Wynton Marsalis Quotes & Sayings

I play piano and drums very poorly and French horn and tuba all equally as bad. — Wynton Marsalis

When you create change with your point of view, you have to be ready for what comes with that. — 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

I grew up in the South, and our way of dealing with each other was teasing, ribbing, making fun and scrapping in the street. Criticism doesn't bother me so much. It actually made me, when I was younger, more aggressive. But you get into middle age, and you lose interest in that stuff. It's not serious. — Wynton Marsalis

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

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

Jazz music is the power of now. — 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

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

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

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

It was Dr. King's tireless activism that fostered our modern way of relating to one another. — Wynton Marsalis

New Orleans - the real New Orleans - is the soul of the country. — Wynton Marsalis

Let the critics criticize and let the doers do. — Wynton Marsalis

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. — Wynton Marsalis

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

If you are serious about American culture and you are serious about Afro-American culture, you are in a lot of pain. You are not - you are not smiling about it. — Wynton Marsalis

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. — Wynton Marsalis

We always hear about the rights of democracy, but the major responsibility of it is participation. — Wynton Marsalis

I became a man in New York. New York made me the musician that I am and the person that I am, so it's impossible for me to say I regret having lived there. — Wynton Marsalis

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

The bandstand is a sacred place. — Wynton Marsalis

I noticed that religion gave some people a way to escape dealing with the world: "Things will be better when you die," the people of my grandma's generation said as they worked themselves to death. "God wants you to forgive and love those who do you wrong," some people said to shake off the shame of being unable to respond to the abuse they endured. The holier-than-thou faction found comfort in believing, "The rest of y'all are lost because you don't have a personal relationship with God - our God."
But art engages you in the world, not just the world around you but the big world, and not just the big world of Tokyo and Sydney and Johannesburg, but the bigger world of ideas and concepts and feelings of history and humanity. — 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. — 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

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

I think that the blues is in everything, so it's not possible to neglect it. You hear somebody go 'Ooh ooh oooh,' and that's the blues. You hear a rock n' roll song. That's the blues. Somebody playing a guitar solo? They're playing the blues. — 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. — 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

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

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? — Wynton Marsalis

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

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. — Wynton Marsalis

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

One thing about excellence, it's an exclusive club. And it'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

As long as there is democracy, there will be people wanting to play jazz because nothing else will ever so perfectly capture the democratic process in sound. Jazz means working things out musically with other people. You have to listen to other musicians and play with them even if you don't agree with what they're playing. It teaches you the very opposite of racism and anti-Semitism. It teaches you that the world is big enough to accommodate us all. — Wynton Marsalis

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

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. — 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

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

This rebuilding of New Orleans gives us the perfect opportunity to see if we're ready to extend the legacy of Dr. King. — Wynton Marsalis

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

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

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. — Wynton Marsalis

As you get older - for example, in our band we have members of our orchestra, like Carlos Enriquez and Ali Jackson and Walter Blanning. I taught them when they were in high school, and now they teach me.I'll regularly call Ali and say, "Man, can you break this rhythm down for me?" Or Carlos was actually our music director in Cuba, and he's been instrumental in a lot of my education, and I started to develop a saying with them, because they tease me all the time - you get older, you have that familiar relationship - I say, "You have to follow your young leadership, too." — Wynton Marsalis

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

This music heals people because music is vibration, and the proper vibration heals. — Wynton Marsalis

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

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?' — Wynton Marsalis

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. — Wynton Marsalis

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

Duke Ellington always had a style: original, clean with interesting color combinations. He had an artist's eye. — 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

We looked up to our father. He still is much greater than us. — 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

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

I never minded giving my opinions. They are just opinions, and I had studied music and I had strong feelings. I was happy for my opinions to join all the other opinions. But you have to be prepared for what comes back, especially if you don't agree with the dominant mythology. — Wynton Marsalis

Love is the spiritual essence of what we do. Technique is the manifestation of the preparation and investment as a result of the love. — Wynton Marsalis

I love Gustavo Dudamel and I love what he does for classical music, and I love what he comes out of, El Sistema and the old man Abreu. When we were in Venezuela, I had the chance to go to his building. He had, like, five or six orchestras playing of kids from the hood playing, like, Mahler's third symphony and Shostakovich fifth and Beethoven. Man, it's unbelievable. I mean, they could play. — Wynton Marsalis

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

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

I wanted to make somebody feel like Coltrane made me feel, listening to it. — Wynton Marsalis

Humility is the doorway 2 truth & clarity of objectives ... it's the doorway 2 learning. — 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

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. — Wynton Marsalis

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

Many of our greatest musicians abandoned all of their aesthetic objectives to try to become pertinent. And, at the end of the day, they never became pop stars. I counter stated that very strongly, and I continue to do that. — Wynton Marsalis

I grew up in the South, in New Orleans, where guys torture you all the time. So I didn't really grow up on the self-esteem campaign. When you were lousy at something, they told you you were lousy, and they told you how to fix it. — Wynton Marsalis

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

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 — Wynton Marsalis

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

The best musicians know this music isn't about "schools" at all. Like my father says, "There's only one school, the school of 'Can you play? — 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

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

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

The majority of the high schools and the public schools in N.Y.C. don't even have band programs. Hip-hop in a lot of ways is an outgrowth of a lack of instruments and a desire to play music, so we can't really fault the kids for that. — Wynton Marsalis

The best way to be, is to do. — Wynton Marsalis

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. — 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

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. — 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

You need a team. You need people to push you. You need opponents. — 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

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

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. — Wynton Marsalis

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

My daddy thought - no, he expected - that my brothers and I and our generation would make the world a better place. He was correct in his belief because he had lived in an America of continual social progress, depression followed by prosperity, segregation by integration, and so on. — 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

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. — Wynton Marsalis

When you study our greatest artists, you will find that they give us a key to understand how to deal with each other, and that our bloodlines are intertwined. It's not hyphenated America. That there is an America, and it is expressed in those arts. It gives us a key to figure out how to negotiate with each other, and it tells us actually who we are. — Wynton Marsalis

There's so much spirit of integration and democracy in jazz. — Wynton Marsalis

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