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" 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
Brother
Someone
Love
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" 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
Power
Beautiful
" 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
Me
Music
People
" 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. "
Kamasi Washington
Year
Life
Kind
" 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
People
World
You
" At the time of 'The Epic,' as a core band, we were all spending so much time apart making music for other people that by the time we got together - even though we grew up together and there's a special connection we have - it was like a rare privilege to come together. "
Kamasi Washington
Special
Together
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. "
Kamasi Washington
You
Age
Alone
" 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. "
Kamasi Washington
People
Style
Saying
" 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
Clarity
Face
You
" So much good music has been looked over because of preconceived notions of genre. "
Kamasi Washington
Over
Because
Much
" I started playing with this band, the Polyester Players. It was my introduction into funk. So I went and got a James Brown record. 'Black Caesar' is a film score, but it's so dope. "
Kamasi Washington
Band
Black
Dope
" 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
Me
World
" A legacy is a lot of times determined by how people accept your music. And sometimes people's legacy starts late or starts early, or they last a long time or a short amount of time. As a musician, I've never taken an approach of wanting to try to control that because I don't think that I can. "
Kamasi Washington
Think
Time
Music
" 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. "
Kamasi Washington
Gift
Thankful
Blessing
" 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
Like
" 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. "
Kamasi Washington
Parents
Music
Experience
" L.A. is a big city that has a lot of music in it but is not necessarily known for it. A lot of musicians got lost in that. You can make a living; you can gig a lot within the city and never get out of it. That was something that me and my friends, our generation, were afraid of happening to us. "
Kamasi Washington
Me
Music
Friends
" 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
New Things
Life
Think
" We're the only ones who can change our reality. "
Kamasi Washington
Who
Change
Only
" 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
Hate
Say
People Say
" 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
Musicians
Generation
Jazz
" 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
Imagination
Back
Remember
" When you bring multiple cultures together, there's a degree of push and pull. "
Kamasi Washington
Bring
Cultures
Push
" 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
People
Me
New York
" 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
Butterfly
Best
Jazz
" 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
Learn
Pressure
Three
" There's this notion that music has to be confined to some small, simple place to be popular, something I never believed. "
Kamasi Washington
Simple
Music
Small
" As musicians, we have one of the greatest tools of bringing people together in music. "
Kamasi Washington
People
Together
Music
" I went to a music academy in Los Angeles, and some friends started playing me Ravel and Prokofiev, who I liked, but what really blew me away was 'The Rite of Spring.' That's what made me get interested in classical music for real and want to study it. "
Kamasi Washington
Spring
Music
Me
" 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
Music
I Am
World
" 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
People
Music
Beauty