Kamasi Washington plays his father’s saxophone. But the Grammy-nominated artist who rose to fame working with legends like Kendrick Lamar and Herbie Hancock didn’t start out on the horn. Nor did he or his musician father ever think he’d play sax at all, the instrument for which he’s now become famous. For at the beginning, young Washington imagined himself a drummer. Today, he remembers seeing pictures of himself playing drums as young as three years old. His father, Rickey Washington, was the sax player in the family. So, the younger Washington tried his hand at piano, then later clarinet. At this point, around the time he was 12 years old, his dad was a little fed up with his son’s musical wanderlust. He kept telling his son that the clarinet was (essentially) the same thing as sax. But that never felt true for the aspiring Washington. The day he picked up his father’s horn and played—that’s when
