Drunk

The bass on To Pimp a Butterfly (2015) is Thundercat's. Before the jazz and soul world claimed him he had spent his teens and twenties in the crossover thrash band Suicidal Tendencies — a gig he still held around the time of his own Apocalypse (2013).

In 2015, Kamasi Washington emerged as a new voice in jazz with his triple album The Epic — but that same year he was also arranging strings on To Pimp a Butterfly, a landmark hip-hop record. He'd already left a mark outside jazz before the jazz world took notice.

Terrace Martin trained as a jazz saxophonist, but in 2015 he helped shape the sound of a landmark hip-hop album, To Pimp a Butterfly. Around the same time he was quietly releasing straight jazz records like Velvet Portraits and Gray Area under his own name, moving between the two worlds with the same hands.