Jazz saxophonist Kamasi Washington brings his big sound back to D.C.

“My friend [drummer] Ron Bruner and I, we went down to Adams Morgan, and someone pulled us into a club and put us on the stage right there,” recalls Washington, 42. “We already had a bit of a fantasy about what the East Coast was like. But when we went back to LA, we told everybody, ‘Oh, man, on the East Coast, you can just walk down the street and get a gig!’”

Impromptu gigs don’t happen often for Washington anymore — but big ones do. His Aug. 1 performance at the Birchmere in Alexandria is a stop on the way to Washington’s appearance at the Newport Jazz Festival, arguably the most prestigious in the world.

“It’s such a rich history at Newport,” says Washington, who’s making his fourth appearance at the Rhode Island festival. “The lineup is always really amazing. The last time we played there, [alto saxophonist] Kenny Garrett was playing; myself and [Grammy-winning keyboardist] Robert Glasper were on the side of the stage, and it just felt like I was in high school again, star-struck.”

The saxophonist is, himself, the most recent jazz artist to attain a measure of crossover stardom. He drew national attention through his work on hip-hop artist and fellow Angeleno Kendrick Lamar’s acclaimed, jazz-spiced 2015 album “To Pimp a Butterfly,” then compounded it a few months later with his own ambitious release, “The Epic.”

The three-hour, three-disc album featured over 30 musicians, including a string nonet and a 14-piece choir, and carried a strong current of 1960s and ’70s jazz in the spiritual mold of John Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders. At a glance, it was far from courting the pop mainstream.

Yet it was a breakthrough success, riding high on Billboard magazine’s Heatseekers and independent album charts and receiving critical raves.

Eight years later, Washington has proved more than just a flavor of the month. He is a regular draw at jazz venues and festivals around the world, and has released another mammoth triple album (2018’s “Heaven and Earth”) and two acclaimed EPs.

The scope of his music has also broadened. “Heaven and Earth” incorporated funk and hip-hop, a mix that Washington also deployed — albeit with a lighter touch — in the jazz/hip-hop supergroup Dinner Party with Glasper, DJ 9th Wonder and saxophonist-producer Terrace Martin.

“It really was like a dinner party,” says Washington of the project, which recorded an EP in 2019. “Our music can be a bit heavy, so this was just making music from a place of fun.”

In addition, Washington composed and performed the score for “Becoming,” the 2020 Netflix documentary about Michelle Obama. More recently, he has been working with Moroccan vocalist Ami Taf Ra, producing her Kahlil Gibran-inspired album “The Prophet and the Madman.”

At Newport, he will explore yet another dimension when he collaborates with Joe Russo’s Almost Dead: a Grateful Dead cover project.

Even so, the cavernous spiritual-jazz sound remains Washington’s calling card. While his band at the Birchmere will include only eight members, it manages to harness the vastness of his recordings.

“It’s about having different colors, different textures, and each one leaving space for the other colors to have a chance to shine,” he says. “Of course, the bigger the groups are, the more variety you get, but any one of them can fill up a stadium with sound.”

Washington is finishing up work on a new album: It will be a significant departure, he says, from his previous ones. “It’s going to be different, a different approach,” he teases — pointedly shying away from any deeper information. “I’ll leave that as a surprise for when it’s finally ready to come out. We might play some of the songs at the Birchmere, though.”

One detail he does offer is that his toddler daughter, born during the covid-19 pandemic, helped write one of the album’s new tunes. “She’s very musical. She loves playing piano,” he says. “So she had this little melody she was playing. I took it and turned it into a song.”

It’s also possible, he notes, that some of the older material will take on new identities — new to the audience, at least.

“A lot of my songs live in my head for a long time before they make it out into the real world,” he says. “I go through a lot of arrangements and possibilities. For the records, I end up kind of choosing one version of a song that is the one that I want to live forever. But when we play live, we usually depart from that and play the other possibilities. Each song is its own universe, and there’s a multiverse of possibilities.”

Aug. 1 at 7:30 p.m. at the Birchmere Music Hall, 3701 Mount Vernon Ave., Alexandria. birchmere.com. $69.50.