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

Kamasi Washington

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" 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? "

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" My dad was very much a Pan-Africanist and instilled in me and my siblings a want for that knowledge. "

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" By the time I was about 15, I was out playing gigs and knew I was going to be a musician. "

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" 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. "

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

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" 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. "

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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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" 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

" 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. "

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Beautiful Place

" 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. "

Kamasi Washington

" 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. "

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" 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

" 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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" 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

" 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

" 'Harmony of Difference,' to me, was an opportunity to celebrate one another. And 'Fists of Fury' is an opportunity for us to protect one another. "

Kamasi Washington

" I have to always check back in with my imagination just to remember that I have this infinite potential, and I can do anything, and anything is possible. "

Kamasi Washington

" 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. "

Kamasi Washington

" 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. "

Kamasi Washington

" 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. "

Kamasi Washington

" 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. "

Kamasi Washington

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

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

" 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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" 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. "

Kamasi Washington

" 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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" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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