I was that kid who made his friends listen to the albums they didn’t want to. Kamasi Washington Read Quote
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 Read Quote
Music is this medium to express who I am and what I’ve been through and my thoughts and what my feelings on the world are. We’re all on the planet together; I’m just using this medium to express how I see it. Kamasi Washington Read Quote
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. Kamasi Washington Read Quote
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 Read Quote
I grew up with a sense of music being a very spiritual experience while playing in church and with parents who were socially aware, always teaching me to look beyond the obvious in understanding how the world works. Kamasi Washington Read Quote
A legacy is a lot of times determined by how people accept your music. And sometimes people’s legacy starts late or starts early, or they last a long time or a short amount of time. As a musician, I’ve never taken an approach of wanting to try to control that because I don’t think that I can. Kamasi Washington Read Quote
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 Read Quote
My dad was really into avant garde jazz: Archie Shepp, John Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders. Kamasi Washington Read Quote
