The Optimist: Remembering Ryan Porter and the West Coast Get Down
Ryan "Papa" Porter tragically died on Saturday 16 May, three weeks after a car accident in Los Angeles County. He was 46. Tony Austin, the West Coast Get Down's engineer, drummer and Porter's closest friend since childhood, announced the news on social media. "Ryan was like a brother to me," Austin wrote. "We have been in each other's lives since we were kids. Ryan's love for music and his overall compassion for humanity was infectious and truly inspiring."
Porter was the West Coast Get Down's trombonist and one of its co-founders. He was the J.J. Johnson disciple who turned up on Kamasi Washington's The Epic, on Kendrick Lamar's To Pimp a Butterfly, and on records by Snoop Dogg, Stevie Wonder, Rihanna, Kanye West, Lauryn Hill and Nick Cave. Across four solo records and a decade of touring the world with Washington's band, he became one of the most distinctive trombone voices of his generation. He was also, by every account, one of the warmest figures in jazz.
For the uninitiated, the West Coast Get Down is the Los Angeles jazz collective formed in 2006 by nine childhood friends from South LA. The press has called them the "Wu-Tang Clan of jazz", which is reductive but useful as shorthand. Its core members are saxophonist Kamasi Washington, bassists Miles Mosley and Stephen 'Thundercat' Bruner, drummers Ronald Bruner Jr and Tony Austin, pianists Cameron Graves and Brandon Coleman, multi-instrumentalist Terrace Martin, and Porter. Across thirty years that ran from a Watts high school music room to Coachella and the Whitney Biennial, they have done as much as anyone to revitalise jazz for a younger generation.
The Multi-School Jazz Band
Before anyone called it the West Coast Get Down, there was the Multi-School Jazz Band.
Reggie Andrews ran the music programme at Alain LeRoy Locke High in Watts from the late 1960s until 2008. A working pianist who had played with Willie Bobo and co-written the Dazz Band's "Let It Whip", Andrews built Locke's jazz programme into one of the most consequential in America. Patrice Rushen came through it. Ndugu Chancler, Gerald Albright, Rickey Minor and later Kamasi Washington, Terrace Martin, Stephen and Ronald Bruner.
The Multi-School Jazz Band was Andrews's extracurricular masterstroke. With funding from the then named, Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz, Andrews collected the best teenage players from different schools and brought them back to Locke to rehearse together. Washington and Miles Mosley were at the Academy of Music at Hamilton High in Beverlywood. So was Cameron Graves, who arrived in ninth grade and met Washington in the school's C-band jazz ensemble. The Bruner brothers came in from elsewhere. Porter came in from South Central, where he had grown up listening to his grandfather's jazz records and picked up the trombone at five after seeing the cover of a J.J. Johnson album. By the time these kids were sixteen they were already playing two or three times a week with someone like Andrews, a serious working musician, telling them when their playing wasn't tight enough.
Outside of school they kept playing together. Washington's parents had a backroom studio at their house in Inglewood, under the LAX flight path, that the band called The Shack. Porter later described it as "stinky hot as balls". Out of those sessions came the first formal version of the group: the Young Jazz Giants, made up of Washington, Graves, Ronald Bruner Jr and Stephen Bruner. They won the John Coltrane Saxophone Competition in 1998 and put out a self-titled album on Birdman Records in 2004, when most of them were still in their early twenties.
Porter took a different path through his early twenties. He went to the Manhattan School of Music in New York, where he studied under the trombonists Steve Turre and David Taylor, and came home to LA in the early 2000s. Snoop Dogg's band picked him up. So did Lauryn Hill's. By the time the rest of the Get Down were ready to start recording in earnest, Porter had spent years on the road learning what a horn can do behind a singer.
The Piano Bar years
By 2006 most of them were back in Los Angeles from college and conservatory. They were playing sideman gigs, scoring films and pitching demos. But they needed a stage of their own.
In 2008 Miles Mosley booked a twice-weekly residency at The Piano Bar in Hollywood, co-led with Tony Austin. The rest of the cohort started turning up and the band ballooned. The name came from the Piano Bar days. Mosley would announce the night from the stage as "the West Coast Get Down". It stuck. The residency ran for roughly eight years until the venue closed in 2016, and the band played one of the closing weekends.
