“When I first played some Coltrane-type stuff on the ‘Pimp a Butterfly’ sessions, Kendrick got it immediately. ‘I want it to sound like it’s on fire,’ he’d say. That’s the kind of common ground that the best jazz and the best hip-hop have.”
― Kamasi Washington
“Hip-hop and jazz have always been intertwined. Even the G-funk thing. You listen to ‘The Chronic,’ there’s flute solos and everything. It’s always been there.”
― Kamasi Washington
“This precious thing of empathy and love and understanding is something we have to hold and appreciate and protect.”
― Kamasi Washington
“My mum liked gospel and R&B, Chaka Khan, and Whitney Houston.”
― Kamasi Washington
“When I was working on ‘To Pimp A Butterfly’ and ‘DAMN.,’ I’m really making music for Kendrick. It’s a different mindset than when I’m making music for me. I’m trying to get into his head and figure out what he wants because it’s his vision. That’s what I expect from people when they’re playing on my records.”
― Kamasi Washington
“If we all give our power to one person, that’s what the world will be. If we all decide to make the world a beautiful place, it’ll be a beautiful place.”
― Kamasi Washington
“As a person who grew up in Los Angeles – that’s a very diverse place – I’ve always felt like that diversity is a blessing. It’s not a problem to be solved: it’s a gift to be thankful for.”
― Kamasi Washington
“Hip-hop is a collage. It samples from all different styles of music.”
― Kamasi Washington
“I don’t want to live my life to necessarily overcome struggle, but when I am going to hit struggle throughout my life, I face it head on.”
― Kamasi Washington
“Music is an expression of life, who you are, and what you’ve been through.”
― Kamasi Washington
“Jazz is like a telescope, and a lot of other music is like a microscope.”
― Kamasi Washington
“There’s a deeper level of healing that needs to happen for the world in general. There’s a mass of people who are broken.”
― Kamasi Washington
“I have to always check back in with my imagination just to remember that I have this infinite potential, and I can do anything, and anything is possible.”
― Kamasi Washington
“We’ve now got a whole generation of jazz musicians who have been brought up with hip-hop. We’ve grown up alongside rappers and DJs; we’ve heard this music all our life. We are as fluent in J Dilla and Dr Dre as we are in Mingus and Coltrane.”
― Kamasi Washington
“I grew up with a sense of music being a very spiritual experience while playing in church and with parents who were socially aware, always teaching me to look beyond the obvious in understanding how the world works.”
― Kamasi Washington
“When you bring multiple cultures together, there’s a degree of push and pull.”
― Kamasi Washington
“Every time you learn a new language, your understanding of language overall grows, so every time I would learn new music, my understanding of music would grow because I was taken to an extreme in a different direction, and that was, in effect, carrying over into what I do.”
― Kamasi Washington
“Even the greatest musicians, they only represent themselves. You represent who you are and what your experiences are and what you have in your heart, and it’s the same for me. I represent who I am and what I’ve been through and what I’m bringing to the music.”
― Kamasi Washington
“Music is an expression of who you are, and – at least in that sense – I think I epitomize Black Lives Matter. I’m a big black man, and I’m easily misunderstood. Before I started wearing these African clothes, people would assume that I was a threat and that it was O.K. to be violent toward me.”
― Kamasi Washington
“I wanted to be a positive force in the world.”
― Kamasi Washington
“Becoming a musician is a strange thing. It’s not all cupcakes and ice cream. You’re trying to master an instrument, and you sometimes can’t tell if you’re getting better. You love it, but you also hate it.”
― Kamasi Washington
“All forms are complex once you get to a really high level, and jazz and hip-hop are so connected. In hip-hop, you sample, while in jazz, you take Broadway tunes and turn them into something different. They’re both forms that repurpose other forms of music.”
― Kamasi Washington
“There’s a whole stereotype of the jazz musician that’s into poetry and reading and metaphysics and all that stuff. Really, it’s a sign of someone who’s searching, whose mind is open, looking for answers. Whatever ideas you may come up with, the beautiful thing is the search.”
― Kamasi Washington
“In the ’80s, a lot of kids, if you were kind of bright, you got bussed to schools out of your community. So you wouldn’t know the talented musicians who lived around the corner from you.”
― Kamasi Washington
“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.”
― Kamasi Washington
“I can’t really worry about nuclear war any more than I can worry about the aliens coming.”
― Kamasi Washington
“I kept thinking about how ironic it is how people who live in places where there is diversity tend to love it – and the people that don’t live in particularly diverse places tend to be the ones attacking it. In a way, that’s similar to music, which is essentially the art of bringing things together.”
