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" 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

Piano

Three

Serious

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" Jazz is like a telescope, and a lot of other music is like a microscope. "

Kamasi Washington

Microscope

Music

" 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

" 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. "

" 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

Professional

Music

" 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. "

" 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. "

" There's this notion that music has to be confined to some small, simple place to be popular, something I never believed. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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

Edge

Living

" So much good music has been looked over because of preconceived notions of genre. "

" Jazz is a part of me. "

Kamasi Washington

Part

Jazz

" I feel like I'm musically free to do what I want. "

Kamasi Washington

Free

Want

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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.' "

" 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. "

" 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

New York

Think

" 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. "

" I wanted to be a positive force in the world. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" All John Coltrane's records are amazing. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "