Video Rewind: Kamasi Washington: A jazz genius on collaborative lessons learned from Kendrick Lamar, Snoop Dogg, Lauryn Hill, and more

26:45And we had a guest a while back, John Cleese from Monty Python, who has this idea of open versus closed modes of thinking. And when you're open, it's sort of more improvisational. You're trying things, you know, you're trying all these different things to see what works. And then the closed mode, you go and execute on it. And I'm wondering if there's any parallels in your work where there's sort of more of an improvisational phase and then you move to a more structured phase or maybe it's something really different. Yeah, there's always improvisation. There's always space for the moment, you know, because to me, the music always has the final say.

27:26Musicians that I grew up playing with, all of us, we kind of all have that philosophy of like, if something happens in a moment that's not on the page, that's beautiful. That supersedes the written music no matter what. but I will say that when we're making an album in general, there's more of a vision for the songs. When we get in the studio, I have a vision for the song. Now someone could play something and change that vision, but I do come in with a vision. I come in with an idea of something that I want to get to. But when we play live, I deliberately go, let's try to explore all the possibilities.

28:05Let's just go to all the different places. You know, it's almost like trying everything on the menu. You know, you go to a restaurant that's known for the, you know, whatever, for the burgers. And you had the burger, so now you want to like, okay, now let's try all the other stuff on the menu and just see what's what. We treat each song like that each night. And so, you know, for me, that's kind of like our version of that. Because we always improvise. That's part of the culture of jazz, you know, coming in. but recording versus live. And when we play live, that's when we're exploring all the possibilities.

28:38When we're recording, that's when we're trying to realize a vision. And they're both valid and they're both important. One thing that I'm really struck by in all of your work is there's a few things. There's a great deal of layering. There's complexity, but it doesn't feel complex for the sake of being complex. There's a lot of pieces to it. There's a lot of depth and the vision in the epic and your new record, Peerless Movement, it comes through very well. But I'm always struck by how you are generous with, you know, the musicians with you. And last year I saw Herbie Hancock perform in South Carolina in Greenville.

29:18And I was blown away by, you know, here's a legend on stage with super talented people. and he'd give them like as much time as they wanted to build something. He had a vision and they had some sort of like agreement, but he was going to give people as much space as they needed to build something. And then that would come back around into Herbie's vision, his orbit, whatever. How did you think about that when you're recording the epic? Because that seemed like it had like lots of structure and clarity. Was it also open to collaborators' visions as well? Yeah. I have a place that I want the music to go, but I have no ego involved in it.

30:03So it's not like where I want the music to go is where it should go. And none of the musicians I play with approach to music with any ego. We all check our ego at the door. And so what happens is, you know, if it's my record, or whatever my music that we're playing, that obviously I've spent more time with it. So I'm going to come in with a clearer vision for the music than anyone else. So with my vision that I have for it, you know, a lot of times it's the one that we end up kind of going with. But like there's a song called The Rhythm Changes and we recorded it on the Epic. But before we recorded it on the Epic, I recorded it at my house.

30:44So when I wrote that song, I wrote it with a bass line that was like,

30:51It was like, you know It was a rhythm It had a little bit of a Latin Kind of almost feel to it So I wrote that down And I gave it to Thundercat And Thundercat looked at it And he went

31:12And then Ronald came in with a drum beat And it was like that is not what I wrote but it's better than what I wrote and so that's what we're going to do so what happens is I think with most musicians that really are kind of putting the music first is I want the best musical experience that we can have and so I'm playing with these amazing great musicians it wouldn't make any sense for me to not give the listener an opportunity to hear them make music. I look at it more like that. It's just like, well, this is what makes sense. Brandon Coleman up here playing me. I've got to give him some space to play all this wonderful music he has in him.

