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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

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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
Kind
Generations
People
Came
Understanding
Talking
Understand
Applied
Didn
Philosophical
Thought
Generation
Music
York

More quotes by Wynton Marsalis

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You don't try to duplicate certain things that other cats do, because you could never do it as well as they do. Nobody can get on that tenor saxophone and play like Trane, because he's the only one who can spell out chords and sound good when he does it.
Wynton Marsalis
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Jazz is democracy in music.
Wynton Marsalis
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Some stances are just conducive to swinging. If I stand up straight for too long it's harder to swing. Plus my feet hurt.
Wynton Marsalis
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My older brother and myself always played together in bands, but we never knew we would be professional musicians.
Wynton Marsalis
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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
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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.
Wynton Marsalis
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Commercialism that has absolutely no relationship to quality whatsoever, only quantitative assessment of a thing.
Wynton Marsalis
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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
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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.
Wynton Marsalis
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I think that virtuosity is the first sign of morality in a musician. It means you're serious enough to practice.
Wynton Marsalis
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I play piano and drums very poorly and French horn and tuba all equally as bad.
Wynton Marsalis
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Jazz music creates so many phenomenal figures.
Wynton Marsalis
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There's so much spirit of integration and democracy in jazz.
Wynton Marsalis
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It's really not a stretch. The checks and balances are the same. The drums are the executive branch. The jazz orchestra is the legislative branch. Logic and reason are like jazz solos. The bass player is the judicial branch. One our greatest ever is Milt Hinton, and his nickname is The Judge.
Wynton Marsalis
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The arts speak across epochs. If you think that people started to build a cathedral in 1315 and the people worked on that cathedral, it wasn't going to be finished until 1585. So they were thinking 200 years from now. Maybe by the time I die, this wall might be put up.
Wynton Marsalis
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The musicians, Duke Ellington, his thing was not about separating himself from the rest of America. Louis Armstrong - go to the forefathers of our music - Jelly Roll Morton - they're not preaching a separatist agenda. They're not taking their music and saying, This is for me.
Wynton Marsalis
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Don't wish for someone else to do later what you can do now.
Wynton Marsalis
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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.
Wynton Marsalis
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Those who play for applause....Tha t’s all they get.
Wynton Marsalis
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This music heals people because music is vibration, and the proper vibration heals.
Wynton Marsalis