Top 208 Quotes & Sayings by Wynton Marsalis
Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American musician Wynton Marsalis.
Last updated on September 17, 2024.
The rebuilding of New Orleans is an important point in the history of the United States.
As a jazz musician, you have individual power to create the sound. You also have a responsibility to function in the context of other people who have that power also.
When you create change with your point of view, you have to be ready for what comes with that.
I wanted to make somebody feel like Coltrane made me feel, listening to it.
The heart of a music is its rhythm. The heart of rhythm section music is the rhythm.
I believe in professionalism, but playing is not like a job. You have to be grateful to have the opportunity to play.
My daddy expected that my brothers and I and our generation would make the world a better place. He had lived in an America of continual social progress.
Many a revolution started with the actions of a few. Only 56 men signed the Declaration of Independence. A few hanging together can lead a nation to change.
I always read all these books about the slaves. My mother is very educated. My father would talk to us like we were grown men. We never knew what he was talking about half the time.
We looked up to our father. He still is much greater than us.
The bandstand is a sacred place.
When people dress well, they play well.
You need a team. You need people to push you. You need opponents.
Whenever you face a man who's playing your instrument, there's a competition.
I believed in studying just because I knew education was a privilege. It was the discipline of study, to get into the habit of doing something that you don't want to do.
The best way to be, is to do.
I feel like a lot of the fundamental material, I've assimilated. So now the question is: Am I going to really get into my spiritual inheritance of music and really develop my abilities?
My older brother and myself always played together in bands, but we never knew we would be professional musicians.
Even in these times, there are still neighbors that will turn their backs on neighbors.
When did we begin to lose faith in our ability to effect change?
There really have only ever been a few people in each generation who step out, are willing to put themselves on the line, and risk everything for their beliefs.
My mother always took my brothers and me to music lessons. There were six children. Our parents attended our concerts and encouraged us to study and enjoy many different types of music.
We always hear about the rights of democracy, but the major responsibility of it is participation.
Through improvisation, jazz teaches you about yourself. And through swing, it teaches you that other people are individuals too. It teaches you how to coordinate with them.
There is an idea that a mind is wasted on the arts unless it makes you good in math or science. There is some evidence that the arts might help you in math and science.
Ethics are more important than laws.
What, other than injustice, could be the reason that the displaced citizens of New Orleans cannot be accommodated by the richest nation in the world?
My thing is, once you start to put a backbeat on your music or something that has a machine in it, you have popularity, but you lose the flexibility. And you lose a richness.
Jazz is not the kind of music you are going to learn to play in three or four years or that you can just get because you have some talent for music.
I dress up a certain way because I respect the music.
Swing is extreme coordination. It's a maintaining balance, equilibrium. It's about executing very difficult rhythms with a panache and a feeling in the context of very strict time. So, everything about the swing is about some guideline and some grid and the elegant way that you negotiate your way through that grid.
Only a few act - the rest of us reap the benefits of their risk.
I got my first trumpet when I was six years old, from Al Hirt. My father was playing in Al Hirt's band at that time.
Don't worry about what others say about your music. Pursue whatever you are hearing... but if everybody really hates your music maybe you could try some different approaches.
There was one thing Beethoven didn't do. When one of his string quartets was played, you can believe the second violin wasn't improvising.
When I first came to New York everybody on the scene would treat me like I could play, but I couldn't.
Thank the good Lord for a job.
The musicians I respected were much older than me. I expected them to cut my head, and they did.
This rebuilding of New Orleans gives us the perfect opportunity to see if we're ready to extend the legacy of Dr. King.
I sounded like myself. People be saying I sound like Miles or Clifford Brown.
There's the tradition in jazz of having the Battle of the Bands, and you do not want to get your head cut when you're playing.
I play piano and drums very poorly and French horn and tuba all equally as bad.
People have taken time out of their day and spent their money to come sit down at a concert. And it's jazz music-it's not easy for them to get to it. I don't want them ever to feel that I'm taking their presence lightly.
Don't settle for style. Succeed in substance.
Jazz music is America's past and its potential, summed up and sanctified and accessible to anybody who learns to listen to, feel, and understand it. The music can connect us to our earlier selves and to our better selves-to-come. It can remind us of where we fit on the time line of human achievement, an ultimate value of art.
I have absolutely no idea what my generation did to enrich our democracy. We dropped the ball. We entered a period of complacency and closed our eyes to the public corruption of our democracy.
When I auditioned for my high school band the band director was excited because my father was known to be a great musician. When he heard me, he said 'Are you sure you're Ellis's son?'
I didn't want to get that ring around my lips from practicing the trumpet, because I thought the girls wouldn't like me. So I never practiced.
It's important to address young people in the reopening of New Orleans. In rebuilding, let's revisit the potential of American democracy and American glory.
The first time I ever played the trumpet in public, I played the Marine Hymn. I sounded terrible.
The young very seldom lead anything in our country today. It's been quite some time since a younger generation pushed an older one to a higher standard.
What I really have in my head, my imagination, my understanding of music, I never really get that out.
Through first-class education, a generation marches down the long uncertain road of the future with confidence.
The nerves are a problem on trumpet, because when you mess up everyone can hear it. Just remember most people are too polite to say anything about it. That should calm your nerves.
Don't wish for someone else to do later what you can do now.
Everything comes out in blues music: joy, pain, struggle. Blues is affirmation with absolute elegance. It's about a man and a woman. So the pain and the struggle in the blues is that universal pain that comes from having your heart broken. Most blues songs are not about social statements.
Maybe the preoccupation with technological progress has overshadowed our concern with human progress.
Trumpet players see each other, and it's like we're getting ready to square off or get into a fight or something.
There are forces all around you who wish to exploit division, rob you of your freedom, and tell you what to think. But young folks can rekindle the weary spirit of a slumbering nation.
It was Dr. King's tireless activism that fostered our modern way of relating to one another.
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