31:58I try to offer up the best musical experience. I understand I'm going to make room for myself. There's going to be a time and a place for me to offer up something for sure. But I'd rather give two offerings and let Brandon also be able to give an offering then I give three offerings and he doesn't get to give in that doesn't serve the music the music is better served but you know I'm only two offerings for me and one man it's better served that way the music is better you've talked about the experience working on to pimp a butterfly with Kendrick Lamar and it seems like it's maybe similar and different at the same time that he's like very detail-oriented focused and he wants to be involved or witnessing kind of like what contributions are to come into the record.

32:46Could you just talk a little bit about what that process feels like comparatively? Yeah, his process, it's equally open. It seems like he gives space to anyone that he's working with to give whatever they feel like the music needs. And he takes it all in, and then he carves out what he needs, what he wants from that. and in that he's a master at getting the best of whatever you give him you know most of these I work with people all work with artists and you gave him seven diamonds and you only used two of them you know and them two that he used you kind of snuck those two in there you know everybody doesn't always perceive the beautiful things you know And so Kendrick is a master at perceiving those things and finding a way to implement them while maintaining his vision, you know.

33:47And a lot of times, at least from my perspective, you know, like he and, you know, Stanley of Heaton Chairs, they have a vision that's clearer to them than it is to me, you know. And so when I work with Kendrick, you know, I've learned to just give him the full pie, you know. Here's everything I'm hearing. and then he's a master at taking the parts that i gave him that work with what he's going for you know and that's kind of his approach i wanted to ask you about different modes of creativity and and it started kind of a strange place but the video game street fighter and i heard you talking on this other show about playing street fighter i grew up with that too i don't play so much anymore but i dropped endless quarters into an arcade with friends play street fighter and I was frankly terrible at it you know I'd used a semo wrestler guy often with like the slapping hand motion that was like my goodness but you talked about how it's not difficult for you to focus on something if it's something you love doing you will focus whether that's a game like a street fighter game or music like practicing endless hours as music and I think a lot of the people that we talk to that are very creative oftentimes maybe have ADHD diagnosed or undiagnosed and may have trouble focusing on certain things but can focus very well on others.

35:02Yeah, I'm just curious how that focus has affected the way that you approach your own creativity. I definitely have trouble focusing. You know, I probably have trouble breaking my focus. You know, walls could be falling down. Oh, I was going to be on fire and I'm, you know, I get lost in things easily. My creative process is a very exploratory one. I have songs that sometimes I sit with for years until I find that one thing about it. There's this song called Journey that I had for years. I had the whole song. I just couldn't figure out what the drums were supposed to be. And my studio, especially when I was younger, the studio I had at my dad's house, it was a bit of an organized chaos.

35:48And people used to laugh because I just had these Post-it notes. I used to write songs on these Post-it notes. And that song sat on a post-it note for years. And a lot of people liked it. And I was like, yeah, I like it. I just don't know. I don't know rhythmically what it's supposed to do. I was playing it on the rounding piano, and Miles Mosley, bass player, jumped on the drums and randomly just played the perfect rhythm for that song. Oh, there it is. Now you go from a post-it note to manuscript paper. And off you go to the bandstand. I can move fast if I need to. I have a deadline or something like that.

36:26But I'm a coppersons. I have a bunch of songs, like, you know, this book I hear full of songs that I'm just fiddling with. I kind of go like that. You know, I'll write a song, and then I'll write another song along, and I'll write another song along, and then I go back to that song I wrote three days ago, mess around with it. That's kind of my process. It's my strength and my weakness, because I can get sidetracked on something. And you get too focused on that, drop a week, and not even realize what happened to it, you know? I wanted to talk about maybe a different direction. So writing a song from scratch and finding these pieces and assembling that versus discovering something that is fascinating and reimagining that.

37:06Claire DeLune, actually, your version of it came up in a prior episode with the founder of Automatic, the company who makes WordPress. And it's like 50 % of the web runs on this platform. And he's a jazz fan. And we started talking about that. And he just went on and on about Claire DeLune and how magical it is, which is interesting because I, too, have that same connection to that song. I've already written it in my will. I told my wife, this is the song I want to play at my funeral. It's powerful. It's like a musical cathedral. There are some songs that are already just magnificent, you know, in their first imagining.

