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All Quotes by author - 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. "
Think
Time
Music
" 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. "
Music
You
Hip-Hop
" All John Coltrane's records are amazing. "
John
Coltrane
Records
" 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. "
Forget
History
American
" 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. "
Sound
Saxophone
Play
" 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. "
Gift
Thankful
Blessing
" As musicians, we have one of the greatest tools of bringing people together in music. "
People
Together
Music
" 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. "
Going
Yourself
You
" 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. "
Special
Together
Music
" 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. "
Love
Ice Cream
Hate
" By the time I was about 15, I was out playing gigs and knew I was going to be a musician. "
Going
Time
Playing
" 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. "
Heart
I Am
Musicians
" 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. "
World
Day
Opportunity
" 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. "
Time
You
Music
" Fela Kuti blew my mind. His playing is very unorthodox, but I learned how to appreciate that. "
Appreciate
How
Learned
" 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. "
People
World
You
" 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. "
New
Born
Time
" '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. "
Opportunity
Harmony
Celebrate
" 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. "
Listen
Hip-Hop
You
" Hip-hop is a collage. It samples from all different styles of music. "
Different
Music
Collage
" I can't really worry about nuclear war any more than I can worry about the aliens coming. "
Worry
More
I Can
" 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. "
Live
Life
Struggle
" I feel like I'm musically free to do what I want. "
Like
Free
Want
" 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. "
Beautiful Place
Power
Beautiful
" 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.' "
People
Me
World
" 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. "
Parents
Music
Experience
" 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. "
Imagination
Back
Remember
" 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. "
Love
Art
Diversity
" 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. "
Edge
Living
Like
" 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! "
New Things
Life
Think
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