Jazz saxophonist and genre-crossover star Kamasi Washington has revealed details of his new upcoming album, and hinted at plans to write a graphic novel based on a dream that inspired last year’s lengthy hit album, The Epic.

The artist was recently awarded the inaugural American Music Prize for Best Debut Album– valued at $25,000 – for his triple-CD release The Epic, which made headlines as a jazz album that infiltrated the mainstream music audience with its mix of R&B, soul-jazz fusion and rippling tenor sax solos.

Later in the year Washington became a household name when he featured on Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly, further proving the successful possibilities of cross-genre collaborations. “The energy of hip-hop and the energy of jazz are coming from a similar place,” he said in an interview with Rolling Stone. “The whole repurposing of music: the way hip-hop uses samples to create new songs, and in jazz, how we take show tunes and turn them into standards.”

In the same Rolling Stone interview, the artist elaborated on the style and content of the upcoming project, which is set to be bigger and better than The Epic if that’s even possible. “In my mind, I have plans for more large-ensemble stuff: doing some brass ensembles and not just things with the choir… It’s hard to say exactly; it’s all in my head right now.” He seems taken by working with layered instrumental constructs, elaborating that he’s been recording himself over and over to produce a “32-saxophone thing…that sounds cool.” The upcoming graphic novel is based on the dream that inspired Washington to release The Epic as a three-CD set, rather than cutting it down to a single CD.

Speaking about his success as a jazz artist in an over produced and pop-dominated world, Washington shows he’s just as much of a thinker as he is an award-winning composer and performer.

“I think the open mind is the one that’s reachable,” he said. “You look at something like this political race or something like that, and you see that there’s a lot of closed minds out there. And with closed minds also come closed eyes closed ears and everything else. And so people becoming open to jazz…it’s a very self-expressive, very inclusive music. It’s rarely about one individual." 

Washington is touring Hawaii, Australia and New Zealand in coming months, but plans to start recording the new album before then.

IMAGE: Miikka Skaffari / Getty Images