Kamasi Washington, “Fearless Movement.”

Historically, jazz has been under-appreciated as a genre in America. Legitimate musical geniuses, towering greats like Charlie Parker, John Coltrane and Miles Davis, had to travel to Europe, escaping American racism to find audiences sophisticated enough to dig what they were doing. It’s both a tragedy and black mark on our nation’s history that America failed these artists so thoroughly. Now, older, wiser and more woke, we have some sense for the immensity of what was lost.

The latest album by Kamasi Washington testifies to a new era in jazz. Or as Washington and a group of voices intone at the album’s outset, channeling Psalm 40, “Sing unto the Lord, a new song.”

Fearless Movement is a sprawling epic: 90 minutes of music, more than a dozen musicians, endless improvisational flights into dizzying virtuosic psychedelia. But the album is inclusive in addition to being expansive. Collaborations with funk legend George Clinton, super bassist Thundercat, rapping twins Taj and Ras Austin from Coast Contra, hip-hop producer DJ Battlecat, Outkast’s André 3000 and others result in an album that resists categorization beyond superlatives like “incredible.” The album opens up jazz’s often cloistered sensibilities to the booty-shaking power of rap and funk without diluting Washington’s headier musical vision.

At times, the music is like a firehose or an unstoppable torrent of talent. Cameron Graves’ extended piano solo during “Lesanu” — the nearly 10-minute musical epic that opens the album — sounds like it’s being played with thousands of impassioned fingers. Thundercat’s face-melting bass solo on “Asha the First” will have bedroom bassists on YouTube throwing in the towel. Often, the notes come so fast and furious that they wash over listeners like rain.

The first half of the double album, packed with collaborations, moves nimbly between genres. George Clinton’s vocals on “Get Lit” turn up the funk while D Smoke, the 2019 winner of Netflix’s reality hip-hop show “Rhythm + Flow,” spits some fantastic bars. “Together” — a soul jam with singer BJ the Chicago Kid — simmers with sultry mellowness, while “Computer Love” blooms into a sultry and synthesized ballad with vocalist Patrice Quinn singing seductively about her digitally mediated romances. Rapper-turned-flautist André 3000 offers breathy counterpoint to Washington’s fluid horn lines on “Dream State.”

The second half of the album captures Kamasi Washington and his band performing four extended cuts. The highlight is the nearly 14-minute epic “Road to Self,” which begins with gentle piano and swinging drum groove before evolving into an ambitious piece of spiritual jazz in the tradition of Charles Mingus’ 1972 album, Let My Children Hear Music. But much of the song’s studio ear candy consists of space-age synthesizers and difficult-to-identify sounds that percolate behind the scorching instrumental performances and add a distinctly 21st-century feel.

Fearless Movement lives up to its name. Washington and company are relentless in their pursuit of new sonic territories, absorbing and magnifying the music that has come before them. The expansive 90 minutes of music seems to contain both our utopian hopes for a future age of material aplenty and spiritual awakening, as well as a painful awareness of the earthly suffering in our shared history