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Bullseye with Jesse Thorn

Kamasi Washington & Simon Rich

Bullseye with Jesse Thorn

NPR

Society & Culture

4.52.6K Ratings

🗓️ 5 November 2018

⏱️ 68 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

This week, we're dedicating almost an entire episode to one of our favorite musicians: Kamasi Washington! Kamasi is a saxophonist and composer. In the studio, he's played sax and arranged for hitmakers like Kendrick Lamar, Ryan Adams, Snoop Dogg - and that's just naming a handful. On his own, he's a visionary bandleader with over half a dozen solo records to his name. He broke through in 2015, with his three hour long instant classic "The Epic" - a record that found its way to a bunch of top ten lists and renewed a fiery debate in the music world: can a guy like Kamasi, not yet 40, revive jazz and turn it into a young person's game again? He and Jesse talk about his time playing sax in bands, as a composer and bandleader, and his nearly unbeatable Street Fighter II skills. We'll close out this week's show with a treat: a short story from the one and only Simon Rich! He's been a writer for SNL, the New Yorker and much more. He just put out a terrific new short story collection called "Hits and Misses." The outshot is back next week!

Transcript

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0:00.0

Bullseye with Jesse Thorn is a production of MaximumFun.org and is distributed by NPR.

0:12.9

I'm Jesse Thorn.

0:13.9

When you're young and you're trying to figure out your life, you don't usually know what

0:17.9

you're good at, right?

0:19.7

These kind of things take time.

0:21.4

And not everyone finds their calling in life the way that say Kamasi Washington did.

0:27.2

He is an acclaimed jazz composer, band leader.

0:31.4

And he also plays the saxophone beautifully.

0:33.9

I never thought that I could make music like the music that I liked because I was having

0:39.7

found my voice.

0:40.7

And it was like when I found the saxophone, it was almost immediate.

0:44.8

It was like a seat.

0:46.6

It was like all of a sudden, like, oh, we're there, right there.

0:50.7

That's where you will be able to make music that you enjoy.

0:54.1

And I was like, oh, wow.

0:56.0

I could do that.

0:57.0

Like, I could make a song that made me feel the way I feel when I hear this or play

1:01.6

you record.

1:02.6

I could do that.

1:03.6

Like, oh, wow.

1:04.6

And then I was just hooked, you know, all that addictive personality, like 97% of it went

1:11.8

right into the saxophone and music.

...

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