A Quote by Kamasi Washington

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.
I've always had some level of having to be independent outside of music because the music wasn't a smooth ride. We lost a lot in the mix: Everybody that I came in the music game with - friends I brought in with me - are all doing 10-34 years in jail. That's why if you want to get the real, you gotta get it from me.
Yes, I started piano and classical singing, I wanted to study jazz, but I tried to go to the Polish University of Jazz, but they didn't want me. In Krakow, I wanted to conduct, they didn't want me. And I start to think, 'I have to do something.' In Krakow there was drama and music. I started to study.
When I started music, I started out in Puerto Rico with classical music. But what really made me want to be a musician was jazz, and because I didn't grow up with jazz, I had to learn it from a very basic level. I had to go into the history and learn everything about the development of the music, all the players and all that stuff.
I was playing surf music with my band when a girlfriend of mine who had come from Los Angeles took me to a James Brown concert. That show really changed my whole outlook and thought processes, especially about music and different cultures.
My father is an actor, so he brought me into his agency when I was young. It wasn't something I wanted to do until high school, when I started taking theater and really liked it. Then an agent found me and wanted me to come out to Los Angeles and give it a shot. I gave myself six months, but it only took me like a week to get a job.
I heard Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis, and that was it. I didn't ever want to be anything else. I just started banging away and semi-studied classical music at the Royal Academy of Music but sort of half-heartedly.
My father was able to play a number of musical instruments and I fell in love with classical music in my teens and I allowed it to influence me. I like to think I took and still do from classical music and various techniques, I have made classical albums and recorded seven different pieces of Bach on different albums and its all music too me.
The first song that made me interested in music was 'Oh, Pretty Woman' by Roy Orbison. It was the guitar intro, that riff, that I really liked and made me listen in a different way.
My father did not bother that I play not a classical music. He always congratulated me for my development in music, I mean in any music but, he hang on to continue training at the Academy of Music... however, I never mentioned to my teachers that I trained myself at weekends in clubs.
I started piano lessons at age six but didn't take music seriously until I was a teenager, when I thought about a career in music. I studied classical music, and my instruments were guitar and piano. I played keyboards in bands, and after high school I went to Vienna to study at the Academy of Music. I also became a session player, which culminated in my work with Tangerine Dream.
I started when I was really young. I was playing classical music when I was 4 and when I turned 11 I started to write pop music. I guess you could say it was my intellectual evolution and my love of music began to change.
I started playing guitar when I was eight. Well, I started piano and really liked it but never practiced, but it taught me how to read music, and then my mom signed me up for guitar lessons, and I connected to that way more.
We've got the prettiest girls in the world here in Los Angeles and there's a great music scene. And I learned what I learned about cinema here in Los Angeles so it's always been really important to me as a city to live in and I love making movies about it.
Nirvana really touched me as a teenager and started making me pay attention to music as a participatory thing that I could do. Music that you want to throw your body into it - that's a feeling that I'm not quite satisfied with having made yet.
I wasn't playing the music, the music was playing me... and once that went away, and I had the feeling I was playing music, I had to stop. The need to go onstage and get my brain flattened every night left me, and what I didn't wanna do is go onstage and perpetrate a fraud... You cannot fool an audience.
Obviously there are pieces of classical music that are some of the most beautiful music ever written, for me anyway is a lot of classical or contemporary music, so it's a different kind of space that you enter when you're listening to it.
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