A biography for Kamasi Washingtonhasn’t been written yet.
“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.”
“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?”
“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.”
“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.”
“I feel like I'm musically free to do what I want.”
“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.”
“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.”
“We're the only ones who can change our reality.”
“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.”
“All John Coltrane's records are amazing.”
“As a musician, your instrument is almost predetermined. I had played drums, piano, clarinet, but when I heard Wayne Shorter play the saxophone, I knew that sound is what I wanted.”
“Fela Kuti blew my mind. His playing is very unorthodox, but I learned how to appreciate that.”
“When you're making music, you're creeping up on your heart and pouring it out into something.”
“My mum liked gospel and R&B, Chaka Khan, and Whitney Houston.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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!”
“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.”
“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.'”