Music exists within life. It moves almost like the tide, like the ocean, coming in waves. The waves rise up, and then they come down, and then they move forward, and then they rescind back. If you look at the history of music, it’s always doing that. And as musicians, we kind of ride those waves. Some people are able to ride multiple waves. Most have one, maybe two. Those like Bowie just make their own.
What those waves carry, though, is different every time. There’s music that’s a vehicle to open your mind, to feel something a little beyond what we’re able to see. There’s music that tells the story of a life. There’s music that’s just pure fun, the same reason you might play a game. And all of those things are okay.
Life, for me, philosophically, is meant to be enjoyed, and what you find joy in is going to be different for everyone. Searching for something beyond reality is hard, heavy work. The people that do it enjoy that work, and that’s why they do it. Having that perspective means you don’t have to get so hung up on whether what you’re trying to do in music is what everybody’s looking for right now. You can’t control that. That’s why you have people who make amazing music in their time and it doesn’t get discovered until after their life. It’s just timing. Their wave was maybe rescinding back.
That’s why I always tell young musicians: if you really want to be a musician, you’ve got to find most of your joy in the creation of the music itself. Because otherwise, if you associate your success with how many albums you sell or how popular you are, that may not happen, even if you’re making something extraordinary. I’d rather create something beautiful that no one saw how beautiful it was, than create something that was just ok and have everyone say it was amazing.
The whole system we’ve lived on seems to be in transition
Right now, it feels like we’re in some kind of transition. I’m not sure which direction it’s going in, but it’s moving. The world is in a heavy space. I don’t know if it’s ever not in a heavy space, but particularly so right now. And I don’t know if that means people are going to want heavy music or light music. But that moment of clarity is coming, or maybe switching. You can feel it. People are sensitive to that, they feel it too, and so we kind of brace ourselves and get ourselves ready.
Jazz came into existence at the turn of the 20th century, and that was when the real shift began, from feudal societies towards democratic ones, humanitarianism, and people caring more about how people should be treated in general, and less just about their own. That idea of, hey, even if you’re not one of me, I should care how you’re treated. That wasn’t always the norm. Jazz came up around that, and I think we’re right now in a space where that idea is being challenged again, where the whole system we’ve lived on seems to be in transition. And in those situations, historically, something new bubbles up. Some kind of new music, rising somewhere I’m probably not even aware of yet.
The thing about jazz specifically is that because it’s so centred around personal expression, it’s very easily bent. These words we use to contain music don’t always work. Language is so powerful that we think it’s all-powerful, but it really isn’t. Just because I give something a name doesn’t make it so. When people ask me what jazz is, it takes millions of words to do justice to what it actually is. I always felt that a lot of music was jazz that just wasn’t called jazz. James Brown is definitely jazz to me, just not called it. He’s so connected to the music that came before him, and those musicians felt that connection too. It’s just that the people who decided what to call things decided to call it funk.
Fear is ruling the day right now
That instinctive expression feels a little lost at the moment. There’s much more conformity. Of course, conformity mostly comes from fear and fear is ruling the day right now. People are afraid to fail. The issue now is just that there are more people, more stuff, and in a sense, because of the internet, music has become so vast, so wide, it’s almost reverting back to a place before recorded music, where you really have to do something special to cut through.
Conformity, though, has its place. Part of the reason we even know John Coltrane’s music is because of all the people who tried to play like him, who loved him and hoisted him up. The reason someone born decades after he died knows who he was is because of those people.
But here’s what I think about conformity and excellence. As you go towards excellence, you start to see that it spirals off in all these different directions. Each person, at the higher levels, is completely different. You can’t play the notes John Coltrane plays and the notes Joe Henderson plays at the same time. They’re different answers. And once you realise that, you start to think: maybe what I should do is try to find something neither of them found. That doesn’t mean I don’t love or respect them, it just means I can’t be either of them anyway. So why not try to find somewhere that hasn’t been touched yet? Don’t let a desire for some abstract idea of success push you to conform your music in a way that removes its power. Because now you’re just in the mix.
Right now, the writing on the wall is that doing things purely for money is going to become harder and harder. It’s going to be too easy to get robots to do it for some minuscule amount. And that’s scary, because what we fear is not being able to feed ourselves, not being able to have the means to exist. But the silver lining is that what you’ll end up with, across every industry, is people doing things because they just really want to do them. And once you get there, you get back to innovation. Because why conform? People conform because they think that’s how they get success, meaning money. Take money out of the equation, and the conformity drops. What’s left is a desire for excellence. And as you pursue excellence, you realise that each person who reaches it is completely different. There are no right answers, just different ones.
All I want is for everyone to use their music to make the world better. It sounds simple, but I think if you decide that your ultimate goal is to do good, the first thing you have to do is try to figure out what good is. And that’s the start of everything. Before music, before art, before anything, you create some type of personal morality. What is good? What is the least harmful path? That’s not as simple as it sounds, and I struggle with that idea too.
But a society that’s searching for that answer, and trying to gear their lives towards doing as little bad and as much good as they can, that’s a society that feels better. When people say, I want to do what’s best for me, the world starts to feel dangerous. But when you ask, what’s actually good here, who really needs this more, so many of our problems start to go away. We’re living on a planet that is actually super abundant, enough for everyone. The path that’s ultimately best for everyone is to think that way.
Life is the car, music is the wrench.
Music is much smaller than life, but it’s powerful. And as you really learn how to make it and use it, you realise how powerful it is. It’s like a wrench and a car. Life is the car, music is the wrench. The car does many more things than the wrench, but the wrench can have a profound effect on the car, good or bad. So what are you going to use it for?
I’m older now. I’ve kind of made a path I can walk. But I see a lot of young musicians with such beautiful gifts, and I can’t help but feel a certain concern for them, a desire for them to have the opportunity to create the music I think they can make. You just never really know. Don’t underestimate the power of what you can do, even when the world feels random. If you’re not trying, it won’t happen. But if you do try, it could. And at the end of the day, you can look back and say: I made that. And that was enough.
There’s something else that’s been a bit of my mantra lately, and that’s gratitude. We lost Sonny Rollins. We lost Ryan Porter, who played with me since we were 11 years old. And this London show is a tribute to him, to Miles Davis, to John Coltrane, to all of them. Gratitude is the basis for a lot of the ability to see things for what they are. You have to be thankful for how things are first, before you can really see what they are and what they’re not.
This conversation took place on 9 June 2026 and has been edited and condensed for clarity and flow.
Kamasi Washington played at the Royal Festival Hall this summer as part of Meltdown, the world’s longest-running artist-curated music festival.
