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" 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?' "

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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. "

Kamasi Washington

Someone

Choose

Power

" I never had a problem moving between jazz and hip-hop. "

" 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. "

" 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.' "

" All John Coltrane's records are amazing. "

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

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

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

" We learned at a young age, with our dad, that even if you weren't doing something, you had to look like you were, or some hard labor was coming your way. That's the reason I started practicing music - when I was practicing, Pops left me alone. "

" 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

Music

People

" 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. "

" 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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

" Music doesn't come out of you, it comes through you. You are almost like a messenger. "

Kamasi Washington

Out

Music

" In general, in my life, one of the coolest things that I've been able to do is to go to different places and meet different people and see how they view the world and to learn what their music is and what their language is, and the food they eat and everything. That idea of the beauty of the vastness of the world has just been my life. "

" When you're making music, you're creeping up on your heart and pouring it out into something. "

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

" 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. "

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

" 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! "

" You have to dig deep to make great music, and it gets harder and harder. It's a difficult, painful process to reach deep in there and pull out the real gems. And you have to have that little bit of anxiety of, 'Can I really do this? Am I good enough?' You need that in the recipe to really get down in there. "

" I can't really worry about nuclear war any more than I can worry about the aliens coming. "

Kamasi Washington

Worry

I Can

" 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. "

" I think the open mind is the one that's reachable. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "