110+ Wynton Marsalis Quotes On Education, Music And Blues

Wynton Marsalis is an American jazz trumpeter, composer, bandleader, and music educator. He is the managing and artistic director of Jazz at Lincoln Center in New York City and is a nine-time Grammy Award winner. He is also the first jazz artist to win the Pulitzer Prize for Music for his oratorio Blood on the Fields. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Wynton Marsalis on education, music, love.

Top 10 Wynton Marsalis Quotes

1. I always like to play very contemporary concepts of swing right next to New Orleans music because it highlights continuum.
2. 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?'
3. And that's the soulful thing about playing: you offer something to somebody. You don't know if they'll like it, but you offer it.
4. The real power of Jazz is that a group of people can come together and create improvised art and negotiate their agendas... and that negotiation is the art
5. Love is the spiritual essence of what we do. Technique is the manifestation of the preparation and investment as a result of the love.
6. Everything comes out in blues music: joy , pain , struggle . Blues is affirmation with absolute elegance.
7. Louis Armstrong is jazz. He represents what the music is all about.
8. Jazz music is the power of now. There is no script. It's conversation. The emotion is given to you by musicians as they make split-second decisions to fulfill what they feel the moment requires.
9. What is deeper than respect and love? That’s what we felt: veneration.
10. Whenever you face a man who's playing your instrument, there's a competition.

Wynton Marsalis Short Quotes

• Let the critics criticize and let the doers do.
• I try to put a lot of our music in my music - by that I mean of American music.
• We no longer want to be a melting pot, because we don't understand what is already melted.
• Humility is the doorway 2 truth & clarity of objectives... it's the doorway 2 learning.
• Thank the good Lord for a job.
• New Orleans - the real New Orleans - is the soul of the country.
• Jazz is democracy in music.
• The Duke and Swing represent affirmation in the face of adversity.
• The only justification for looking down on anyone is that you're going to stop and pick them up.
• Music is always for the listener, but the first listener is always the musician

Wynton Marsalis Quotes About Education

Through first-class education, a generation marches down the long uncertain road of the future with confidence. — Wynton Marsalis

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. — Wynton Marsalis

I think that when the education system started to be dismantled during the first Great Depression in the 1930s, we didn't recover from that. — Wynton Marsalis

The people are not coming because of me. They didn't come before me. It's because of a lack of education and understanding, so it makes me more motivated. It's like my mother said about having an artistic child - she learned more from him and he gets more attention and more of the love, not less. — Wynton Marsalis

Wynton Marsalis Quotes About Music

How great musicians demonstrate a mutual respect and trust on the bandstand can alter your outlook on the world and enrich every aspect of your life, understanding what it means to be a global citizen in the most modern sense. — Wynton Marsalis

In Jazz, improvisation isn't a matter of just making any ol' thing up. Jazz, like any language, has its own grammer and vocabulary. There's no right or wrong, just some choices that are better than others. — Wynton Marsalis

Music is the art of all the invisible things that are real. Art, emotion, spiritual essence, consciousness - these things are hard to prove. Music helps you to focus on your sound. We understand that for very young kids. — Wynton Marsalis

If you're not making mistakes, you're not trying. — Wynton Marsalis

Benny Goodman's band was integrated before baseball. Even before it was physically integrated, music was integrated. Everyone listened to Armstrong and Ellington. The 20s was called the Jazz Age. It's part of being American. — Wynton Marsalis

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. — Wynton Marsalis

Because the blues is the basis of most American music in the 20th century. It's a 12-bar form that's played by jazz, bluegrass and country musicians. It has a rhythmic vocabulary that's been used by rock n' roll. It's related to spirituals, and even the American fiddle tradition. — Wynton Marsalis

I dress up a certain way because I respect the music. — Wynton Marsalis

The reason why the music [jazz] is important is because it's an art form-an ancient art form-that takes in the mythology of our people. — Wynton Marsalis

