Wynton Marsalis Quotes

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?'

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.

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

Love is the spiritual essence of what we do.

Technique is the manifestation of the preparation and investment as a result of the love.

Everything comes out in blues music: joy , pain , struggle .

Blues is affirmation with absolute elegance.

Louis Armstrong is jazz. He represents what the music is all about.

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.

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.

What is deeper than respect and love? That’s what we felt: veneration.

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.

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.

Whenever you face a man who's playing your instrument, there's a competition.

If you're not making mistakes, you're not trying.

Let the critics criticize and let the doers do.

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.

I dress up a certain way because I respect the music.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Jazz music is the power of now.

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.

The bandstand is a sacred place.

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.

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.

A beat is a moment in the life a groove.

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.

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.

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

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.

Don't bullshit' just play.

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.

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.

Sustained intensity equals ecstacy.

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.

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

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.

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.

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."

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

I try to put a lot of our music in my music - by that I mean of American music.

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."

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

I think that virtuosity is the first sign of morality in a musician.

It means you're serious enough to practice.