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" 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

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" 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

" 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

" The song 'Leroy and Lanisha' on my album 'The Epic' is really my homage to 'Linus and Lucy.' "

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

" 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

" 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

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

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

" 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

" 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

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

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

" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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

Beautiful Place

" 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

" 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

" The musicians I really looked up to as a kid were the ones who could play everything. "

Kamasi Washington

" Hip-hop is a collage. It samples from all different styles of music. "

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

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

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

" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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