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" All John Coltrane's records are amazing. "
Kamasi Washington
John
Coltrane
Records
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" 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. "
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" We're the only ones who can change our reality. "
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" 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. "
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" 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. "
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" 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! "
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" 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. "
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" My hope is that witnessing the beautiful harmony created by merging different musical melodies will help people realize the beauty in our own differences. "
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Beauty
Help
" 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. "
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" 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.' "
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" 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. "
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Los Angeles
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" 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. "
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New York
Me
Think
" 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. "
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People
Musicians
Music
" Jazz is a part of me. "
Kamasi Washington
Part
Me
Jazz
" 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.' "
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Best
Great
Nice
" 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. "
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Edge
Living
Like
" 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. "
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Butterfly
Best
Jazz
" I can't really worry about nuclear war any more than I can worry about the aliens coming. "
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Worry
More
I Can
" 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. "
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Parents
Music
Experience
" 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. "
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Love
Ice Cream
Hate
" I never had a problem moving between jazz and hip-hop. "
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Hip-Hop
Never
Problem
" 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. "
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Time
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" 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. "
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Learn
Pressure
Three
" 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. "
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" 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. "
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People
World
You
" 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. "
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Think
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" When you're making music, you're creeping up on your heart and pouring it out into something. "
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Out
Your
You
" There's this notion that music has to be confined to some small, simple place to be popular, something I never believed. "
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Simple
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" 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. "
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" 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. "
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" Fela Kuti blew my mind. His playing is very unorthodox, but I learned how to appreciate that. "
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