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The first time I ever played the trumpet in public, I played the Marine Hymn. I sounded terrible.
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
Trumpet
Ever
Firsts
Hymns
First
Trumpets
Time
Sounded
Marine
Played
Terrible
Hymn
Public
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If you're not making mistakes, you're not trying.
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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.
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New Orleans - the real New Orleans - is the soul of the country.
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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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When I first came to New York everybody on the scene would treat me like I could play but I couldn't.
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I try to put a lot of our music in my music - by that I mean of American music.
Wynton Marsalis
Don't bullshit' just play.
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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.
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There are forces all around you who wish to exploit division, rob you of your freedom, and tell you what to think. But young folks can rekindle the weary spirit of a slumbering nation.
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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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What I really have in my head, my imagination, my understanding of music, I never really get that out.
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Trumpet players are just belligerant, and cocky, and you know, just hard-headed.
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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.
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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.
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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 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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Jazz music is America's past and its potential, summed up and sanctified and accessible to anybody who learns to listen to, feel, and understand it. The music can connect us to our earlier selves and to our better selves-to-come. It can remind us of where we fit on the time line of human achievement, an ultimate value of art.
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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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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.
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It's like we're suffering from an identity crisis, and that identity is in our arts and the fact that we don't find it chief amongst our agendas to teach our kids who we are as a nation and the battles we've had on this ground and how they've been successfully resolved. We can't enjoy the fruits of the labor of our ancestors.
Wynton Marsalis