― Kamasi Washington
“Whenever my dad wasn’t practicing, he was listening to music. He had an amazing jazz collection, and my mom had stuff like Chaka Khan to help balance it out.”
― Kamasi Washington
“You have to dig deep to make great music, and it gets harder and harder. It’s a difficult, painful process to reach deep in there and pull out the real gems. And you have to have that little bit of anxiety of, ‘Can I really do this? Am I good enough?’ You need that in the recipe to really get down in there.”
― Kamasi Washington
“Fela Kuti blew my mind. His playing is very unorthodox, but I learned how to appreciate that.”
― Kamasi Washington
“I’ve had experiences where people say, ‘I hated jazz before I heard you guys!’ I’m like, ‘You didn’t hate jazz before you heard us; you hated the idea of jazz.’”
― Kamasi Washington
“We’ve played so many places where, if you asked people, ‘Do you like jazz?’ they would be like, ‘Not at all.’ But I think that if you’re really putting yourself out there and really communicating, music can put you beyond people’s preconceptions, beyond their playlist.”
― Kamasi Washington
“The fact of the matter is that nobody understands what John Coltrane is doing except John Coltrane. And maybe not even him. So we’re all experiencing it on this subconscious level.”
― Kamasi Washington
“The song ‘Leroy and Lanisha’ on my album ‘The Epic’ is really my homage to ‘Linus and Lucy.’”
― Kamasi Washington
“At a certain point, when there’s a barrier between you and what’s right, eventually you have to decide you’re not going to allow yourself to be subjugated.”
― Kamasi Washington
“’Harmony of Difference,’ to me, was an opportunity to celebrate one another. And ‘Fists of Fury’ is an opportunity for us to protect one another.”
― Kamasi Washington
“If you look up, and you see that all of a sudden the world is really coming down on people with brown hair, I would think the people with black hair would look at that and go, ‘Well, that could be me, and so, I shouldn’t stand for that any more than those people with brown hair stand for it.’”
― Kamasi Washington
“I think L.A. has one of the most innovative and forward-thinking jazz scenes in the world. New York definitely has the volume – there’s more music happening in New York than anywhere else. But to me, L.A. – it’s kind of a gift and a curse.”
― Kamasi Washington
“Los Angeles has always been overlooked as far as jazz, and just high-level music in general. But, like, my dad’s a musician, so I’ve grown up around so many brilliant musicians that nobody outside Los Angeles knows about.”
― Kamasi Washington
“What fixes your spirit when Ferguson happens? When Trayvon Martin and those kind of things happen, they hurt your spirit; it hurts your heart and your soul. You need something to fix it.”
― Kamasi Washington
“When I was younger… we used to go to this place called Rexall to play ‘Street Fighter.’ At Rexall, there would be different people from different hoods there playing the game. It was the one place that was like an equalizer. It was just about how good you were at ‘Street Fighter.’”
― Kamasi Washington
“I’m trying to just keep pushing on the things I’ve been wanting to do in my life and in music. And think of new things to do!”
― Kamasi Washington
“I think the open mind is the one that’s reachable.”
― Kamasi Washington
“The thing about hip-hop is, like, that the instruments were taken out of schools. But – you might have taken the instruments out of schools, but we’ll take the records and sing over them!”
― Kamasi Washington
“It’s either, like, ‘Your album was the first jazz album I listened to,’ or, like, ‘My friend took me to this show, and I’ve never been to a jazz show before, but, man, I’m so happy I came. I can’t wait to go home and see more.’ And you can feel it in the crowd, too. You can see the groups of people that don’t really know what to expect.”
― Kamasi Washington
“We do have the power to kind of make this world what we want it to be. But we have to just choose to do it ourselves and not wait for someone else.”
― Kamasi Washington
“My hope is that witnessing the beautiful harmony created by merging different musical melodies will help people realize the beauty in our own differences.”
― Kamasi Washington
“Someone like Donald Trump can’t control the way I show love to my brother. He can’t control the way I feel about my neighbors.”
― Kamasi Washington
“I feel like I’m musically free to do what I want.”
― Kamasi Washington
“Isaac Smith sounded like Curtis Fuller, Corey Hogan sounded like Sonny Rollins, Terrace Martin sounded like Jackie McLean. Already, at 13, 14, 15 years old.”
― Kamasi Washington
“So much good music has been looked over because of preconceived notions of genre.”
― Kamasi Washington
“I like living on that edge, musically. I like a bit of insecurity and that feeling of not really knowing what’s going to happen.”
