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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: 62
Born: 1961
Born: October 18
Bandleader
Composer
Conductor
Jazz Musician
Trumpeter
New Orleans
Louisiana
Wynton Learson Marsalis
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Philosophical
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Generation
Music
York
Kind
Generations
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Understanding
Talking
More quotes by Wynton Marsalis
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
If you are serious about American culture and you are serious about Afro-American culture, you are in a lot of pain. You are not - you are not smiling about it.
Wynton Marsalis
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
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.
Wynton Marsalis
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.
Wynton Marsalis
When I did the Abyssinian mass, I went through the whole history of the church music and the gospel music, even with the Anglo American hymns, the Afro American hymns, the spirituals and how it developed, up to Thomas Dorsey and the Dixie Hummingbirds, going through the history of the music, jazz musicians.
Wynton Marsalis
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.
Wynton Marsalis
I wanted to make somebody feel like Coltrane made me feel, listening to it.
Wynton Marsalis
The musicians I respected were much older than me. I expected them to cut my head, and they did.
Wynton Marsalis
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?
Wynton Marsalis
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
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
Everything comes out in blues music: joy , pain , struggle . Blues is affirmation with absolute elegance.
Wynton Marsalis
My older brother and myself always played together in bands, but we never knew we would be professional musicians.
Wynton Marsalis
The first jazz musician was a trumpeter, Buddy Bolden, and the last will be a trumpeter, the archangel Gabriel.
Wynton Marsalis
A beat is a moment in the life a groove.
Wynton Marsalis
Trumpet players see each other, and it's like we're getting ready to square off or get into a fight or something.
Wynton Marsalis
Jazz music creates so many phenomenal figures.
Wynton Marsalis
Art is a luxury. It's not necessary for you to - you can work your job and you can make some money and never know who Walt Whitman was, and never read a poem.
Wynton Marsalis
For Black people, we're one of the only groups of people that for some reason to express love of yourself, in some ways, is misconstrued as a dislike for someone else.
Wynton Marsalis