Jazz music is the power of now. — Wynton Marsalis

Wynton Marsalis Quotes About Love

For Black people, we're one of the only groups of people that for some reason to express love of yourself, in some ways, is misconstrued as a dislike for someone else. — Wynton Marsalis

We all teach from that same frame of reference. We're like neighborhood - the people who have had the opportunity through this music to gain a platform and spread the message of this music, which is basically love in a form of communication that's honest and truthful. — Wynton Marsalis

When I was 12, I began listening to John Coltrane and I developed a love for jazz, which I still have more and more each year. — Wynton Marsalis

When it comes to songs and music, yeah, people love to sing and dance and play music and tunes, and that stream of consciousness that exists in music, nobody knows where that comes from. — Wynton Marsalis

We learn a language through its song, and even if you don't have music you have the song of people you love's voice, and you'll notice that song in their voice. — Wynton Marsalis

Wynton Marsalis Quotes About Blues

The blues is always there. It's going to be hard out here, but it's all right. It's all right, and that's what the blues teaches you. You got to roll with the punches and find your equilibrium. — Wynton Marsalis

Blues is like the roux in a gumbo. People ask me if jazz always has the blues in it. I say, if it sounds good it does. — Wynton Marsalis

We're blues people. And blues never lets tragedy have the last word. — Wynton Marsalis

Wynton Marsalis Quotes About Jazz

A beat is a moment in the life a groove. — Wynton Marsalis

The bandstand is a sacred place. — Wynton Marsalis

Sustained intensity equals ecstacy. — Wynton Marsalis

Don't bullshit' just play. — Wynton Marsalis

Certain music, jazz in particular, has the ability to make you a better citizen of the world. It helps you expand your world view and gives you more confidence in your cultural achievements. Improvisational jazz teaches you about yourself while the swing in jazz teaches you how to work with others — Wynton Marsalis

It's really not a stretch. The checks and balances are the same. The drums are the executive branch. The jazz orchestra is the legislative branch. Logic and reason are like jazz solos. The bass player is the judicial branch. One our greatest ever is Milt Hinton, and his nickname is "The Judge." — Wynton Marsalis

Nothing else will ever capture the democratic process in sound as perfectly as Jazz. — Wynton Marsalis

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. — Wynton Marsalis

Grace Kelly plays with intelligence, wit and feeling. She has a great amount of natural ability and the ability to adapt. That is the hallmark of a first-class jazz musician. — Wynton Marsalis

If you didn't have the amalgam of Blacks and African-type sensibility and European sensibility, you wouldn't have jazz. Even in the negative and in the positive ways - if there was no slavery and the abolition of slavery, there would be no jazz. — Wynton Marsalis

Wynton Marsalis Quotes About Trumpet

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. — Wynton Marsalis

Having heard Clifford Brown play all those fast runs, I used to really practice Clarke trumpet exercises all day long so that I could play fast. That's all I wanted to do. I was like a child with a toy. — Wynton Marsalis

Milk in a mother's breast-that's cool. Milk in a mouth-that's cool too. But milk in my trumpet? Not so cool. I have to play that thing. — Wynton Marsalis

Trumpet players are just belligerant, and cocky, and you know, just hard-headed. — Wynton Marsalis

The first jazz musician was a trumpeter, Buddy Bolden, and the last will be a trumpeter, the archangel Gabriel. — Wynton Marsalis

Wynton Marsalis Famous Quotes And Sayings

We need more math classes, we need more science. It's the art of math and the art of science that creates all the innovation, and we have a tradition of great arts, great music. — Wynton Marsalis

Young kids are always singing and painting. When you get to that second and third grade level, you're supposed to put all that aside. — Wynton Marsalis

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. — Wynton Marsalis

My older brother and myself always played together in bands, but we never knew we would be professional musicians. — Wynton Marsalis

Walt Whitman's "Leaves of Grass" is still in print. They're debating right now over Mark Twain. He's still available. Winslow Homer can still be seen. Our arts are - they're there. We got to go get them and understand that this is an important legacy for our country. — Wynton Marsalis