― Kamasi Washington
“American music comes from the same tree, but sometimes we get to these places in history where we forget where things come from, and they get compartmentalized.”
― Kamasi Washington
“My dad was very much a Pan-Africanist and instilled in me and my siblings a want for that knowledge.”
― Kamasi Washington
“Jazz is a part of me.”
― Kamasi Washington
“There’s this notion that music has to be confined to some small, simple place to be popular, something I never believed.”
― Kamasi Washington
“When you’re making music, you’re creeping up on your heart and pouring it out into something.”
― Kamasi Washington
“As musicians, we have one of the greatest tools of bringing people together in music.”
― Kamasi Washington
“I never had a problem moving between jazz and hip-hop.”
― Kamasi Washington
“People like to compartmentalise music, especially African-American music, but it’s really one thing. One very wide thing. I mean, it’s like all those great records by Marvin Gaye and James Brown back in the day – there are tonnes of jazz musicians playing on them.”
― Kamasi Washington
“I started playing drums at three, then piano at five, then clarinet. But it wasn’t till I picked up a saxophone aged 13 that I really got serious about music.”
― Kamasi Washington
“My dad was a professional musician; my mom played, too, but just for fun. All my siblings played. The house was full of music books, videos, albums. I guess it’s not surprising that I ended up becoming a musician.”
― Kamasi Washington
“When I was younger, I’d be walking down the street and suddenly panic because I had a cool idea and no way of getting it down – I’d have to sing it all the way home. Now I can hum it into my phone.”
― Kamasi Washington
“I went to a music academy in Los Angeles, and some friends started playing me Ravel and Prokofiev, who I liked, but what really blew me away was ‘The Rite of Spring.’ That’s what made me get interested in classical music for real and want to study it.”
― Kamasi Washington
“The idea of the beauty of diversity came from just growing up where I grew up. Los Angeles is a very big city – there’s Little Ethiopia, Little Armenia, Little Tokyo, Chinatown, there’s African-Americans, Latinos, Europeans.”
― Kamasi Washington
“In general, in my life, one of the coolest things that I’ve been able to do is to go to different places and meet different people and see how they view the world and to learn what their music is and what their language is, and the food they eat and everything. That idea of the beauty of the vastness of the world has just been my life.”
― Kamasi Washington
“Jazz is an interesting music. It’s one of the few forms of music where everyone that’s performing the music has a creative stake in the music. In jazz, everyone’s improvising, and everyone’s creating at the same time.”
― Kamasi Washington
“We’re the only ones who can change our reality.”
― Kamasi Washington
“I think people psych themselves out before they listen to jazz a lot, thinking that they have to, like, put on a suit or something. That’s not what it is.”
― Kamasi Washington
“People need to realize that even the greatest jazz musicians, when they listen to jazz, they’re not like, analyzing it and deconstructing it – they’re enjoying it. It’s like listening to any other style of music. It’s saying something to you, and you kind of just absorb it.”
― Kamasi Washington
“My dad was really into avant garde jazz: Archie Shepp, John Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders.”
― Kamasi Washington
“All John Coltrane’s records are amazing.”
― Kamasi Washington
“I started playing with this band, the Polyester Players. It was my introduction into funk. So I went and got a James Brown record. ‘Black Caesar’ is a film score, but it’s so dope.”
― Kamasi Washington
“Gerald Wilson was one of my mentors: he was in his nineties before he passed and, literally, every time I saw him, he’d be like, ‘Man, Kamasi, I’ve got this new thing! Nobody ever heard anything like this before!’ It’s amazing hanging out with somebody that was born in 1918.”
― Kamasi Washington
“Funk could very easily be called jazz, but you call it funk. Does that really matter? People dig that they associate themselves with certain genres, but the genres to me are made up things, like an imaginary world.”
― Kamasi Washington
“L.A. has always been hated on so much. I remember, the first time I went to New York, I was at jam sessions, and people would hear me and come up to me and be like, ‘Oh wow, you’re from L.A.? Really?’”
― Kamasi Washington
“I was hearing music in my head and trying to play it on the clarinet, but it didn’t match.’ Then, literally the first day, it did with the saxophone. I was like, ‘Oh man, that’s what I’ve been trying to do; this is what it’s supposed to sound like.’”
― Kamasi Washington
“L.A. is a big city that has a lot of music in it but is not necessarily known for it. A lot of musicians got lost in that. You can make a living; you can gig a lot within the city and never get out of it. That was something that me and my friends, our generation, were afraid of happening to us.”
