KW: Now it gets real tricky [laughs]. In terms of my formative years, that tour with Snoop… So I would say Snoop’s music, his album that had the most impact on me was Doggy Style.

FB: How old were you when that came out?
KW: Well, Doggy Style came out in ’93 so I was twelve and in Junior High School. It was just one of those records that, like I said, a lot of those songs were samples and stuff like that, that was the song, that was the only version of it I knew, so when I went to go on tour with him, playing those songs was like playing a soundtrack to my early adolescence. It was totally surreal. I remember being backstage playing Madden with Snoop and I was just like, “I can’t believe this is happening right now.” You know what I’m sayin’?

FB: And how did that tour come together?
KW: Terrace Martin actually called me for it. He’d been working with Battlecat and this guy called Marvin Williams, and Snoop wanted to put together a live band with a horn section. So myself, Terrace and Ryan Porter, who plays trombone, were the horn section. It was very eye-opening for me because I grew up listening to hip-hop but never really played it. So I had this divide between the music that I listened to and the music that I played and then all of a sudden I had to play it and learn to understand it. It definitely opened my mind to how many different ways you can think about music.

FB: On a technical level?
KW: Yeah. So you listen to a lot of the music and it seems like it’s going to be kind of simple, but for them it’s all about the feel and how you play the music. That really helped me as a jazz musician because jazz is wide, you can kind of get away with playing cool stuff but not really considering how you’re playing it. But all of a sudden I’m playing with Snoop and it’s like, well there’s no opportunity to play any of that stuff, you got to play, bup bup-ba-da dee-dup, and it’s all about how you play that line not just playing the notes and keeping the rhythm. You got to make it feel good or what will happen is Soopafly would come up and just be like, “Na it’s cool, just lay off.” And if he tells you to lay off too much, that means you know you’re probably about to get fired because they’re not feeling what you’re playing [laughs]. So you have to learn how to place what you’re playing in the right space, the timing, the tone, everything, all the subtleties of music were pushed to the forefront and it was like, oh man, it made me hyper aware of them and then I took that awareness to jazz and all of a sudden I’m really thinking about how I’m playing stuff.

FB: And what’s Snoop’s musical interest like?
KW: Really wide actually, he’s one of those people that listens to a lot of records, he could probably teach a musicology class himself [laughs]. This was pre-iTunes so backstage you’re constantly hearing all these records that you never even heard, he was always playing music.

FB: Pre-Shazam as well.
KW: [Laughs] Na you didn’t know what you were hearing. One time we were at a show and he played this Rick James song and he was just looping it, which he didn’t normally do, he’d normally play different songs all the time, but we were all backstage just chilling and he was looping this song, it’s called Bustin Out, and no one said anything. So everybody’s just chillin’, smokin’ and drinkin’, playing video games like any other time but the song is just looping. It starts off with Rick James going, ‘Well alright you squares!’ and then this trombone part comes in. So we go on stage and we had a whole other intro, a whole other theme that we were going to do, and Snoop walks out in front of about 60,000 people, gets on the mic and goes, ‘Well alright you squares!’ [laughs] And it’s like straight over everybody’s head, nobody in the band knew what he was talking about, we’re ready to play our regular little intro and he turns around to look at the band, and goes, ‘Well alright you squares!’, and we’re like, ‘What is happening right now?’ Luckily we have this trombone player called Isaac Smith and Isaac got it, and he started playing the Rick James song. So you had the whole band, no-one had talked about the key, or what the bass line was and you had this line, da-da-da-dee da-da, and everyone had to just come in and it was an amazing experience but I was like, that could have gone so bad. Snoop was like that, he expected his band to be on some genius stuff. That was one of the most interesting moments, I was like ‘Wow man, we did it but how did he know we were going to be able to do that?’ When Isaac came in it was like the train’s moving now, it’s on the tracks and I hope this bass player knows the bass line [laughs].

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