But you listen to Coltrane and that's something human, something that's about elevation. It's like making love to a woman. It's about something of value, it's not just loud. It doesn't have that violent connotation to it. I wanted to be a jazz musician so bad, but I really couldn't. There was no way I could figure out to learn how to play. — Wynton Marsalis

You don't try to duplicate certain things that other cats do, because you could never do it as well as they do. Nobody can get on that tenor saxophone and play like Trane, because he's the only one who can spell out chords and sound good when he does it. — Wynton Marsalis

Art is a luxury. It's not necessary for you to - you can work your job and you can make some money and never know who Walt Whitman was, and never read a poem. — Wynton Marsalis

The musicians, Duke Ellington, his thing was not about separating himself from the rest of America. Louis Armstrong - go to the forefathers of our music - Jelly Roll Morton - they're not preaching a separatist agenda. They're not taking their music and saying, "This is for me." — Wynton Marsalis

The soul gives us resilience - an essential quality since we constantly have to rebound from hardship. — Wynton Marsalis

I get so much from having the opportunity to interface with the younger people and to bring information to them and to represent our culture and our way of life. The feeling and the warmth and the love, it's unbelievable. The type of exchange that goes on between students and teachers or visiting people who are doing master classes, and not just when they're musicians. Even general classes, when the students are not necessarily musicians. — Wynton Marsalis

The fact that we are culturally ignorant and we don't know what our heritage is, the price that we pay is that we act outside of ourselves almost all the time. We make very bad decisions how we deal with other people and their culture. — Wynton Marsalis

Commercialism that has absolutely no relationship to quality whatsoever, only quantitative assessment of a thing. — Wynton Marsalis

I'll write down and catalogue all the different devices that are Americana to me, and I try to have a historic depth and breadth and also the things that we do in our time, the type of vamps and chants, things that are available to us. — Wynton Marsalis

When those who are educated using their education to exploit those who aren't. That's what the sub-prime scandal represents - people of education using it at the expense of others. At Jazz at Lincoln Center, we have 22 educational programs. Not just the word but the substance of education is guided by the arts. — Wynton Marsalis

Some stances are just conducive to swinging. If I stand up straight for too long it's harder to swing. Plus my feet hurt. — Wynton Marsalis

When I came to New York, to Brooklyn, I met Alvin Ailey and Stanley Crouch and August Wilson. They were always putting things in a philosophical context. All the great jazz musicians did, too. There was always a sub-context to what they were saying about music even though they would be very down home and earthy. So I started to develop, in addition to my power and ability to simply hear, a way to place myself in a time. — Wynton Marsalis

We created the spirituals. We created so much great music, jazz chief amongst our innovations, teaching us how to prize ourselves and how to speak to one another, that our kids don't know that achievement, there's no way in the world that could be good for us. — Wynton Marsalis

We started to confuse entertainment with art, because art has a component of entertainment. It has to have that or it becomes too boring. It becomes too lost in its own devices. But I just think that we started to lose, and even before that, it's not necessary. — Wynton Marsalis

The arts shows that you're civilized, and it makes life sweet. So you can exist and you can buy more things and you can be more - we're dealing with a form of commercialism that obscures a prior relationship to quality, and it's a national problem. — Wynton Marsalis

Many heroic things happened during slavery. And remember that there was a national movement away from it even at the time. The era of Reconstruction and then the subsequent dismantling of Reconstruction sent us in a tailspin. Then we had the Civil Rights movement. Now we have our first non-white president. We have a pattern of moving apart and then coming back together throughout the history of this country. Each time, we come closer. — Wynton Marsalis

If you looked around, you'd be glad you couldn't see. — Wynton Marsalis

When I first came to New York everybody on the scene would treat me like I could play but I couldn't. — Wynton Marsalis

No particular music makes me feel nostalgic. If it's great, it just keeps me in the present moment. That level of music is like a classic story, like the Iliad-something so perfect it can never be old. — Wynton Marsalis

