‘He pointed to me’: How an impromptu solo launched Kamasi Washington’s career

This weekend Kamasi Washington will perform at the Newport Jazz Festival before a sold out audience. What follows is a conversation he had with GBH’s Morning Edition when he was in Boston in 2023.

For most of his childhood, Kamasi Washington didn’t have his heart set on music as a career. Then at age 15, he had an epiphany.

“It was always going to be a part of my life,” he said. “I grew up in a household that allowed me to understand what it meant to be a professional musician.”

Washington’s father, Rickey, was a saxophonist and flutist. And when Washington turned 13, he picked up his father’s old saxophone. But it took another two years, and an unexpected act by a music teacher, for him to realize his calling.

Washington attended the Academy of Music of Alexander Hamilton High School in Los Angeles and was a member of the prestigious L.A. Multi School Jazz Band, a special program for exceptionally talented students. There, he played alongside young musicians who would go on to become heavyweights in the industry, like Terrace Martin, trombonist Isaac Smith and the Bruner brothers — Grammy-winning drummer Ronald Bruner Jr. and bassist Stephen Lee “Thundercat” Bruner.

“They were all so good,” he said. “I was good in my school, but in that band, I wasn’t one of the soloists.”

During a performance at the Playboy Jazz Festival — a yearly gathering of established and up-and-coming jazz musicians, now renamed the Hollywood Bowl Jazz Festival — the band’s teacher, Reggie Andrews, did something that startled the young Washington.

“He just randomly gave me a solo,” Washington said. “While I was on stage, he pointed to me. And I literally looked around like, 'What? Me?’”

The scene remains emblazoned in his mind. He recalls the solo as being a sub-par.

“People said I sounded good, but I just wasn’t happy with how I sounded,” he said.

But it was that moment — and the awareness that he could have done better — that set Washington on the path to becoming a living legend.

“That was the moment when I was like, ‘I’m going to really take this seriously,’” he said. “That’s when I was like, 'You know what? I’m going to practice eight hours a day.’ Because I knew what I was supposed to do to get good. My dad had told me. I had read it in the books. And I knew I wasn’t really doing that.”

Nearly three decades later, Washington’s name is synonymous with contemporary jazz and improvisation. He is a frequent collaborator with Kendrick Lamar, providing the saxophone on the rapper’s award-winning albums, “ To Pimp A Butterfly” and “ DAMN.” He has performed with legends like Herbie Hancock. And he composed the Grammy-nominated score for Michelle Obama’s Netflix documentary, “ Becoming.”

But even with a stack of accolades, Washington doesn’t feel pressured to continue raising the bar.

“I don’t think of it as pressure,” he said. “I’ve always looked at it as opportunity.”

It’s a nonchalant attitude that might have come from the unexpected beginnings of his professional career.

“I’m already beyond what I was dreaming about at that point in my life,” he said. His philosophy is that music is “an expression of who you are,” rather than what a person hopes to become.

At least one thing remains unchanged from that young, 13-year-old Washington to the 42-year-old he is today: his saxophone. Washington has continued to play the same horn his father gave him even before he had settled on music as a lifelong endeavor. Many artists spend their entire careers searching for the perfect instrument or equipment — but for Washington, it was love at first sight.

“It is very, very, very rare. I play the same saxophone, same mouthpiece, even the same type of reeds,” he said. “I’m like the guy who married his high school sweetheart.”

Kamasi Washington will perform at the City Winery in Boston with vocalist Ami Taf Ra on May 9, 10 and 11.