37:45And my understanding is that took a long time to build, took years to build originally. But why revisit that song? What was it that attracted you to it? And tell us a little bit more. Take us into the process of reorchestrating it. Design Better is supported by Masterclass. So many designers we talk to tell us that they're stressed out about how rapidly the creative process is changing. I know it's cliche to say AI is changing the world, but hey, it's true. I've been building with AI for a while now, and I still don't have my head fully wrapped around how everything works. That's why I took Fei-Fei Li's master class.

38:23Her point is that AI has no direction of its own. The forces shaping it are human choices, and people who understand those forces don't just keep up with the technology. They steer it. And that changed my perspective. Instead of wondering which tool I should learn next, I now stay focused on my goals and how my tools empower my best work. That's just one idea from one class on Masterclass. There are 200-plus more available taught by people who define their fields from just$10 a month with a 30-day money-back guarantee. Right now, as a listener of Design Better, you get at least 15 % off any annual membership at masterclass.com slash design better.

39:04That's 15 % off masterclass.com slash design better. Head to masterclass.com slash design better to see the latest offer.

39:19In general, you know, for me, I'm a music kid. I love listening to music. and from time to time, I'll hear something in a song. You know, I'll just hear a song and I'll go, oh, man. I'll just hear it. I'll be listening to it the way it is and I'll hear another way it could be. And I'll hear it. I'm never interested we did this this way. Now, with Claire DeLune, that is what happened, but I have a mentor, I had a mentor named Gerald Wilson. And, you know, we would talk about music a lot and, you know, he loved Debussy and he's always just talking about how soulful he was. He talked about soulful those romantic French composers where that idea, you know, that juxtaposition of kind of like this dude from the late 1800s, early 1900s, and French guy probably with a puffy shirt, like a soulful person, I was looking for it.

40:15I was like, I wonder what Gerald meant by that. And I was listening to that song, and I was like, man, this is just like the blues. Yeah. You know what I mean?

40:27Kamasi Washington:Blue, baby, all the blues. I heard it and I was listening to it. I was like, man, we could play this song like that. So then it turns into, you know, just kind of range song. I was like, man, but after the intro, you know, I was like, you know, instead of playing the middle of the song as an intro, you know, so like we played a song up to one point and the intro was at the breaking point. You know what I mean? So that was just me wanting to give a nod to the original. And then when we started playing it, it was like, man, I just had this vision of this beautiful celestial being coming down to earth and kind of meeting all these soulful people.

41:08I'm lucky that I grew up with musicians that I've known my whole life. And so usually when I have an idea, they just immediately understand it. And so when I said, we're going to play this classical song, it's just straight soul. Oh, okay. I rolled out some of the parts. I showed them what I was thinking, but they kind of got it straight away. I would love to talk about spirituality with you. Every time I listen to any of your work, that's the feeling I have, is some spiritual connection. I don't know if that's what you're telling me when I listen to your music, but I feel like Claire de Lune is one example, but there's so many other, like Truth is another song where I feel like you want to show us something, like you want to show us something that's bigger than us.

41:56And I want to know what that is. Like, what are you showing us? And where does that come from? That's hard to answer. I do truly believe that this life, who we are, what I am, And what we are is more than just flesh and bones. You know, I do feel like we have spirits and like we're spiritual beings. And that's why music affects us in the way it does, because it's a medium that really kind of mixes those two levels of reality. And that's why, you know, music has the power it has, you know, over it. It's kind of inexplicable. It's hard to explain why you love a song. It's really hard. Even if you're the greatest musical theorist ever, it's hard to really explain what makes a good song a good song.

42:44And I think that it is putting a piece of who you are. And I think that it's possible in any form. It's possible in a poem. It's possible in a painting. It's possible in a clay pot. you know it's possible and some food that you make you can put a piece of that deeper self of who you are that other part of yourself not that your body is not yourself but there's another part of yourself that we can't see and if you put that into what you're doing it speaks to people I feel like there's something in all of us that wants a connection on that level when I go see a Rembrandt painting, I feel it. There's something else in that thing.

