Shawn Healy Presents Kamasi Washington in Sacramento

He is a founding member of the jazz collective West Coast Get Down. Washington was born in 1981 and raised in Los Angeles, California, and is a graduate of the Academy of Music of Alexander Hamilton High School in Beverlywood, Los Angeles. He enrolled in UCLA's Department of Ethnomusicology, where he played with faculty members including Kenny Burrell, Gerald Wilson and Billy Higgins.

His debut solo recording, The Epic, was released in May 2015, followed by the mini-album/EP Harmony of Difference in September 2017 and his second full-length studio album, Heaven and Earth, in June 2018. In 2020 he scored the Michelle Obama documentary Becoming, and he co-founded the supergroup Dinner Party with Terrace Martin, Robert Glasper and 9th Wonder.

In 2021 he contributed a cover of Metallica's "My Friend of Misery" to The Metallica Blacklist. Washington, along with Bonobo and Floating Points, composed music for the 2025 Japanese anime television series Lazarus, directed by Shinichirō Watanabe.