Saxophone virtuoso and widely lauded bandleader Kamasi Washington introduced hip-hop audiences to the lineage of spiritual jazz and hard bop with 2015’s The Epic and 2018’s Heaven and Earth, heralded as some of the best music of the 2010s by The New York Times, Rolling Stone, Pitchfork, Vice, Stereogum, and many more. An artist whose multidisciplinary work has garnered him Grammy ® and Emmy ® nominations, spots at Sundance Film Festival and the Whitney Biennial, and the inaugural American Music Prize, he’s been called “one of today’s more popular musicians of any kind, as well as an ambassador for Los Angeles’s thriving scene” by The New York Times.
Earl Sweatshirt is the virtuosic byproduct of Los Angeles’ fertile ground, where hip-hop sowed its seeds and historic cultural movements were born. The prodigiously gifted writer, lyricist, and producer grew from the zeitgeist from which contemporary collectives in hip-hop today were predicated. And while most movements become fleeting as soon as they arrive, Earl pushed forward, documented his growth and self-discovery on record, and cemented himself as one of the foremost culturally relevant MCs in the game—one who never strayed too far away from his Los Angeles beat-scene roots. His debut album Doris arrived in 2013 and introduced the world to a more realized vision than his seminal mixtape Earl, which was released three years prior when he was just 16 years old. He followed Doris with the critically lauded I Don’t Like Shit, I Don’t Go Outside in 2015, further exploring the depth of his technical dexterity with more swagger than he had on prior releases. Three years later, in 2018, he released Some Rap Songs, the tightly wrought album that found a more self-aware and mature Earl present in his reflections on being in the public eye since he was a teenager, coupled with his reconciling with the death of his father. Enter Feet of Clay, the conceptual 2019 project that continues the written narrative of Earl’s life in today’s societal landscape and worldview in real time.