43:32Or I can go and eat someone's food and go, man, you really put your soul into it. When I first started playing music, first thing my dad did, the very first thing he did was he took me to my uncle's church and he was like, this is where we're going to learn how to play music. When I started really playing saxophone, he was like, let's go here let's go play and when i was playing there all that music was made for some greater purpose so my original foundation in music kind of comes from there you know it was like we're doing this praise god and it was like oh wow okay and you could feel it i used to play this church there was this lady that she used to sit in the back of the church she wouldn't join the choir if we played and sang good enough, she would catch the spirit and sing over the whole choir and the whole band with our speakers and everything and just bring everybody to tears.

44:38But we had to get her there. As you start to play music, when you start tapping into that, you start tapping into your spirit, start tapping into your soul, you start tapping into something that's more than what we see. It just feels good. It's the best much of music. It just really is. And that's the reason why. It just feels good to play music that way. It's the music I love the most. And so whenever I make music, I'm usually trying to get there. And there's different ways, different paths, different ways, different happenings. And I love trying new paths and new ways to get there. But I'm always trying to get there.

45:19for another reason then i just it feels good it was good over there the video for truth feels like a visual embodiment of the feeling of so much of your music how much of that was you kind of directing that or was that a collaborative process what was that like oh definitely collaborative process um peggy rojas is another one of those people that he puts his soul into what he does, you know? The idea of truth is that it's a six-part movement where the first five movements, he plays five songs, and in the six-part truth, we're playing all five songs at the same time. It's kind of a metaphor for just the reality that as much as it seems like we fight over dominance over each other, we fight for our place at the table, there's room for everybody.

46:13There's room for all of us. And it was a very serendipitous thing because when I brought that song to record, I told the musicians, told the guys in the band, like, what we're going to do. They're like, okay. And so the first thing we did was record the five songs separately. And then I forget, like, after we recorded the fifth song, they were like, we're going to play all that together at the same time? But they didn't believe it. They didn't believe that these songs, these melodies could be played at the same time. Now that's perfect. That's just perfect, because that is the whole point in this is that we don't believe I can let you be who you are and I can be who I am and we can be right up next to each other and it can be fine.

46:54I don't need to change you and you don't need to change me. We can just be together. And it's beautiful actually, not just fine, it's beautiful. It'll be beautiful, us right next to each other, learning from each other, bouncing off each other, interacting with each other. You know, that was the idea of it. And so I wanted to give it that like almost another dimension by also having this idea be expressed in other mediums at the same time. So I had my sister create paintings, five paintings in the same way, five paintings, and then she would combine those five paintings and a six painting. And then I asked Andrew Rojas to do the same thing with a video montage.

47:35He did short clips for each individual song that culminated into him making a video for truth. You know, I just talked to him about what I thought about life and the world, what I thought about that piece. And he came up with a beautiful treatment. And, you know, AJ and I, that's how we kind of usually work. I kind of usually just kind of tell him what the music that I'm making, like what it means to me. And then he'll come up with a way of how to express that meaning. and then we'll shoot it and then we'll kind of come together to kind of like figure out how to like, you know, really get it to line up and really kind of be one thing, you know?

48:16And we both kind of, I think we hear music, we hear life and have a good synergy in how we see things. But no, he created that treatment and directed it. We worked together, obviously, to get it to his final stage, but that was his work. Your dad plays a part in your newest album and I remember hearing a story of growing up you're a hip-hop fan and you first started realizing that they're sampling these jazz records and your dad's got this big collection of records and you actually start taking them and moving them into your own space and you sort of that music that was his how it became yours in a certain way and then now it feels I don't know full circle is the right way to phrase it but now he's playing together with you on an album So how does it feel?

