Wynton Marsalis Quotes

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.

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.

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.

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.

The first time I ever played the trumpet in public, I played the Marine Hymn. I sounded terrible.

So when we spend all of our time trying to separate that which is already joined, it's a waste of time.

The heart of a music is its rhythm. The heart of rhythm section music is the rhythm.

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.

I believe in professionalism, but playing is not like a job. You have to be grateful to have the opportunity to play.

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.

The blues. It runs through all American music. Somebody bending the note. The other is the two-beat groove. It's in New Orleans music, it's in jazz, it's in country music, it's in gospel.

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.

The only justification for looking down on anyone is that you're going to stop and pick them up.

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.

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

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 musicians I respected were much older than me. I expected them to cut my head, and they did.

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.

I always like to play very contemporary concepts of swing right next to New Orleans music because it highlights continuum.

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.

I have friends who will critique me much harder than any review.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

In the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra we play such a diversity of music, with 10 arrangers in the band, we don't really worry about whether it's contemporary or not.

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.

Music is always for the listener, but the first listener is always the musician

I'm just lucky to have the type of friends and musicians and people dedicated to my music that I do.

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?

I didn't have a philosophical understanding of music until I came to New York. I didn't understand how it applied to my kind and my generation. I thought it was just old people talking.

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.

When did we begin to lose faith in our ability to effect change?

Jazz music creates so many phenomenal figures.

Ethics are more important than laws.

New Orleans - the real New Orleans - is the soul of the country.

I almost never watch TV, except for '60 Minutes' and pro football. I love Drew Brees, the Manning brothers and the Steelers' linebackers.

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

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

There's always the cliche of the choir shouting and clapping. OK, you have to do that, but there's also introspective parts, parts where you just follow someone that's preaching. There's lots of different emotions and moods that a service requires.

Jazz is democracy in music.

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.

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.

We no longer want to be a melting pot, because we don't understand what is already melted.

I had to figure out how to survive in New York, and most of my time was occupied in getting an apartment and getting money. A lot of older jazz guys looked out for me and found me gigs and places to stay.

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.

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.