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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.

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
Played
Second
Wasn
Quartets
Didn
Improvising
Thing
Beethoven
Believe
Violin
String
Strings

More quotes by Wynton Marsalis

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And my identity...I never really wondered about it because, unfortunately, I sounded like myself. People be saying I sound like Miles or Clifford Brown.
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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.
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And that's the soulful thing about playing: you offer something to somebody. You don't know if they'll like it, but you offer it.
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The musicians I respected were much older than me. I expected them to cut my head, and they did.
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Humility is the doorway 2 truth & clarity of objectives... it's the doorway 2 learning.
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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.
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I remember when I wrote a piece, Blood on the Fields, it was a while ago, it was about slavery and about two characters, and I studied so much of music, I would always go back to the original documents, and as much as I can get original chants and slave chants and different type of beats and rhythms and ring shout.
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If you looked around, you'd be glad you couldn't see.
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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.
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There is an idea that a mind is wasted on the arts unless it makes you good in math or science. There is some evidence that the arts might help you in math and science.
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Benny Goodman's band was integrated before baseball. Even before it was physically integrated, music was integrated. Everyone listened to Armstrong and Ellington. The 20s was called the Jazz Age. It's part of being American.
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The only justification for looking down on anyone is that you're going to stop and pick them up.
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The best way to be, is to do.
Wynton Marsalis
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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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Jazz music is the power of now.
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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.
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Commercialism that has absolutely no relationship to quality whatsoever, only quantitative assessment of a thing.
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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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New Orleans - the real New Orleans - is the soul of the country.
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Louis Armstrong is jazz. He represents what the music is all about.
Wynton Marsalis