49:02It must be a pretty powerful moment. Yeah. Yeah, I still got his records. He said that. Yeah. You know, my dad, he was my teacher, and he was my access point for anything I wanted to do musically. So if there's a book I wanted, he probably already had it. If there's an instrument I wanted to play, he probably had it. If there was something I couldn't understand in music, I could always go to him and he would tell me what was going on. And my dad made a decision when we were very young to focus more on teaching so that he could be home to raise us. He didn't want to go on the road and have us not have him around, you know.

49:44And so, you know, I remember being a kid and, you know, before all the famous people, my first role model was him. And I remember I was just wish he would go out and play more. You know, I used to ask him on time, why don't you go play? I get up at 6 o 'clock in the morning, you know. And so the heavy came out the same year he retired. And so when I got my first tour, you know, and that had been a dream for me to actually tour my own music. And I said, you want to come on tour with us? He said, yeah. And it was great for me. It was like a childhood dream for me to see him playing every night and really like doing his thing.

50:17He always makes a cameo or something like that on my records. And, you know, to have him be more featured in this last record was great. you know and I'm always happy to you know to be able to have Pottis be involved and he's the reason why I'm a musician there's no other way to put it I'm a big fan of you know sticking with the people that stuck with me you know and Pottis been there since day one Bob is a big show it's great and I love hearing him play and hearing his contribution and it was funny because when we were kids you know he's always yelling at us because he didn't sound good and now now he's playing with us so I can he don't yell at us no more You could yell back, I guess.

50:56That's great. You've talked about a number of the amazing people that you've worked with, and there's a much longer list that we could go into. But I wonder if we could talk about just a couple people to see what you learned from them. One person I'm particularly curious about is Wayne Shorter, because Wayne was just an amazing human being. There was a great documentary done on him recently. And so listeners, if you don't know much about Wayne Shorter and you want to just know a little bit about how people around him thought about him, go check it out. It's on Amazon Prime. You got to meet him in high school.

51:33Is that right? Yeah. First of all, Wayne Shorter was in high school. He came down to that band, the Multischool Jazz Band that I told you about. Yeah, he came and he sat right next to me. And literally, Wayne Shorter was the reason why I wanted to play saxophone. Clark Blakely and the Jazz Messengers was my favorite band in elementary school. And it was the version that had Wayne Shorter that was my favorite version of that band. Shorter and Lee Morgan. I mean, I love, obviously, all the different variations of the band, but that one was just that was my one, you know? I never forget it. He was sitting next to me, and I was like, I gotta say something.

52:07Kamasi Washington:I gotta say something. I gotta say something. I'm not saying. All I can think of him to say, I was like, hey, man, were you and Lee Morgan friends? You guys sound like you were friends. I didn't have a whole lot of opportunities to play with Wayne. I had a few. You know, I had that time. We played once for the Monk Institute's saxophone competition. I wasn't in the competition, but I played with him with Tours Duke. I had a chance to play with his band. I should be for him. But I studied his music my whole life. And Wayne Shorter, to me, is just like a guiding light into the endless possibilities of creativity.

52:47I think that's what any Wayne Shorter fan kind of loves and boasts, is that Wayne just feels like he's always coming from the most honest place, and he has such a creative spirit. He hears the notes that no one else would have been, and he's so comfortable in that space, the uniquely Wayne Shorter space.

53:16and it's so beautiful to hear you know and it's so beautiful to see and to me what inspired me the most was just to be comfortable in being myself not to get too caught up into trying to be something that I think other people want me to be to just be happy and to be grateful and to explore and to enjoy who I am that's what I got the most from playing, probably more from listening to him in that documentary, too. It was kind of very affirming. When I got to really hear him talk about that stuff, I was like, oh, wow. I said, I thought you meant that. And even just playing with his band. When I played with his band, they were trying to pass on a lot of the things they learned from him.

54:03Terrence and I both played with him. I feel like I grew so much from that one experience. And the few times that I did get a chance to play with him or next to him, So like I got so much out of them, even though they were short and they were far between, they had a meaningful and lasting effect on them. The last person I'll ask you about is Herbie Hancock, because he, I think he's a different type of guy. He was best friends with Wayne Shorter, also an L.A. guy. Presumably your paths cross semi-regularly. He's been touring recently. What have you learned from your interactions with Herbie? Yes, I've had more opportunities to play music with Herbie.

