NEW YORK, NY.- Before Kamasi Washington unveiled his breakthrough opus, he admits, he second-guessed it.

“The Epic” (2015) was a major moment, not just for the Los Angeles saxophonist and composer, but for jazz at large. Arriving on the heels of Kendrick Lamar’s seismic “To Pimp a Butterfly” — an album featuring contributions from Washington and his tight-knit hometown coterie — it contained nearly three hours’ worth of surging, spiritually charged music, spearheaded by Washington’s roaring tenor sax. Despite its daunting scope and operatic grandeur, it resonated broadly, serving as a gateway to jazz and the thriving scene orbiting Washington’s label at the time, Brainfeeder.

But in the long interval between its recording — most of which took place in 2011 — and its release, Washington toyed with the idea of trimming it down to make it more palatable. “I had so much time, sitting on it for a good little minute, so I made edited versions,” he said with a sheepish laugh during a recent video interview from his Inglewood, California, home, sporting a black-and-gold striped knit hat and a flowing, floral-embroidered shirt. But, inspired in part by the boldness of “To Pimp a Butterfly,” and the way it further challenged Lamar’s audience following the rapper’s 2012 multiplatinum hit “Good Kid, M.A.A.D City,” he decided to honor his original vision, keeping “The Epic” epic.

“I’m just going to let it be what it is,” he recalled thinking at the time. “And I’m cool with whatever that does.”

In the years since “The Epic,” that principle has continued to serve Washington well. His new album out May 3, “Fearless Movement,” includes high-profile guest spots from George Clinton, who sings on the woozy, grinding “Get Lit,” and André 3000, who contributes blissed-out flute textures to the relaxed jazz-funk excursion “Dream State.”

Overall, it finds Washington, 43, adhering to his long-standing vision, presenting sprawling, eclectic tracks — 12 in just shy of 90 minutes — that refute any notion of jazz as a cloistered musical zone and showcase the chemistry of his core musical crew, a decades-strong friend group that started taking shape in early childhood.

Like “The Epic,” “Heaven and Earth” from 2018 and Washington’s self-released CD-Rs of the early 2000s, “Fearless Movement” features the crackling drum tandem of Ronald Bruner Jr. and Tony Austin, as well as Bruner’s bassist brother Stephen (better known as Thundercat), singer Patrice Quinn and trombonist Ryan Porter. “The sound we have, it’s precious to me,” Washington said.

In a phone interview, Porter reflected on the collective strength of Washington’s extended ensemble, which also includes pianist Cameron Graves, keyboardist Brandon Coleman, bassist Miles Mosley and multi-instrumentalist Terrace Martin. “The best analogy I can think of is that each of these guys is like Voltron,” he said, likening the musicians to the robots in a 1980s animated series who were stronger as a whole. “It’s a big musical machine.”

Though Washington is a consummate collaborator, “Fearless Movement” is, in part, fairly personal: a response to first-time fatherhood. “I’ve kind of known what I was supposed to do for a long time, since I was a little kid,” he said of his musical calling. “And when I had my daughter, it, in a way, changed; it was like, oh, I’m supposed to be your father.”

Washington said with a laugh that his daughter, now 3, was “hyper aware” that she was partly responsible for one of the album’s tracks, “Asha the First,” which grew from a melody that she picked out on the piano: “She knows it’s hers.” Washington also took her cues when it came to the album cover, which shows the saxophonist standing still, with her in motion around him. “I had this idea of her kind of standing in this particular way, and she wouldn’t do it. She wanted to run circles around me,” he said. The resulting image “felt like it spoke to that energy so perfectly.”

Sitting next to his piano in the sun-filled room where he composes, Washington explained that the album’s André 3000 collaboration came about after the rapper-flutist invited Washington to sessions for his 2023 instrumental opus “New Blue Sun” and offered to play on something of Washington’s in return. “He brought this big arsenal of flutes, and he started just playing through them for me,” Washington said of what became a spontaneously evolving session. Coleman suggested that they capitalize on the moment and improvise something entirely new. “I didn’t really know what we were going to get,” Washington said, “and it just came out so dope.”

The George Clinton cameo arose after Washington chatted with the funk trailblazer in 2022, at a Los Angeles gallery show featuring Clinton’s visual art, and remembered an unfinished track composed by Bruner Jr. In a phone interview, Clinton said that based on his earlier exposure to Washington, he “knew it was going to be cool.” The Parliament-Funkadelic leader recalled first hearing of Washington through Lamar when he was recording his own contribution to “To Pimp a Butterfly.” The rapper had touted characters including Washington, Thundercat and producer and Brainfeeder label head Flying Lotus as “the West Coast new version of P-Funk.” Clinton said he found the comparison apt, and praised the way Washington and his associates adeptly bridged genres: “They got a jazz thing, but they’re still relating to the young street people.”

For all its might, Washington’s saxophone sound has proved highly adaptable, meshing handsomely with the dramatic art-pop of Florence + the Machine, the funky fusion of Herbie Hancock and Metallica at the band’s most grandly gothic. This past February, Washington attended a Red Hot Chili Peppers show as a birthday present to himself. He ended up onstage, playing a typically searing solo with the band after a last-minute invitation from Flea, a friend and fan.

“He came with all the thunder and all the heart and all the thoughtfulness that’s part of his playing,” Flea said in a phone interview. “It was phenomenal how much power he gets out of that woodwind instrument, and sensitivity and expression.”

Flea’s reaction upon first hearing Washington mirrored that of many listeners at the time. When tuning in to contemporary jazz, he “was getting a cold feeling and a lack of originality and a lack of the revolutionary spirit, which is the thing that I admire deeply from the jazz I love,” he said. “And when I heard ‘The Epic’ and I listened to Kamasi’s playing and the way he was going about it, I just felt that revolutionary spirit again.”

The praise directed at Washington during that era was intense, but his firm grounding helped him navigate what could have been a disorienting rise. “I was already who I was before anyone said anything like ‘You are the savior of jazz,’” he said. “Just one year before that, they wouldn’t have said my name at all.”

Washington’s wide acclaim afforded him new opportunities, like an invitation to contribute to the 2017 Whitney Biennial and the chance to score the 2020 Michelle Obama doc “Becoming,” for which he picked up a Grammy nomination. And his increased platform added prestige to satellite projects such as Dinner Party, a team-up with Terrace Martin, Robert Glasper and the producer 9th Wonder that will appear — along with Washington’s own band — at this summer’s Newport Jazz Festival.

Like his personal life, Washington’s musical practice is still evolving. He’s working on a ballet and recently completed music for a new project by Shinichiro Watanabe, director of the celebrated animé series “Cowboy Bebop.”

But beyond specific near-future projects, he’s honing a certain mindset, taking cues from the luminaries he’s been lucky enough to work with so far. “That free spirit is something I’m kind of realizing more and more is just a through line” uniting figures such as Lamar, Hancock and André 3000, he said. As he praised their shared creative conviction, he could have been describing his own. “It’s like that sense of, they make the music and the art they want to make, no matter what it is,” he said, sounding determined. “They’re unstoppable.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.