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" 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
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" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" When I was younger, I'd be walking down the street and suddenly panic because I had a cool idea and no way of getting it down - I'd have to sing it all the way home. Now I can hum it into my phone. "
Kamasi Washington
Walking
Street
Home
" 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 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
" 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
" 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. "
Kamasi Washington
Someone
Choose
Power
" 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
" 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
" The song 'Leroy and Lanisha' on my album 'The Epic' is really my homage to 'Linus and Lucy.' "
Kamasi Washington
Song
Really
Epic
" Even the greatest musicians, they only represent themselves. You represent who you are and what your experiences are and what you have in your heart, and it's the same for me. I represent who I am and what I've been through and what I'm bringing to the music. "
Kamasi Washington
Heart
I Am
Musicians
" 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
" 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
Time
People
Jazz
" 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
" All John Coltrane's records are amazing. "
Kamasi Washington
John
Coltrane
Records
" As musicians, we have one of the greatest tools of bringing people together in music. "
Kamasi Washington
People
Together
Music
" 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
" When I was younger... we used to go to this place called Rexall to play 'Street Fighter.' At Rexall, there would be different people from different hoods there playing the game. It was the one place that was like an equalizer. It was just about how good you were at 'Street Fighter.' "
Kamasi Washington
Be Different
Good
People
" 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
" 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
" 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
Love
Ice Cream
Hate
" I never had a problem moving between jazz and hip-hop. "
Kamasi Washington
Hip-Hop
Never
Problem
" 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
" I kept thinking about how ironic it is how people who live in places where there is diversity tend to love it - and the people that don't live in particularly diverse places tend to be the ones attacking it. In a way, that's similar to music, which is essentially the art of bringing things together. "
Kamasi Washington
Love
Art
Diversity
" My mum liked gospel and R&B, Chaka Khan, and Whitney Houston. "
Kamasi Washington
Whitney
Houston
Gospel
" 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