Interview: Kamasi Washington
Interviewer: Michael Gourrier (a retired WWOZ D.J that specializes in jazz.)
Text Writer: Mary Andrews, transcribing, organizer, photographer, and writing
New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival
May 3, 2019
Kamasi Washington made a very welcome visit to the 50th Anniversary edition of the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival. Washington, now in his 30s, grew up in the ‘West Coast Jazz Scene’ and studies at UCLA’s Ethnomusicology. He quickly performed alongside musicians Kenny Burrell, Billy Higgins, Wayne Shorter, Horace Tapscott, Lauryn Hill, George Duke, Thundercat, Chaka Khan, Kendrick Lamar and many more. His landmark albums have been widely touted as brilliant.-Mary Andrews
Washington gave an in-depth interview at the Alison Minor Stage prior to his set later in the day. Here are the highlights of the interview.
Michael Gourrier: Kamasi is a young man but he has a very rich pedigree and resume. It would be impossible to cover everything so I personally have selected the stuff that would be interesting to me. It’s been a real meteoric career for Kamasi and we’ll start by asking him something about his background. I want to acknowledge his dad who is in the audience. I had the opportunity to see him play with Kamasi’s group a couple of years ago. And he is an excellent soprano saxophone player and you can check him out at the Gentilly Stage today.
Coming up in you household besides your dad, were there any other brothers, sisters or your mom interested in music?
Kamasi Washington: Yes, I have a big family with six brothers and sisters. My older brother directly older than me plays piano and I have a younger sister that is a painter and she also plays music. She did the paintings for Harmony of Difference album. My youngest sister sings and plays violin. She sang in the choir on Heaven and Earth album. My aunt plays too.
So, you grew up in a musical family playing in the Washington family
Yeah.
You went to a musical high school in L.A. and you graduated from UCLA. Give us an overview of that particular period.
I was 13 when I really started playing the saxophone. There is a school in LA for kids who really want to be musicians. I transferred to Hamilton High School. When I graduated I went to UCLA. I studied at the music college. I wanted to learn about music from all over the world. I had been studying music from the U.S. pretty heavily so I wanted to learn other stuff that I was really aware of. That’s why I went to UCLA.
Some of your mentors were, now check this out, he was a protégé of Kenny Burrell, Billy Higgins, and Gerald Wilson, to name a few. That’s the pedigree from which he has evolved. Another person was Horace Tapscott, a piano player, the composer from LA that never got his just due but he played on WWOZ on a regular basis. He hasn’t been forgotten.
Yeah, yeah Horace made a decision to stay in his neighborhood. The ‘art’ is what he called his band. He called it his ‘artchestra’ instead of an orchestra. They had this house and he would literally bring musicians in and make musicians from the street. He used music as a tool to uplift his community. He sacrificed his own career and put it on hold and didn’t tour as much as he could because he wanted to make sure he did that. It was something that was very impactful for everyone that grew up in there. We all knew Horace Tapscott was. We all knew what he was about.
What was your impression of going to New York and I know you had already dealt with everyone in the band, but what was it like working with the who’s who in Jazz?
Yeah, the first time that Jarrell took me to New York, he took me to play a gig at Birdland. Even though Los Angeles has had a lot of great musicians, we haven’t always had the best reputation for musicians. When Gerald brought me in they were all like, “What are you doing Gerald?” Everybody was really welcoming though. I was lucky that I was on the wings of such a great musician like Gerald Wilson that everybody wanted to hear me play.
After I played, everybody was real cool. So, he asked me to come and record with him. That was an interesting thing. I was a huge Gerald Wilson fan. I listened to all his records. I loved his arrangements. I was a huge, huge fan of his music. So, he told me I was going to record this album.
There was a ballad that he wanted me to play. So he told me to come by his house so I could learn the ballad. I went to his house and his house was two blocks away from my mom’s house. I said Jarrell, I grew up right around that corner from your house.” There was a hill (between us). He said, “Man I used to hear you practicing from down the hill.” He said that he used to go walk around trying to find me. I was like, ‘Man that’s crazy.’ I used to be playing this music and stuff out the window.
