Marsalis Quotes & Sayings

The heart of a music is its rhythm. The heart of rhythm section music is the rhythm. — Wynton Marsalis

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

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

I've never heard anything Wynton [Marsalis] played sound like it meant anything at all. Wynton has no voice and no presence. His music sounds like a talented high-school trumpet player to me ... he's jazzy the same way someone who drives a BMW is sporty. — Keith Jarrett

The piano is the X factor. People have a tough time following the structures when there's no piano there, spelling it out. It makes it more easily understood, particularly to people who don't know as much about music. — Branford Marsalis

Louis Armstrong was the primary contributor to jazz music in the 20th century. His improvisational skills served as the principal model for all who came after him, regardless of one's chosen instrument. — Ellis Marsalis Jr.

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

There is not a sentence in the world that could respectfully do justice to the life and music of Jerry Garcia. — Branford 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

My father is a jazz musician, so I grew up hearing jazz. My parents loved it, but I didn't like it. It went on for too long. Yes, I had certain teachers that really inspired me, like Danny Barker, and John Longo. And I had no idea that I would have any impact on jazz. — 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

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

Coltrane came to New Orleans one day and he was talking about the jazz scene. And Coltrane mentions that the problem with jazz was that there were too few groups. — Branford Marsalis

Jazz fans love Miles and I love him for a myriad of reasons, but the overviews are always too simplistic. — Branford Marsalis

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

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

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

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

Jazz music celebrates life! Human life; the range of it, the absurdity of it, the ignorance of it, the greatness of it, the intelligence of it, the sexuality of it, the profundity of it. And it deals with it. In all of its ... It deals with it! — 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

One of the things that I loved about listening to Miles Davis is that Miles always had an instinct for which musicians were great for what situations. He could always pick a band, and that was the thing that separated him from everybody else. — Branford 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

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

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

I wouldn't argue that anyone living can play the trumpet better than Wynton Marsalis. — Christian Scott

The biggest problem with American music right now, is that kids don't listen. They come by it honestly, Americans don't listen anyway. When people go to concerts, they say I'm going to see ... not, I'm going to hear. — Branford Marsalis

I think that one of the problems that jazz has is that it's so incestuous that it's starting to kill itself. — Branford Marsalis

it ain't as hard as picking cotton — Wynton Marsalis

The lion's share of what I hear right now are people who, intentional or accidental, have avoided all jazz prior to 1960. And all the musicians who were successful in the '60s spent their entire lives, prior to 1960, listening to all the musicians these people avoid. — Branford Marsalis

A lot of musicians have a tough time hearing what we're doing in a trio format. — Branford 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 don't care who likes it or buys it. Because if you use that criterion, Mozart would have never written Don Giovanni, Charlie Parker never would have played anything but swing music. There comes a point at which you have to stand up and say, this is what I have to do. — Branford Marsalis

He [Benny Carter] is all that every jazz musician the world over wants to be. He's performed 20,000 nights. How many shoes have been shined? How much mascara put on? Rouge? How many of those impossible bowties have been tied? How many love songs have been sung? How many dances have been danced? How many have passed to the sound of his music? It's been said that a man should not be forced to live up to his art. Benny Carter is one of the rare instances when we wonder whether the great art that a man has created can live up to him. — Wynton Marsalis

It has been difficult to hold onto many paintings but I have retained a few. Possibly the current favorite is titled 'Big Band' completed in 2005. It measures 13 feet x 9 feet. It has 18 nearly life size recognizable portraits of the biggest jazz stars that I knew and saw perform in the 1950s, '60s, '70s, '80s and includes Wynton Marsalis. — LeRoy Neiman

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

Don't wish for someone else to do later what you can do now. — Wynton Marsalis

The Duke and Swing represent affirmation in the face of adversity. — Wynton Marsalis

The whole point is, give me a break with the standards. You go to the average jazz label and suggest a record and they want to know which standards you're going to play. I'm saying let's break the formula. — Branford 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

A musician's whole life is to listen. — 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

To date, [Wynton] Marsalis has received a total of nine Grammy Awards; a Pulitzer Prize (the first ever awarded to a jazz musician) ... and twenty-nine honorary degrees, including Columbia, Brown, Princeton and Yale; the National Medal of Arts; and numerous awards from other countries. — Randy Sandke

Only a few act - the rest of us reap the benefits of their risk. — Wynton Marsalis

Through improvisation, jazz teaches you about yourself. And through swing, it teaches you that other people are individuals too. It teaches you how to coordinate with them. — 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

Generally, when I wake up in the morning I set out a series of problems for myself and I write them down, and when I'm sleeping, my mind solves the problems. When I wake up in the morning, I have more clarity on the issue. — 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

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

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

Humans are imperfect. That's one of the reasons that classical and jazz are in trouble. We're on the quest for the perfect performance and every note has to be right. Man, every note is not right in life. — Branford Marsalis

Jazz comes from our way of life, and because it's our national art form, it helps us to understand who we are. — 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

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 way to learn the language is to rip off other players. As Benny Golson told me, "We all start off sounding like other cats. And gradually, a lick here or there,we start to sound like ourselves. But it takes a long time to do so ... " That'swhat he told me, and it worked for me. — Branford 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

So much of Jazz doesn't have an audience other than music students or musicians. — Branford Marsalis

My thing is, once you start to put a backbeat on your music or something that has a machine in it, you have popularity, but you lose the flexibility. And you lose a richness. — Wynton Marsalis

You know, being America, being the land of "number ones", everyone wants to be a leader before they follow. — Branford Marsalis

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

You don't know what you like, you like what you know. In order to know what you like, you have to know everything. — Branford 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 did we begin to lose faith in our ability to effect change? — 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

My daddy expected that my brothers and I and our generation would make the world a better place. He had lived in an America of continual social progress. — 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

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

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

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

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

I suspect that we might actually start selling some records with these artists in about 10 years. Some the people who invested, they're a little tight-because it's a lot of money to start up a company. — Branford Marsalis

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

Wynton Marsalis' skills have grown as fast as his ambition, and he is the most ambitious younger composer in Jazz. — Jon Pareles

I think that if you keep banging at the door all you need is a little foothold, a little tiny foothold, and then the rest will take care of itself. — Branford 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

We have something that is unique. We have our craft. We have our art. We have our desire. — Branford Marsalis

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

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

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. — Wynton Marsalis

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. — Wynton Marsalis

I'm not a person who writes really abstract things with oblique references. I look at abstraction like I look at condiments. Give me some Tabasco sauce, some ketchup, some mayonnaise. I love all of that. Put it on a trumpet. I've just got to have the ketchup and Tabasco sauce. That's my attitude about musical philosophy. — 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

Today you go into make a modern recording with all this technology. The bass plays first, then the drums come in later, then they track the trumpet and the singer comes in and they ship the tape somewhere. Well, none of the musicians have played together. You can't play jazz music that way. In order for you to play jazz, you've got to listen to them. The music forces you at all times to address what other people are thinking and for you to interact with them with empathy and to deal with the process of working things out. And that's how our music really could teach what the meaning of American democracy is. — 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

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

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

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

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

It's hard to get into Newsweek because, as more of our former intellectual magazines take on a pop focus, if there's no buzz, there's no interest. — Branford 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

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