Our culture is what we did together. What did Walt Whitman represent for all of us? What was his message to us? That is an inheritance, and when we squander that inheritance we act outside. We don't know who we are; we don't know where we are. — Wynton Marsalis

We fight for territory. We see it in our Congress, we see it in our political systems, we see it in our ways of life, how separated we are. When we moved out of the cities and we lost all of the memory that was in cities, and we - one of the highest achievements in our culture is to be able to segregate yourself from everyone else, and the deep thing is the deepest punishment is solitary confinement. — Wynton Marsalis

Those who play for applause....Tha t’s all they get. — Wynton Marsalis

The arts speak across epochs. If you think that people started to build a cathedral in 1315 and the people worked on that cathedral, it wasn't going to be finished until 1585. So they were thinking 200 years from now. Maybe by the time I die, this wall might be put up. — Wynton Marsalis

I remember when I wrote a piece, "Blood on the Fields," it was a while ago, it was about slavery and about two characters, and I studied so much of music, I would always go back to the original documents, and as much as I can get original chants and slave chants and different type of beats and rhythms and ring shout. — Wynton Marsalis

This is our bandstand. If you don't want to play, get up off the instrument and leave. — Wynton Marsalis

New Orleans had a great tradition of celebration. Opera, military marching bands, folk music, the blues, different types of church music, ragtime, echoes of traditional African drumming, and all of the dance styles that went with this music could be heard and seen throughout the city. When all of these kinds of music blended into one, jazz was born. — Wynton Marsalis

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. — Wynton Marsalis

Jazz is not just 'Well, man, this is what I feel like playing.' It's a very structured thing that comes down from a tradition and requires a lot of thought and study. — Wynton Marsalis

It's our job to just do as much as we can to enlighten the people about it and to represent it by playing it with some integrity. That's what I try to do. — Wynton Marsalis

I travel up and down the country and I've been all around the middle of America for many years. Middle America is not one big mass of people with a proverbial beer in its hand, keeping the country down. That is not my experience of it and I don't labor under that misconception. And we have a long tradition of coming together through music in our country. — Wynton Marsalis

My father was a teacher, my mama was a community worker, I taught in so many schools. So when you get that experience of how to communicate with younger people, put that hand on them and give them that old-school feeling, the maturity and adult, a lot of our kids just need the feeling of that love, and that's the frame of reference that I teach from and that's the frame of reference that all of our musicians in the Jazz at Lincoln Center. — Wynton Marsalis

I hope it might help players have confidence in our own ways, and not to be afraid of them, as Bernstein showed - things like hoe-downs, fiddle songs, and the art of improvisation, and the New Orleans funeral tradition, and call-and-response church singing, and the fact that the blues run through everything. And in our relationship to European music, in that we don't have to imitate it, it's a part of us, inseparable. — Wynton Marsalis

It's harder to build than destroy. To build is to engage and change. In jazz, we call progressing harmonies changes. Changes are like obstacles on a speed course. They demand your attention and require you to be present. They are coming...they are here..... and then they are gone. It's how life comes. Each moment is a procession from the future into the past and the sweet spot is always the present. Live in that sweet spot. Be present. — Wynton Marsalis

If you want to be different, do something different. — Wynton Marsalis

Flexibility is an essential part of Jazz. It's what gives Jazz music the ability to combine with all other types of music and not lose its identity. — Wynton Marsalis

Everything about the swing is about some guideline and some grid and the elegant way that you negotiate your way through that grid. — Wynton Marsalis

It's like we're suffering from an identity crisis, and that identity is in our arts and the fact that we don't find it chief amongst our agendas to teach our kids who we are as a nation and the battles we've had on this ground and how they've been successfully resolved. We can't enjoy the fruits of the labor of our ancestors. — Wynton Marsalis

I think that virtuosity is the first sign of morality in a musician. It means you're serious enough to practice. — Wynton Marsalis

