Kamasi Washington Quotes

Talking about remixes, some people like to preserve what is original and some people give it a new meaning. Coming to Hip Hop, the biggest of the artists use sampling. You are changing the genre of the song and to be able to give old music in new package is also fair and people who have emotions attached to it - they are also not wrong.

Every writer from Montaigne to William S. Burroughs has pasted and cut from previous work. Every artist, whether it's Warhol or, you know, Dangermouse or whoever.

I think, in history, everything is about the remix.

Normally, things are viewed in these little segmented boxes. There's classical, and then there's jazz; romantic, and then there's baroque. I find that very dissatisfying. I was trying to find the thread that connects one type of music - one type of musician - to another, and to follow that thread in some kind of natural, evolutionary way.

I like to blur the line between remix and cover version and new song.

A lot of the images I use are already out there in the public or in the news. I just steal them or photograph them or repaint them, so they've already been talked about, already been consumed.

A lot of art and visual crafts are based on appropriating things.

I played with so many musicians and some of the musicians would have something I want. I steal a lot of them, and I mash it up, I mash it up into my chords.

There is a modern take on certain things you can do that, to me, is still jazz.

When I was playing piano, it was like, 'I'm going to write a song using all the white keys.' My music director, who knew my jazz background, suggested I try big-band music, so we spent a year experimenting with it in concert, and the audience reaction was really good.

We're all Vanilla Ice. Look at Girl Talk and Danger Mouse. Look at William Burroughs, whose cut-up books antedate hip hop sampling by decades. Shakespeare remixed passages of Holinshed's 'Chronicles' in 'Henry VI.' Tchaikovsky's '1812 Overture' embeds the French national anthem.

I like mash-ups, taking contemporary songs and making them old... old songs, making them new.

I'm mostly fine with anyone using my music for whatever. Everything's just compost that gets reused.

Jazz came out of New Orleans, and that was the forerunner of everything. You mix jazz with European rhythms, and that's rock n' roll, really. You can make the argument that it all started on the streets of New Orleans with the jazz funerals.

The jazz chord substitutions in a country song... that was another thing that bent people's ears. I guess that my favorites are the unique ones. It's not how fast you play. It's that unique blending of different stuff I'm most proud of.

I knew that as a DJ from 1970 on up that I would eventually come with this sound. I brought out all these other break beats that you hear so much on a lot of these records.

I'm not that big a fan of sampling. But I feel like if I'm going to do it, I'm going to do it to where it's more of a reimagining of a track. The songs that I do utilize samples on, most of it you wouldn't even be able to tell what it was unless I told you.

I like the idea of an eclectic approach, incorporating jazz with other forms and other genres of music.

It's sort of what jazz would be if it stopped being snobby and what rock would be if it stopped being stupid.

Let us not forget that the greatest composers were also the greatest thieves. They stole from everyone and everywhere.

I don't take anything from the podcast and bring it to my act, because I feel like that's been burned, unless I feel like I can really develop it beyond two or three jumps beyond what I said on the podcast.

For the chorus of 'Secrets,' we used The Romantics' 'Talking in Your Sleep' and 'Pale Shelter' by Tears for Fears. It's like hip-hop: just grab it.

I've tried to force a solo before, but sometimes it's like, 'That thing don't really fit, man!'

I think it's being innovative and very creative to stay away from flat-out sampling somebody else's record. To me, that doesn't show too much of your creative side unless you take a little piece and add it, almost like spice on a chicken.

Jazz was the pop music of its day, and all American popular music has stemmed from it one way or another.