Fate, ya’ll were mean to be. Who doesn’t know who Gerald Wilson is? Gerald Wilson is a composer, a jazz entrepreneur, who was born in Detroit, but moved to California and he was a part of the West Coast Scene. He’s got a lot of records on Pacific Jazz and they are still available in print. He’s got a son who has been the guitar player with Diana Krall for 20 years. His name is Anthony Wilson. Who else came up in your era in the LA area at UCLA?
People like Harris Martin and Thundercat, Willie Jones III, a lot of great, great musicians. James Newton actually ended up teaching at UCLA just as I was leaving. He was very much influenced by Eric Dolphy who was influenced by Gerald Wilson. Dolphy was in Wilson’s band. He used to babysit his kids and stuff. I was definitely a fan of James Newton via our connection to Eric Dolphy.
A lot of good musicians go into academia and you never hear about them anymore. I’ve heard a lot about Gerald Wilson and James Newton as of late. So hopefully well see him back on the scene. Billy Childs is another one. He’s been in the west coast and a great musician, but if you don’t go out there and listen to serious jazz, you never know about it.
Yes, we had our own little pocket of great musicians that we only knew about or we knew about them, but they were stars in their lane. We would see them walking down the street and we would say, “Oh snap, there’s Sunship.” My friend from Chicago would say ”Who’s Sunship?” ‘You don’t know who Sunship is?’ It was kind of my feeling that it was good and bad for the musicians of my generation. It was very much self-contained. A lot of us did most of our touring outside of jazz. We didn’t feel like they were looking to LA for that kind of music. Now we are getting the opportunity to share our music with the world. We had to have time to develop our music like we were in an incubator. Like a gumbo, we had to simmer it.
You gave me a great idea. I told you I’ve been at every jazz fest and I’ve been in radio for a long time. I’ve interviewed a whole lot of people. Billy Higgins came here with a group and they called themselves The Leaders. He was on more Blue Note records than I can think of. He was a great person. Can you tell the people anything about Clora Bryant?
I never got to play with Clora, but she was definitely a big influence and crushed it in music and had us following her.
Clora Bryant was the first African American female to play in the Soviet Union. She was based in California and she was active in what was called the Central Avenue Scene. Central Avenue was equitant to what was 57th Street in New York. Central Avenue was in LA. It didn’t have the longevity of 57th Street. It still allowed people to come out and to use it as a stepping-stone.
It has the Central Avenue Jazz Festival now in LA. You can still feel the spirit of all that music. Even though the clubs and stuff aren’t there anymore, there is something about all that music that was made there. You can still really feel it.
Tell us about your experience with Phil Ranelin and how you got to play with him and what you picked up from that association.
Billy Higgins had a club called the world stage in Leimert Park. Phil was one of those beacons like Horace Tapscott. A lot of the musicians in LA went through those schools at The World Stage. You went through the Gerald Wilson schools. You went through the Horace Tapscott school. Phil Ranelin was another school to go through. He was a great trombonist and a great composer. I had seen him a lot over the years. I got the order, “Hey man do you want to come to play with me?” I said ‘Absolutely, yes, I would.’ He’s the first person who took me to Mexico. I went to Guadalajara’s Look Fair to play with him. He asked me to record with him. It was amazing how much music he had in him. I was really inspired by them. They were in their elder age by the time I got to work with them. I will never forget, people like Phil and Gerald would never stop innovating. Gerald would call me and he was like Miami 3, “Kamasi, I’ve got this new song. Nobody ever heard nothing like this before.” I was like, ‘Gerald, you are still after it huh. In the middle of the night!’
Music never grows old. It plays over and over. The schools at The World Stage are similar to the schools on the east side of the country mentored by Art Blakey and Benny Carter. They had aggregations that they mentored musicians and they really helped in the development of the music. You’ve also worked with people like George Duke and Lauryn Hill. Kamasi comes from a jazz background, but as his career has evolved and unfolded, he has transcended into other forms of music including other types of music. You worked with Lauryn Hill. It seems like when you started working with Kendrick Lamar, your star came up. Tell us about that.
