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" 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
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" I never had a problem moving between jazz and hip-hop. "
Kamasi Washington
Hip-Hop
Never
Problem
" 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
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New York
" The musicians I really looked up to as a kid were the ones who could play everything. "
Kamasi Washington
Play
Kid
Everything
" 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. "
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Musicians
Generation
Jazz
" 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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Yourself
You
" Hip-hop and jazz have always been intertwined. Even the G-funk thing. You listen to 'The Chronic,' there's flute solos and everything. It's always been there. "
Kamasi Washington
Listen
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" 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
Gangster
Way
Group
" 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. "
Kamasi Washington
Music
Los Angeles
Jazz
" This precious thing of empathy and love and understanding is something we have to hold and appreciate and protect. "
Kamasi Washington
Empathy
Appreciate
Love
" 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
Head
Day
Music
" By the time I was about 15, I was out playing gigs and knew I was going to be a musician. "
Kamasi Washington
Going
Time
Playing
" As musicians, we have one of the greatest tools of bringing people together in music. "
Kamasi Washington
People
Together
Music
" 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
" 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
" Whenever my dad wasn't practicing, he was listening to music. He had an amazing jazz collection, and my mom had stuff like Chaka Khan to help balance it out. "
Kamasi Washington
Balance
Amazing
Music
" 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? "
Kamasi Washington
Music
See
Respect
" 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
New
Born
Time
" 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've played so many places where, if you asked people, 'Do you like jazz?' they would be like, 'Not at all.' But I think that if you're really putting yourself out there and really communicating, music can put you beyond people's preconceptions, beyond their playlist. "
Kamasi Washington
Yourself
Out
Music
" We're the only ones who can change our reality. "
Kamasi Washington
Who
Change
Only
" My dad was very much a Pan-Africanist and instilled in me and my siblings a want for that knowledge. "
Kamasi Washington
Want
Much
Me
" American music comes from the same tree, but sometimes we get to these places in history where we forget where things come from, and they get compartmentalized. "
Kamasi Washington
Forget
History
American
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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. "
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People
World
You
" So much good music has been looked over because of preconceived notions of genre. "
Kamasi Washington
Over
Because
Much
" 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