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It's important to address young people in the reopening of New Orleans. In rebuilding, let's revisit the potential of American democracy and American glory.

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
Young
Rebuilding
Important
Orleans
People
Address
Addresses
Potential
Glory
Democracy
American
Revisit

More quotes by Wynton Marsalis

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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
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I always like to play very contemporary concepts of swing right next to New Orleans music because it highlights continuum.
Wynton Marsalis
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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.
Wynton Marsalis
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Maybe the preoccupation with technological progress has overshadowed our concern with human progress.
Wynton Marsalis
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Only a few act - the rest of us reap the benefits of their risk.
Wynton Marsalis
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The best way to be, is to do.
Wynton Marsalis
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I feel that for years of teaching in the country and reading criticism in books, I feel like the things most needed in our culture are the understanding of the meanings of our music. We haven't done that good of job teaching our kids what our music means or how we developed our taste in music that reminds us and teaches us who we are.
Wynton Marsalis
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Who creates a thing is not as important as what the thing is. Who created baseball? Who created basketball? Who created the space program? Who created - we could go on and on. We could argue about who created something. We all are participants in it.
Wynton Marsalis
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Flexibility is an essential part of Jazz. It's what gives Jazz music the ability to combine with all other types of music and not lose its identity.
Wynton Marsalis
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Jazz is democracy in music.
Wynton Marsalis
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Through improvisation, jazz teaches you about yourself. And through swing, it teaches you that other people are individuals too. It teaches you how to coordinate with them.
Wynton Marsalis
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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.
Wynton Marsalis
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We're blues people. And blues never lets tragedy have the last word.
Wynton Marsalis
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Everything about the swing is about some guideline and some grid and the elegant way that you negotiate your way through that grid.
Wynton Marsalis
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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.
Wynton Marsalis
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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
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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 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.
Wynton Marsalis
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Blues is like the roux in a gumbo. People ask me if jazz always has the blues in it. I say, if it sounds good it does.
Wynton Marsalis
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We no longer want to be a melting pot, because we don't understand what is already melted.
Wynton Marsalis