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I grew up in the South, in New Orleans, where guys torture you all the time. So I didn't really grow up on the self-esteem campaign. When you were lousy at something, they told you you were lousy, and they told you how to fix it.

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
Time
Grew
Orleans
Told
Campaign
Grows
Torture
Guy
Campaigns
Didn
Esteem
Self
South
Something
Guys
Really
Grow
Lousy

More quotes by Wynton Marsalis

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Ethics are more important than laws. Which means that the exact note is less important than the feeling of the note.
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The soul gives us resilience - an essential quality since we constantly have to rebound from hardship.
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Don't settle for style. Succeed in substance.
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We created the spirituals. We created so much great music, jazz chief amongst our innovations, teaching us how to prize ourselves and how to speak to one another, that our kids don't know that achievement, there's no way in the world that could be good for us.
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I'm just lucky to have the type of friends and musicians and people dedicated to my music that I do.
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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.
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If you looked around, you'd be glad you couldn't see.
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But you listen to Coltrane and that's something human, something that's about elevation. It's like making love to a woman. It's about something of value, it's not just loud. It doesn't have that violent connotation to it. I wanted to be a jazz musician so bad, but I really couldn't. There was no way I could figure out to learn how to play.
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Jazz music creates so many phenomenal figures.
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Even if nobody's singing, just when you talk, you're singing. I'll meet somebody and say, Oh, I'm tone-deaf. I say, You're not tone-deaf, because if you were tone-deaf you would speak like that. But you're 'Oh, I'm tone-deaf.' You already sang a song to me.
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When it comes to songs and music, yeah, people love to sing and dance and play music and tunes, and that stream of consciousness that exists in music, nobody knows where that comes from.
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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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The first jazz musician was a trumpeter, Buddy Bolden, and the last will be a trumpeter, the archangel Gabriel.
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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.
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Maybe the preoccupation with technological progress has overshadowed our concern with human progress.
Wynton Marsalis
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Ethics are more important than laws.
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.
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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 think that when the education system started to be dismantled during the first Great Depression in the 1930s, we didn't recover from that.
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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.
Wynton Marsalis