Wynton Marsalis

Musician

1961-10-18

Quotes by Wynton Marsalis

• it ain't as hard as picking cotton

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• 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.

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• it ain't as hard as picking cotton

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• 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.

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• 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.

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• 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.

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• 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.

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• 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.

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• Don't settle for style. Succeed in substance.

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• 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.

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• Maybe the preoccupation with technological progress has overshadowed our concern with human progress.

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• What I've learned how to do as I've gotten older is to take all of the information that I have, and push it aside, and try to distill each song into an emotional theme. The hardest thing that I've ever had to learn how to do in playing music is use the sound of my instrument to create an emotional effect.

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

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• I try to find the core values that are so fundamental that they transcend ethnic identity. That doesn't mean I run from it. I embrace African-American culture and I love it and embrace it, but it is a part of a human identity. So I'm always trying to make a larger human statement.

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• 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.

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

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• 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.

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

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• 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.

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• 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.

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