American - Musician | February 18, 1981 -
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
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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.
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My dad was a professional musician; my mom played, too, but just for fun. All my siblings played. The house was full of music books, videos, albums. I guess it's not surprising that I ended up becoming a musician.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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We're the only ones who can change our reality.
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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.
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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.
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My dad was really into avant garde jazz: Archie Shepp, John Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders.
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My mum liked gospel and R&B, Chaka Khan, and Whitney Houston.
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