The Piano Bar was a workshop. It let them road-test the long, suite-like compositions that would later anchor their solo records. By the end of the decade they had the music. Now they just needed the recordings.
The KSL Sessions
Booking a studio for thirty days is not how anyone records jazz in 2011. The economics don't work. The conventional wisdom says you go in for a long weekend, three days at most, with the music arranged and rehearsed within an inch of its life.
The Get Down went the other way. Their manager Barbara Sealy had been pitching them to labels and been turned down. So they decided to back themselves. Everyone put in equally, Sealy alongside them. They took Kingsize Soundlabs in Echo Park for the month, and used it as a writers' room with microphones. Three-hour blocks per leader. Two terabytes of recorded material by the end of it. Different accounts settle on different numbers. Washington told NPR they cut "190 songs and eight albums", Mosley said it was closer to 170, Porter remembered 137 across 28 days. The exact number doesn't really matter. What matters is what they did with the tapes.
Mosley spoke later about the marathon sessions: "It was, creatively, the most freeing thing I've ever been a part of, but as a human being, it was really hard." Porter put it differently in an interview with Bandcamp Daily: "Those sessions are a blur. I just remember us approaching that music so cinematically. We wanted our albums to sound like scores for different movies."
The first record out of the KSL sessions was Kamasi Washington's The Epic.
The Epic and the breakthrough
The Epic came out on Flying Lotus's Brainfeeder imprint on 5 May 2015. Three discs and 172 minutes, Washington's ten-piece band, augmented by a 32-piece string orchestra and a 20-voice choir. It truly was an epic album, and very much a Get Down affair. Patrice Quinn taking the lead vocal on "Henrietta Our Hero", two drummers (Austin and Ronald Bruner Jr) running parallel kits through the long modal vamps, two bass players, with Mosley on upright and Thundercat on six-string electric. Brandon Coleman and Cameron Graves splitting keyboard duties, Porter taking trombone solos that sounded like J.J. Johnson sitting in with Pharoah Sanders.
It was an audacious release for a label best known at the time for electronic music and instrumental hip-hop. Brainfeeder had put out Thundercat's first two albums and Flying Lotus's Cosmogramma, but The Epic announced that the imprint could also be a serious home for large-ensemble spiritual jazz. Critics loved it. The American Music Prize awarded the album its inaugural $25,000 grand prize. The Los Angeles Times, Rolling Stone, NPR and countless others put it on year-end lists. By 2016 the band was selling out theatres in Europe and playing Coachella as the first jazz band of their generation to land on that stage.
And then there was Kendrick Lamar's To Pimp a Butterfly. Terrace Martin, a Locke alumnus and childhood friend of Lamar's going back to 2005, had brought Porter, Washington, Mosley, Thundercat and Ronald Bruner Jr into the sessions in 2013 and 2014. The album hit in March 2015, changing hip-hop forever and introducing The Get Down and jazz to a massive new global audience. In 2015, To Pimp a Butterfly was the first time many listeners heard the Get Down at all but The Epic, two months later, was the true statement of intent.
After The Epic
The records that came out after The Epic don't form a neat sequence. They came out on different labels over four or five years, sometimes shaped from the KSL tapes and sometimes returned to with new overdubs. But each one centres a different member, and each one is worth its own listen.
Ryan Porter, The Optimist (World Galaxy, 2018)
Porter's four solo records are now the centre of his legacy. Spangle-Lang Lane arrived first in 2017, a children's-book-shaped suite of melodic trombone-led pieces. But it was The Optimist, released the following year, that revealed how the Get Down had actually been built. The album was recorded in 2008 and 2009 in The Shack in Inglewood, which makes it the literal prototype for the KSL sessions: a long, expansive jazz album made by a friend group with no label, no deadline and no commercial imperative. By the time it came out, the rest of the Get Down's records were already starting to land. Force For Good followed in June 2019, recorded across 2014 to 2019, and was the explicit Coltrane homage: eighty-four minutes, Washington moving to soprano on a couple of cuts, Thundercat featuring on "Carriacou". His most recent solo project, Resilience, came out in September 2022, also on World Galaxy. Nine tracks, 57 minutes, and the third in a deliberate trilogy of affirmative records.