― Kamasi Washington
“There were two things I discovered when I toured with Snoop. One was that the band was all jazz musicians. The second was to instil in me a respect for other styles of music. From then on, whenever I played a new kind of music, I came with the same kind of open mind. What are they trying to do? What are they hearing? How do they see music?”
― Kamasi Washington
“Malcolm X’s separatist ideas were situational. If you think about where African-Americans were in the 1940s and 1950s, we needed to step away because that force, which is still present but more subdued, was very in your face, and we needed to take a step back just to get some clarity.”
― Kamasi Washington
“West Coast hip hop was the sound of my neighbourhood. It was something I could relate to because it had a sound that felt like my surroundings – almost more so than what they were saying. That music was made to be bumped in a Cadillac!”
― Kamasi Washington
“My dad’s also a musician, so jazz was always around the house. When I was 11, I developed an interest in it, and he took me to Leimert Park. At that time, it was the artistic hub of L.A., and it was right in South Central. The first concert I went to, I saw Pharoah Sanders at the World Stage club there, which only holds, like, 30 people.”
― Kamasi Washington
“The musicians I really looked up to as a kid were the ones who could play everything.”
― Kamasi Washington
“When I started saxophone, my dad took me to my uncle’s church, and I started playing there, too. At its best, music serves a greater purpose, and that showed me a whole other side to spiritual jazz, one which you can hear in the music – the gospel and blues feel, the soul that’s embedded into the more avant-garde records.”
― Kamasi Washington
“At the time of ‘The Epic,’ as a core band, we were all spending so much time apart making music for other people that by the time we got together – even though we grew up together and there’s a special connection we have – it was like a rare privilege to come together.”
― Kamasi Washington
“One of the things I did learn from ‘The Epic’ was that we don’t have to feel so much pressure to conform to set formats. A song doesn’t have to be three minutes and 30 seconds.”
― Kamasi Washington
“We started ‘Heaven And Earth’ in 2016. That was probably the heaviest touring year of my whole life. We probably did almost 200 shows in 2016. We went into the studio, and I honestly didn’t know what the album was going to be. So I just kind of started picking songs that I liked.”
― Kamasi Washington
“We learned at a young age, with our dad, that even if you weren’t doing something, you had to look like you were, or some hard labor was coming your way. That’s the reason I started practicing music – when I was practicing, Pops left me alone.”
― Kamasi Washington
“When I was about seventeen, I had a group called the Young Jazz Giants. We played all originals. When we would finish playing, people would be like, ‘Oh my God, that was so nice, that was so great.’ But Pops would never tell us we were the best. He would give it to us straight, like, ‘You’re out of tune. You’re dropping beats.’”
― Kamasi Washington
“I think the reason why I see life as this never-ending struggle is because I imagine it having endless potential.”
― Kamasi Washington
“In a lot of ways, I feel like I’m just taking the music that comes to me and trying to make it as beautiful as I can. You can’t really predict or control how people will receive that music.”
― Kamasi Washington
“A legacy is a lot of times determined by how people accept your music. And sometimes people’s legacy starts late or starts early, or they last a long time or a short amount of time. As a musician, I’ve never taken an approach of wanting to try to control that because I don’t think that I can.”
― Kamasi Washington
“By the time I was about 15, I was out playing gigs and knew I was going to be a musician.”
― Kamasi Washington
“I was that kid who made his friends listen to the albums they didn’t want to.”
― Kamasi Washington
“I used to tell my friends, ‘Art Blakey is way more gangster than Eazy-E!’ I ended up getting my friends into jazz, and all of a sudden there was this little group of kids in the middle of South Central that were all into hard-bop.”
― Kamasi Washington
“Music is this medium to express who I am and what I’ve been through and my thoughts and what my feelings on the world are. We’re all on the planet together; I’m just using this medium to express how I see it.”
― Kamasi Washington
“As a musician, your instrument is almost predetermined. I had played drums, piano, clarinet, but when I heard Wayne Shorter play the saxophone, I knew that sound is what I wanted.”
― Kamasi Washington
“My third day playing saxophone, I was in front of a congregation. I still didn’t know the names of all the notes. I was playing by ear, following along, but it was such an encouraging environment, I couldn’t fail. It was all, ‘Yeah baby, you sound real good’ no matter what you play. It was a great way to learn.”
― Kamasi Washington
“Music doesn’t come out of you, it comes through you. You are almost like a messenger.”
― Kamasi Washington
“I’ve known that about myself, that I’ve had two sides: one that’s pretty tactical, down to earth, aware. There’s also a really spacey side. But I realized they’re kinda the same thing.”
― Kamasi Washington
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