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

Kamasi Washington

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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. "

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

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

Kamasi Washington

" There's a whole stereotype of the jazz musician that's into poetry and reading and metaphysics and all that stuff. Really, it's a sign of someone who's searching, whose mind is open, looking for answers. Whatever ideas you may come up with, the beautiful thing is the search. "

Kamasi Washington

" 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. "

Kamasi Washington

" This precious thing of empathy and love and understanding is something we have to hold and appreciate and protect. "

Kamasi Washington

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

Kamasi Washington

" 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. "

Kamasi Washington

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

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

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

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

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

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

" 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

" 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

" I've known that about myself, that I've had two sides: one that's pretty tactical, down to earth, aware. There's also a really spacey side. But I realized they're kinda the same thing. "

Kamasi Washington

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

Kamasi Washington

" Gerald Wilson was one of my mentors: he was in his nineties before he passed and, literally, every time I saw him, he'd be like, 'Man, Kamasi, I've got this new thing! Nobody ever heard anything like this before!' It's amazing hanging out with somebody that was born in 1918. "

Kamasi Washington

" I was hearing music in my head and trying to play it on the clarinet, but it didn't match.' Then, literally the first day, it did with the saxophone. I was like, 'Oh man, that's what I've been trying to do; this is what it's supposed to sound like.' "

Kamasi Washington

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

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

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

" When I first played some Coltrane-type stuff on the 'Pimp a Butterfly' sessions, Kendrick got it immediately. 'I want it to sound like it's on fire,' he'd say. That's the kind of common ground that the best jazz and the best hip-hop have. "

Kamasi Washington

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

Kamasi Washington

" 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

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

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