Porter once told CapitalBop he didn't always know how to label what the Get Down was doing: "When I hang out with my friends and play, I don't even know what to call it. It's got jazz in there but we're also putting Dr Dre and DJ Quik and J Dilla in there." That genre ambivalence is also why his playing carries so much. Porter had spent years backing Snoop and Lauryn Hill before he sat down to make a record under his own name, and he never lost the singer's instinct for melody.
Miles Mosley, Uprising (World Galaxy, 2017)
Mosley plays double bass with a distortion pedal, an octave-down pedal and a wah pedal worked at the bow. The effect approximates a fuzz electric guitar with the bottom-end weight of an upright. Uprising is his vehicle: he sings on it, his bass takes solos that bend over the bar line, and the rest of the Get Down fill in around him. Washington plays tenor. Graves piano. Coleman keys. Austin drums. Porter trombone. The late Zane Musa plays saxophones on what would turn out to be one of his last sessions before his death in 2015. The album was co-produced by Mosley, Austin and Sealy, and debuted at number four on the Billboard Contemporary Jazz chart. Mosley released the long-promised follow-up, +magic: Los Angeles, on his own Beam Records imprint in March 2026 as a limited 500-copy gold-leafed, signed and numbered pressing.
Cameron Graves, Planetary Prince (Mack Avenue, 2017)
Graves had spent two years studying Hindustani tabla six hours a day at UCLA. He has perfect pitch. His father Carl Graves is a Canadian R&B singer who later played keyboards in Oingo Boingo. None of that prepares you for what Planetary Prince sounds like. The opening title track is a fifteen-minute modal odyssey, with Washington and Porter trading long lines over Graves's two-handed pulse. Thundercat plays electric bass, Bruner Jr drums, Trumpeter Philip Dizack and bassist Hadrien Feraud sit in. It is a staggering, genre-defying debut, an intellectual and cosmic exploration of the universe, defined by Graves' fascination with odd time signatures and spiritual frequencies. Seven, the 2021 follow-up on Mack Avenue's Artistry imprint, is Graves's explicit thrash-jazz record: he names Pantera, Slipknot and Meshuggah alongside Coltrane and Mahavishnu Orchestra as touchstones, and the LP plays out across heavy ostinatos and metric superimpositions you don't usually hear on a jazz piano record.
Ronald Bruner Jr, Triumph (World Galaxy, 2017)
A Grammy-winning drummer with the Stanley Clarke Band, alumnus of Suicidal Tendencies alongside his brother, sideman to Wayne Shorter, Ron Carter, Roy Hargrove, Prince and Chaka Khan. Triumph had a seven-year gestation. George Duke, one of Bruner's mentors, urged him into the studio and ended up appearing as a guest on what turned out to be one of Duke's last sessions before his death in August 2013. Mac Miller features. Washington plays. Bruner sings on a couple of tracks. The album moves between fusion, R&B and straight-ahead jazz with the unhurried confidence of someone who has been a working drummer since his early teens.
Thundercat, Drunk (Brainfeeder, 2017)
Stephen Bruner came to electric bass through Suicidal Tendencies and Erykah Badu's New Amerykah Part One, and ended up with five Brainfeeder albums and a Grammy. Drunk was the breakthrough: a 23-track suite of three-minute miniatures that took thumbed sextuplet bass lines, multi-tracked falsetto vocals and a deadpan internet-age lyric sensibility into the mainstream. Kenny Loggins and Michael McDonald show up on "Show You The Way". Pharrell, Kendrick Lamar and Wiz Khalifa feature elsewhere. The 2020 follow-up It Is What It Is won the Grammy for Best Progressive R&B Album and was dedicated to Mac Miller. Distracted arrived in April 2026, mainly produced by Greg Kurstin with help from Flying Lotus, Kenny Beats and The Lemon Twigs, with a posthumous Mac Miller feature among guest spots from Tame Impala, A$AP Rocky and Channel Tres.
