Kamasi Washington
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.Collection: Thankful
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.Collection: Amazing
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.Collection: Imagination
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.
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.
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.
Jazz is like a telescope, and a lot of other music is like a microscope.
Hip-hop is a collage. It samples from all different styles of music.
I think the open mind is the one that's reachable.
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.'
The song 'Leroy and Lanisha' on my album 'The Epic' is really my homage to 'Linus and Lucy.'
When you bring multiple cultures together, there's a degree of push and pull.
Every time you learn a new language, your understanding of language overall grows, so every time I would learn new music, my understanding of music would grow because I was taken to an extreme in a different direction, and that was, in effect, carrying over into what I do.
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.
There's a deeper level of healing that needs to happen for the world in general. There's a mass of people who are broken.
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.
I wanted to be a positive force in the world.
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.
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.
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.
In the '80s, a lot of kids, if you were kind of bright, you got bussed to schools out of your community. So you wouldn't know the talented musicians who lived around the corner from you.
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.
I can't really worry about nuclear war any more than I can worry about the aliens coming.
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.
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.
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.
Fela Kuti blew my mind. His playing is very unorthodox, but I learned how to appreciate that.
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.
The fact of the matter is that nobody understands what John Coltrane is doing except John Coltrane. And maybe not even him. So we're all experiencing it on this subconscious level.
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.
'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.
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.'
This precious thing of empathy and love and understanding is something we have to hold and appreciate and protect.
I think L.A. has one of the most innovative and forward-thinking jazz scenes in the world. New York definitely has the volume - there's more music happening in New York than anywhere else. But to me, L.A. - it's kind of a gift and a curse.
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.
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.
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.'
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!
The thing about hip-hop is, like, that the instruments were taken out of schools. But - you might have taken the instruments out of schools, but we'll take the records and sing over them!
It's either, like, 'Your album was the first jazz album I listened to,' or, like, 'My friend took me to this show, and I've never been to a jazz show before, but, man, I'm so happy I came. I can't wait to go home and see more.' And you can feel it in the crowd, too. You can see the groups of people that don't really know what to expect.
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.
My hope is that witnessing the beautiful harmony created by merging different musical melodies will help people realize the beauty in our own differences.
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.
I feel like I'm musically free to do what I want.
Isaac Smith sounded like Curtis Fuller, Corey Hogan sounded like Sonny Rollins, Terrace Martin sounded like Jackie McLean. Already, at 13, 14, 15 years old.
So much good music has been looked over because of preconceived notions of genre.
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.
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.
My dad was very much a Pan-Africanist and instilled in me and my siblings a want for that knowledge.
Jazz is a part of me.