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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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" 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

Best

Great

Nice

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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 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. "

" 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. "

" Fela Kuti blew my mind. His playing is very unorthodox, but I learned how to appreciate that. "

" 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? "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I was that kid who made his friends listen to the albums they didn't want to. "

" 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. "

" Music is an expression of life, who you are, and what you've been through. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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.' "

" 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. "

" I think the reason why I see life as this never-ending struggle is because I imagine it having endless potential. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" As musicians, we have one of the greatest tools of bringing people together in music. "

" We're the only ones who can change our reality. "

" When you bring multiple cultures together, there's a degree of push and pull. "

" My dad was really into avant garde jazz: Archie Shepp, John Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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

People

New York

" 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

People

Think

" 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. "

" 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

People

World