman with Rachelle Ferrell and Babyface, and so forth. The albums are just beginning to emerge, all of them different.

Mr. Washington’s is the first and the densest, about 175 minutes of music. His band amounts to two piano trios — double drummers, bassists and keyboardists — with horns in front; later he added strings and a choir. “The Epic” is full of swing and funk and long solos, ecstatic highs and drawn-out tensions, dense arrangements, a few places that come close to musical theater, and a direct line — sometimes startlingly direct — to black American church music. It is also cosmic, in both ’70s-retrograde and futuristic ways. Palms will be read to this music, miracles foretold.

Mr. Washington is a big, dreamy, rather brilliant guy from a family of six children, whose parents spent their careers in the Los Angeles public school system; his life has been rooted in local music and education. His mother, Valerie, is a science teacher; his father, Rickey, a recently retired music teacher, was in one of the first classes to graduate from Locke High School, near Watts, built in response to the riots of 1965. He was taught — as well as Rickey’s friends Patrice Rushen and Ndugu Chancler, who went on to some fame in jazz and pop — by Reggie Andrews, an important educator in the area. By the time Kamasi went to high school, Mr. Andrews was still teaching, and looking out for young players.

“In the ’80s, a lot of kids, if you were kind of bright, you got bussed to schools out of your community,” Mr. Washington said. (He attended Hamilton, in West Los Angeles.) “So you wouldn’t know the talented musicians who lived around the corner from you. Reggie used to figure out who was talented around Central L.A., and he’d pick us up after school. We’d all go to Locke.”

The “multi-school” band at Locke also contained Stephen Bruner, Ronald’s brother, now known as Thundercat, a virtuosic electric bassist known through his work with Erykah Badu and Flying Lotus (and on Mr. Lamar’s new album as well). Four of the band’s members, including Thundercat, made a record in 2004 as the Young Jazz Giants; the current West Coast Get Down is made up entirely of players from the same school band. If it seems like an abstraction that great teachers move jazz forward, this group is the proof.

Mr. Washington drifted away from jazz for a while — he lived close to Compton, and the rappers of N.W.A. were his local heroes — but at 11, a cousin played him a tape of Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers, and something connected. “It was the rhythms he played,” Mr. Washington said. “West Coast hip-hop had that heavy sense of the beat, and Art Blakey played with that, too. It sounded like something that Dre would have sampled.” A few years later, after he started playing saxophone, he connected with John Coltrane’s album “Transition,” and his hearing was changed; Coltrane, as well as Wayne Shorter and Kenny Garrett, come out most strongly in his sound.

On May 4, Mr. Washington and his band, in a typically sweeping gesture, will perform all of “The Epic” at the Regent Theater in downtown Los Angeles, the way it’s supposed to be heard, with strings and choir. There will also be a kind of story line, supplied by Mr. Washington as narrator. It turns out that Mr. Washington dreamed a narrative to the music during the long months he was working on it, and the dream determined the sequencing of the album.

“There’s a dude on top of this mountain, and he stands in front of this gate and guards it,” he explained. “There’s lots of carnage around him; he’s been defending this gate for a long time. At the bottom of the hill there’s a little bitty village, with all these people, and all they do is train to challenge this dude, so if they beat him, they get to become him.”

A bunch of things happen next, but in general the story is about real and imagined figures of authority, and special entry into special places. It is possible that there is a metaphor here about jazz, but the music tells you all you need to know.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section AR, Page 20 of the New York edition with the headline: Driving Jazz, With Ease, in Los Angeles. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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