Yeah, it was one of those things where I’ve known Kendrick’s music since 2007. Terrace Martin started bringing Kendrick’s music around. “Man his music is like the John Coltrane of rock.” He’s on a whole other level. After I heard him, I agreed. I grew up with Terrace and Thundercat. I knew they had been working on To Pimp a Butterfly for a number of years, two or three years. I didn’t know what they were doing at the time. I was touring at that point with Stanley Clarke. Terrence hit me up when I managed to come to the studio.
I had just gotten back home when Terrance asked to do something. ‘Oh man.’ Thankfully I did come and when I got there, they played the record for me. It was 60% done at that point and it blew me away. I was like, ‘What do you want me to do?’ He had me do some orchestral and horn arrangements and stuff like that. I played on a few songs. It was great to be around him. He’s such a real genius. Every once in a while you are around these people that have a connection to music that is different. Kendrick definitely has that.
Terence was here last year and played in the Jazz Tent. Kendrick won the Grammy Award for his composition “To Pimp a Butterfly.” In the recent past, the Pulitzer Prize people were passing out awards, he received the first non-jazz or classical award in music. His new CD, Damn, (Kamasi is also on), was the first non-jazz or classical music to receive a Pulitzer Prize. That’s another feather for Kamasi.
A selection, “Desire,” from Kamasi’s first album of his original compositions, Harmony of Difference was played.
Can you tell us about the compositional group just played?
This is a suite that has six parts to it. The first five parts, “Desire,” “Humility, “Knowledge,” “Perspective” and “Integrity,” I wanted to create a journey of understanding. It came from a time period where we were looking at our differences as a problem. I grew up in LA, like New Orleans, there was a gumbo of culture. You go to one block and you can buy a taco. You go to another block and buy some falafel. It’s all these different cultures living together. It was a beautiful thing. It wasn’t like, ‘oh man, here comes another person from another country.’ It was beautiful, Korea town and Little Tokyo, or Armenia. It was all these different cultures. It wasn’t that we were all the same. We were very different. Our differences didn’t make us at odds with one another.
You almost see more people from other cultures in someone else’s area than you see in their own. I wanted to show that musically. What I did with that piece is that I wrote five different songs and the sixth part of the piece played all five songs at the same time. It’s like a journey to truth. Understanding that when we combine and pull all of our different cultures, religions, thoughts, beliefs, languages together, it creates something beautiful. We don’t need to separate ourselves. We don’t need to push people away. We don’t need to tolerate one another. We need to celebrate one another.
A selection from the new CD, “Fist of Fury” was played.
“The Man From Indianapolis” is like Freddie Hubbard’s composition.
That is one of Freddie Hubbard’s compositions. He had a big-time influence on me. When I was a kid, Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers was the band for me. I grew up listening to jazz because my dad was a musician. Before I got into Art Blakey, jazz was my dad’s music. I got Art Blakey and Art Blakey was my music. I was going to tell him about Art Blakey, My dad said, ‘Yes, but that’s my album you are listening to.’
I put the Freddie song on this album because this album was like a journey throughout the consciousness for me a part of who you are in this connection to your ancestors. Being African Americans, we were cut off from the direct link to our ancestors, we have it through other ancestors. We get it in our generation directly through people like Freddie Hubbard and Louis Armstrong, people who are closer to our indirect ancestors. I tried to put that African rhythm underneath the hub tones as a metaphor for that connection. We are connected to one another through each other.
You know New Orleans is the birthplace of jazz because it is the place of African retention. The black people in Congo Square, enslaved people, were able to retain their heritage of culture in New Orleans as opposed to the eastern slaveholding states that they brought with them. New Orleans is known worldwide for its music and we are glad that Kamasi Washington was selected to come and play here on our 50th Anniversary Edition of the Jazz and Heritage Festival.
There were a few minutes of questions from the audience before the interview was over…
Washington gave a brilliant performance at the Gentilly Stage later in the afternoon and gave an electrifying set to one of the biggest crowds at that stage.
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