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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

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Wynton Marsalis
Age: 63
Born: 1961
Born: October 18
Bandleader
Composer
Conductor
Jazz Musician
Trumpeter
New Orleans
Louisiana
Wynton Learson Marsalis
Way
Helps
Life
Jazz
National
Understand
Comes
Helping
Art
Form

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I wanted to make somebody feel like Coltrane made me feel, listening to it.
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Through first-class education, a generation marches down the long uncertain road of the future with confidence.
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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.
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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.
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I believe in professionalism, but playing is not like a job. You have to be grateful to have the opportunity to play.
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There's the tradition in jazz of having the “Battle of the Bands” and you do not want to get your head cut when you're playing.
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Humility is the doorway 2 truth & clarity of objectives... it's the doorway 2 learning.
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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.
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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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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.
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What I really have in my head, my imagination, my understanding of music, I never really get that out.
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Only a few act - the rest of us reap the benefits of their risk.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Whenever you face a man who's playing your instrument, there's a competition.
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Ethics are more important than laws.
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Who creates a thing is not as important as what the thing is. Who created baseball? Who created basketball? Who created the space program? Who created - we could go on and on. We could argue about who created something. We all are participants in it.
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Swing is extreme coordination. It's a maintaining balance, equilibrium. It's about executing very difficult rhythms with a panache and a feeling in the context of very strict time. So, everything about the swing is about some guideline and some grid and the elegant way that you negotiate your way through that grid.
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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?
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