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" This precious thing of empathy and love and understanding is something we have to hold and appreciate and protect. "
Kamasi Washington
Empathy
Appreciate
Love
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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
Good
Baby
Day
" 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
Great
Music
You
" Jazz is an interesting music. It's one of the few forms of music where everyone that's performing the music has a creative stake in the music. In jazz, everyone's improvising, and everyone's creating at the same time. "
Kamasi Washington
Jazz
Creative
Time
" Fela Kuti blew my mind. His playing is very unorthodox, but I learned how to appreciate that. "
Kamasi Washington
Appreciate
How
Learned
" West Coast hip hop was the sound of my neighbourhood. It was something I could relate to because it had a sound that felt like my surroundings - almost more so than what they were saying. That music was made to be bumped in a Cadillac! "
Kamasi Washington
Sound
Surroundings
Saying
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" '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
Opportunity
Harmony
Celebrate
" 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
" 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
" Every day we're here is an opportunity to do what we can to make the world right, to help someone close or far from us, to not get so hung up on what we can't do, and remember what we can. "
Kamasi Washington
World
Day
Opportunity
" The musicians I really looked up to as a kid were the ones who could play everything. "
Kamasi Washington
Play
Kid
Everything
" 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
" All John Coltrane's records are amazing. "
Kamasi Washington
John
Coltrane
Records
" My mum liked gospel and R&B, Chaka Khan, and Whitney Houston. "
Kamasi Washington
Whitney
Houston
Gospel
" I think the open mind is the one that's reachable. "
Kamasi Washington
Mind
I Think
Think
" 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
" 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
" 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
Hip-Hop
You
" What fixes your spirit when Ferguson happens? When Trayvon Martin and those kind of things happen, they hurt your spirit; it hurts your heart and your soul. You need something to fix it. "
Kamasi Washington
Things Happen
Heart
Hurt
" All forms are complex once you get to a really high level, and jazz and hip-hop are so connected. In hip-hop, you sample, while in jazz, you take Broadway tunes and turn them into something different. They're both forms that repurpose other forms of music. "
Kamasi Washington
Music
You
Hip-Hop
" 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
Thinking
Jazz
Listen
" As musicians, we have one of the greatest tools of bringing people together in music. "
Kamasi Washington
People
Together
Music
" The song 'Leroy and Lanisha' on my album 'The Epic' is really my homage to 'Linus and Lucy.' "
Kamasi Washington
Song
Really
Epic
" When you're making music, you're creeping up on your heart and pouring it out into something. "
Kamasi Washington
Out
Your
You
" The idea of the beauty of diversity came from just growing up where I grew up. Los Angeles is a very big city - there's Little Ethiopia, Little Armenia, Little Tokyo, Chinatown, there's African-Americans, Latinos, Europeans. "
Kamasi Washington
Diversity
Growing Up
Beauty
" Jazz is a part of me. "
Kamasi Washington
Part
Me
Jazz
" I can't really worry about nuclear war any more than I can worry about the aliens coming. "
Kamasi Washington
Worry
More
I Can