A Quote by Wynton Marsalis

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.
I want to expand jazz; I don't want to keep the audience limited. I want to reach people who have never come to a jazz concert before. One way to do that is by making records that have a lot of different kinds of music on them.
I don't know why people call me a jazz singer, though I guess people associate me with jazz because I was raised in it, from way back. I'm not putting jazz down, but I'm not a jazz singer...I've recorded all kinds of music, but (to them) I'm either a jazz singer or a blues singer. I can't sing a blues โ€“ just a right-out blues โ€“ but I can put the blues in whatever I sing. I might sing 'Send In the Clowns' and I might stick a little bluesy part in it, or any song. What I want to do, music-wise, is all kinds of music that I like, and I like all kinds of music.
It's dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you're feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them. So throw away your baggage and go forward. There are quicksands all about you, sucking at your feet, trying to suck you down into fear and self-pity and despair. That's why you must walk so lightly. Lightly my darling.
I feel really connected to these young ladies I get to work with; I'm dancing around with them and playing music for them. We sit down and get to know each other so we have a shorthand.
That's what I've always loved about music, that I could go be another guy for two hours. But ultimately it all comes back to: do you have the songs, can you sing them, do you have a great band that can play them with you? You're charging money to have people come watch you play; I want them to feel taken someplace good or provoked into thinking my way for an hour and a half or two hours. I have been a provoker and I'll probably always be one in the public arena for the rest of my life.
I feel like there's not this black-and-white division between concert hall music and music that bands play in a bar. I don't know if this was ever truly the case, but I don't feel that I need to decide between playing for a sit-down, totally silent audience and playing for a bunch of noisy, drunk people in a bar. What I do with the group is somewhere in between.
People get caught up in making music with a trend. You're time stamping your music and I'm guilty of it to. But, I want to make music where five, ten years from now it brought back a memory or brought an emotion out of them they want to feel.
Would I feel comfortable with Hillary Clinton taking care of my money down there? That I pay the taxes, corporate taxes down there? I wouldn't feel comfortable at all. They've just continuously spent money and people are up to here with it.
Pittsburgh isn't fancy, but it is real. It's a working town and money doesn't come easy. I feel as much a part of this city as the cobblestone streets and the steel mills, people in this town expect an honest day's work, and I've it to them for a long, long time.
I think women sometimes stop flirting with their husbands, and you can't. Men want to want feel good - they want to feel like their women love them. When they come home from work, don't start nagging them with questions. Go up to them and give them a big kiss and ask them how their day was.
You're charging money to have people come watch you play; I want them to feel taken someplace good or provoked into thinking my way for an hour and a half or two hours.
When I have an exhibition, I usually arrange it so that if people want to, they can spend two hours there. That way, people who like it don't feel cheated when they go. I want them to walk into the exhibition space and look low and at other levels and angles. The same with emotions. I want them to be emotionally manipulated, to come out feeling something. I want them to laugh, smile, feel sad. Even if they feel angry, that's okay.
Jazz spent a chunk of the day fantasizing about ways to kill his grandmother, plotting them and planning them in the most excruciating, gruesome detail his imagination would allow. It turned out his imagination allowed quite a bit. He spent the rest of the day convincing himself--over and over--not to do it.
I'm so blessed to be able to work with some of the best writers out there, and it's kind of like college with me sitting in a room with some of the best of the best and really taking it in and learning from them, but then also taking time to sit and tell them my stories - it's one of the biggest blessings that could have ever happened.
You couldn't be performing if it weren't for the audience. I appreciate them being there. So why not applaud them? They took time out of their schedule to show up and sit in the concert hall and be part of the experience.
If you come from a working-class background, you can't afford to write full time, because you're just not being paid. Basically, all my arguments come down to Marxist doctrine: The world is shaped by money, so the only voices you'll hear are the ones with money behind them. But thankfully, culture and cool are some things that circumvent money, because if you're cool, people will want to give you money - suddenly you shape the market and people start coming to you. Which is why culture has always been a traditional way out for working-class people.
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