Brandon Coleman, Resistance (Brainfeeder, 2018)
Coleman picked up the piano at sixteen after his brother gave him Herbie Hancock's Sunlight with its talk-box vocals. He's the Get Down's main link to the Parliament-Funkadelic and Roger Troutman lineage. Resistance is twelve tracks of vocoder-and-keytar funk with Washington playing the closing horn solo on "Giant Feelings" alongside Patrice Quinn and Miguel Atwood-Ferguson. Onstage with the live Get Down ensemble Coleman is the most theatrical presence: keytar slung at the hip, synth patches that sound, in his own words, "like Siri singing".
Tony Austin
Austin's own leader record has been talked about for years and is still pending. His contribution to the collective is, in a sense, more important than any one album. He produced and engineered the KSL sessions. He drums on most of the Get Down records, alongside Bruner Jr. His Tama kit anchors the live show. He is also the engineer of record on Becoming (the 2020 Michelle Obama documentary score) and on Lazarus, Washington's 2025 soundtrack album for the Shinichirō Watanabe anime series.
Leimert Park and the lineage
You can't understand the Get Down without Leimert Park.
The cultural centre of Black jazz in LA sits on Degnan Boulevard in South LA. In 1989 the drummer Billy Higgins (the most-recorded drummer in jazz history, Ornette Coleman's drummer, Dexter Gordon's drummer, Cedar Walton's drummer) and the poet Kamau Daáood opened The World Stage there. Higgins ran a Monday-night drum workshop and the Summer Jazz Institute. Horace Tapscott, who had founded the Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra in 1961, gave the venue its blessing. The Arkestra's Afrocentric, community-rooted spiritual-jazz politics became the ethical centre of Leimert Park. Down the street, 5th Street Dick's Coffee House opened two days before the 1992 LA riots and became an after-hours jazz hub that survived the unrest and kept going.
Higgins (who died in 2001) and Tapscott (who died in 1999) personally mentored the Get Down generation. Jesse Sharps, of the Arkestra, has continued to play side by side with the Get Down generation in a working band called The Gathering. And there have been lots of other mentors. At UCLA, Graves studied under Higgins, saxophonist Harold Land and arranger Gerald Wilson. Washington played in Wilson's orchestra and has called Wilson his "biggest hero compositionally". Stanley Clarke and Chick Corea told the young Graves and Bruner that they were inheriting the Mahavishnu and Return to Forever line.
This is the bit most of the press has missed. The Get Down isn't a Brainfeeder spinoff or a To Pimp a Butterfly adjacent project. It's a continuation of a thirty-year LA jazz lineage that runs through the World Stage, the Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra and the Locke jazz programme. When Washington dresses for a show in robes with a chasuble-like panel and conducts a twenty-voice choir through a four-movement suite called "Truth", he's drawing on a spiritual jazz tradition that started in Leimert Park and has continued to this day.
Barbara Sealy
One name connects more of this music than the press has bothered to notice. Barbara Sealy. London-born and Los Angeles-based, Sealy came out of management roles at Walt Disney, Sony Music and the Grammy Awards before founding the West Coast operation of the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz, which she ran for years out of her own house. With her business partner Bob Brodhead she co-managed a Monk scholarship fund that raised more than half a million dollars for inner-city LA music students, and she later built Jazz Sports LA in partnership with the NBA. She has known the Get Down since they were in middle and high school. She helped many in the collective secure their conservatory placements. In 2005 she founded SB Music Management with them as her first roster of artists, and she still manages most of them today. She was at the KSL sessions day and night, helped run the Piano Bar gigs. She championed these musicians long before most even cared.
SBMM operates from an office split between LA and London. For most of the last decade she has also managed the London saxophonist Nubya Garcia. The trans-Atlantic thread the press writes about as if it were a happy coincidence is, in part, one person making phone calls in both directions for thirty years.
The jazz renaissance, in three cities
The 2010s jazz revival had three geographies and the Get Down anchored one of them.
