If you asked random strangers in this Culver City, Calif. café to look around the room and select the man who’s repeatedly been called “the future of jazz,” Kamasi Washington would be the No. 1 draft choice. He looks like Sun Ra reborn as a lineman: hulking but gentle, capable of thunderous cosmic wrath and meditative calm. His massive frame is swaddled in a long black tunic, medallions dangle from his neck, and a kaleidoscopic wooden skullcap protects a thick shrub of hair.

The Inglewood native speaks softly and carries a big stick. This isn’t figurative observation, but literal fact. His regular voice is as serene as his tenor sax is a roaring cataract. Washington also rarely leaves the block without an ornate wooden shark cane. It matches perfectly with the array of spiked panther rings on his right hand—one of which accidentally stabs me as we exchange greetings.

Whether you prefer calling it a presence or an aura, there’s something about Washington that suggests this isn’t his first cycle in samsāra. In concert, his saxophone peals rumble out of an extra-sensory, multi-dimensional vale. Legendary jazz fusion bassist Stanley Clarke called him the heir to the astral master, Pharaoh Sanders. His music is a healing psychedelic balm in a time of bleary chaos.

“I can’t really worry about nuclear war any more than I can worry about the aliens coming,” Washington says with a slight grin. “Every day we’re here is an opportunity to do what we can to make the world right, to help someone close or far from us, to not get so hung up on what we can’t do, and remember what we can.”