54:42I feel like the thing I learned from Herbie, it's a similar thing. I told him that's my song yesterday. I feel like Herbie has his own harmony that God set aside just for him.

54:54Kamasi Washington:And nobody else would tap into it but him. As many people try to copy Herbie Hancock and they learn his solos and they try to play like him, there is a place that only he can get to. And the most kind of profound lesson that I find that I'm able to grasp for some reason more like slowly when I get a chance to play with them is that there is no wrong else. There is no wrong place. There's just different places in music. And that's a very powerful state of mind to be in. If you can get yourself into that state of mind, then none of the possibilities are closed off to you. And that is how you get to those uniquely you, uniquely, you know, personal spaces that they seem to just live in.

55:46It's like they seem to just live in these spaces that it's like, man, no one else plays that. How do you get there all the time? I think it comes from that feeling of like, I can go anywhere. I can do anything. I can play any note I want over this chord, but what note do I want to play? Do I want to play? Do I actually want to play? What note am I actually compelled to play? What am I actually feeling? What do I actually want to do in this moment? It sounds simple, but it's very difficult, actually. But it's so beautiful and so fulfilling when you can get into that space. You know, with Herbie, I have more time with Herbie, and we did a tour together.

56:28We were doing shows together, like a tour in that sense. He was 80 years old, and I felt like he sounded better than he ever sounded. Totally. Who is their best at 80? And I was like, wow, man, music, you really can keep growing in this. You really can keep doing this. Here he is. He's doing it. I'm looking at him. And as good as Herbie has been all his whole career, somehow, some way, he's even further now than he was then it was super inspiring to hear it every night mossy i'm not as much of a jazz aficionado as aaron but there are a few albums that i really love and probably because they're they were introduced by my grandfather who played jazz piano one is just the classic d kellington and john coltrane album back from the early 60s and And I kind of want to get my kids into more jazz music.

57:26They might not like that particular style, but I'm certainly going to share your music. But I'm just wondering if there's any artists right now that you're sharing with your kids or they're inspiring you that would make a good kind of like segue into these different realms of music. You know, music is so much more related than we sometimes realize, you know. So like when I heard Art Blakely and Jazz Messages, it reminded me of NWA. It's just something about the energy of it. it just had that same feel you know and then you know then i was also listening to like child call quest and stuff like that and so they were sampling some of that stuff and it was just a connection between that and that kind of like made it feel familiar to me and then that was the start of my journey and then from there i learned this and i'll start like that you know it just kind of goes from there i mean my daughter actually started off winning into like some pretty heavy stuff

58:15Kamasi Washington:like eric golfe was her favorite nice it was like two weeks old we drove her mother crazy because she only wanted to listen to Eric Dolphy for like a year straight. But, you know, since then she's kind of grown. What I kind of try to do is I listen to like whatever she's into and then I just offer up things that I feel like are adjacent to that. At one point she was, you know, really, really into Michael Jackson. So I started playing her some Weather Report and other stuff like that. I looked at what she was into and it's just so, there's such a wide range jazz music has so much in there and i would just play the music that i thought she would like you know based off the music that she already liked and i found with her that as i just play music around and i mix it in with the stuff that she's listening to it just makes it feel like it fits fantastic kamasi it's been such a treat to talk to you the new record is fearless movement It's wonderful.

59:15It's a great record. I've spent the whole morning just enjoying this in my living room. So thank you so much for being on Design Better. Oh, thank you. Thank you for having me.

59:38This episode was produced by Eli Woolery and me, Aaron Walter. with engineering and production support from Brian Paik of Pacific Audio. If you found this episode useful, we hope that you'll leave us a review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to finer shows. Or simply drop a link to the show in your team's Slack channel, designbetterpodcast.com. It'll really help others discover the show. Until next time.

1:00:13Thank you.