In London, Shabaka Hutchings led Sons of Kemet to a Mercury nomination, then signed to Impulse, then put together the 2018 Brownswood compilation We Out Here with Nubya Garcia, Moses Boyd, Theon Cross, Ezra Collective and Joe Armon-Jones. In Chicago, the drummer Makaya McCraven made In the Moment (2015) and Universal Beings (2018) for International Anthem, a label that has built its catalogue by deliberately recording sessions across Chicago, New York, London and LA in a sort of cross-pollination strategy. In Los Angeles, the Get Down.
The three scenes share traits. Post-genre fluency: hip-hop, electronics, gospel, funk, Afrobeat in London's case. Explicit Black political and spiritual consciousness. A refusal of the conservatory-purist line that had dominated New York and jazz education in the 1990s. And, crucially, a willingness to release music in label clusters and collectives rather than through the conventional jazz majors. Brainfeeder, Young Turks (and its successor Young), World Galaxy through Alpha Pup, Mack Avenue and Beam on the LA side. Brownswood and Native Rebel on the London side. International Anthem in Chicago. All of them independent. All of them artist-led to some extent.
What the Get Down did differently was scale. The Epic is three hours long. Washington's live show has fielded twenty musicians at a stretch. Coleman's keytar, Mosley's bowed bass through distortion, the twin-drummer setup, the choir, the strings, Porter's lyrical mid-register trombone holding the brass front line together: this is jazz built to play arenas and festivals, not the four-set clubs that defined the post-Marsalis era. By 2025 Washington was playing two-hour arena concerts and pulling crowds who had never bought a jazz record in their lives.
That isn't a small thing in a country where, by some accounting, jazz had tied with classical as the least-consumed music genre, representing less than 1% of US on-demand streams. The Get Down didn't fix that on their own. But they helped make jazz a centre of pop-cultural attention in a way it hadn't been since the early 1960s.
What comes next
The collective has spent the back half of the decade in a productive scatter. Washington's Fearless Movement (Young, May 2024) brought in André 3000 on flute, George Clinton, BJ the Chicago Kid, D Smoke, DJ Battlecat, Patrice Quinn, Brandon Coleman and Washington's own daughter Asha. Porter played on it. The Lazarus soundtrack album (Milan, April 2025) gave Washington a long-form scoring credit on a major anime series. Thundercat's Distracted dropped on Brainfeeder in April 2026 with Greg Kurstin in the producer's chair and a posthumous Mac Miller feature. Mosley's +magic: Los Angeles arrived in March 2026 as a limited 500-copy vinyl on his own Beam imprint. Cameron Graves has continued to tour the thrash-jazz of Seven and the live concert release Live From the Seven Spheres. Ronald Bruner Jr remains one of the most-booked drummers in the business. Tony Austin is engineering most of the records they're all on.
A self-titled West Coast Get Down studio album has been promised for at least ten years. It still hasn't arrived. Whether it ever does is now a different question. Bruner Jr once told Dazed that an album would be beautiful. Bruner Jr also told an interviewer, in a different context: "Being in this band is a gig forever. I could be ninety and Kamasi will still call me."
And as for Ryan's legacy. The records are still here. The Optimist. Force For Good. The trombone parts on The Epic, Heaven and Earth, Planetary Prince, Uprising, Resistance and Fearless Movement. He was, in Miles Mosley's words, the player who "leans back" in the perfect counterweight to Washington's lean-forward tenor: "the two of them sound like there are four of them". A perfect bandstand mate to half a dozen of the most important LA jazz records of the last decade. And that's no small thing.
If you don't know Porter's playing, The Optimist (World Galaxy, 2018) is where to start. An unhurried, Coltrane-shaped suite recorded in Kamasi Washington's parents' garage when the Get Down were in their twenties and had nothing but time. Force For Good (2019) is the bigger record but The Optimist is the one that sounds like friendship on a record. Resilience (2022) is the closing chapter, and the most personal of the three. These, along with most of the Get Down's catalogue (The Epic and Thundercat's run on Brainfeeder, Washington's later records on Young, Planetary Prince and Seven on Mack Avenue, Uprising and Triumph on World Galaxy), turn up at Lush Life every now and then. Browse the contemporary jazz collection to find them.