Instead of imposing your will on every situation...focus on including everyone else, and just that little adjustment of attitude gives you the space to understand where and who you are. — Wynton Marsalis

Even if nobody's singing, just when you talk, you're singing. I'll meet somebody and say, "Oh, I'm tone-deaf." I say, "You're not tone-deaf, because if you were tone-deaf you would speak like that. But you're 'Oh, I'm tone-deaf.' You already sang a song to me." — Wynton Marsalis

Ethics are more important than laws. Which means that the exact note is less important than the feeling of the note. — Wynton Marsalis

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. — Wynton Marsalis

What I really have in my head, my imagination, my understanding of music, I never really get that out. — Wynton Marsalis

To say that the Afro American created jazz doesn't mean anything bad about Anglo Americans, and I always teach my younger jazz musicians that at this point the entirety of the American tradition is your heritage, and you need to know it. — Wynton Marsalis

One thing about excellence, it&Mac226;s an exclusive club. And it&Mac226;s only for those who really want to pay dues to the s--. My daddy told me when I was a boy: The only way you can be different from other people is to do some s-- they don't want to do. — Wynton Marsalis

When I did the Abyssinian mass, I went through the whole history of the church music and the gospel music, even with the Anglo American hymns, the Afro American hymns, the spirituals and how it developed, up to Thomas Dorsey and the Dixie Hummingbirds, going through the history of the music, jazz musicians. — Wynton Marsalis

The black hole in democracy is integrity. The great unspoken is integrity. When integrity is not first and foremost, it's quite palpable but not visible. It's always there. Jazz highlights it because musicians and jazz always represented a high level of integrity. — Wynton Marsalis

Who creates a thing is not as important as what the thing is. Who created baseball? Who created basketball? Who created the space program? Who created - we could go on and on. We could argue about who created something. We all are participants in it. — Wynton Marsalis

What takes its place is very dry education. And the tools that actually can teach you - singing and playing, learning how to participate with other people, spiritual richness - are replaced with a big emphasis on how to memorize things. That's such an incomplete education. Survival of the fittest used to mean being bigger and stronger. — Wynton Marsalis

We don't have the leadership or the understanding of the value of this, and when your political systems and your economic systems start to fail, it's only a cultural understanding that allows you to reconstruct them and to get back to who you are. For some reason, it hasn't dawned on us yet. — Wynton Marsalis

You can reach a situation where things of intelligence and refinement and culture can be considered elite, and things that are crass and ignorant can be considered to be real and of the people. And when you begin to have the mass of populus striving for something that's not worth striving for, then tremendous amounts of energy go into...the maintenance of that which is worthless. — Wynton Marsalis

Jazz celebrates older generations and not just the youth movement. When you "sell" only to people of a certain age, you get cut off from the main body of experience. The power of couple dancing and courtship, it's elegant, and you wouldn't realize America was once a nation of dancers and singers today. People of all races could dance and sing. — Wynton Marsalis

I worry more about the marketing that's taken hold since the 70s. The Jazz era, the Swing era, those were huge. Entire decades were named for music. In the 1940s - after World War II - changes in taxation, ballrooms closing, people moving to the suburbs, and the onset of target marketing and the confusion of commerce with art caused some things to happen as a result that have taken us away from jazz and what jazz offers us. — Wynton Marsalis

When I say "our," I definitely mean all of America. It's not less pertinent for you because it comes from a Black person, just like a great achievement by an Anglo American is less important. — Wynton Marsalis

Life Lessons by Wynton Marsalis

1. Wynton Marsalis is an example of how dedication and hard work can help you achieve your goals. He has worked tirelessly to hone his craft and become one of the most influential jazz musicians of all time.
2. His commitment to music education and the importance of teaching music to the next generation is an inspiring example of how to use your platform to make a difference.
3. Wynton Marsalis is a reminder that passion and dedication can help you reach the highest levels of success, and that it is possible to make a positive impact in the world through your art.