Quote

Jazz music is the power of now. There is no script. It's conversation. The emotion is given to you by musicians as they make split-second decisions to fulfill what they feel the moment requires.

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
Moment
Decisions
Given
Jazz
Split
Moments
Musical
Splits
Power
Musician
Fulfill
Music
Conversation
Musicians
Feel
Second
Script
Feels
Emotion
Scripts
Make
Decision
Requires

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Only a few act - the rest of us reap the benefits of their risk.
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You need a team. You need people to push you. You need opponents.
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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.
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Everything comes out in blues music: joy , pain , struggle . Blues is affirmation with absolute elegance.
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The soul gives us resilience - an essential quality since we constantly have to rebound from hardship.
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Maybe the preoccupation with technological progress has overshadowed our concern with human progress.
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I try to put a lot of our music in my music - by that I mean of American music.
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No particular music makes me feel nostalgic. If it's great, it just keeps me in the present moment. That level of music is like a classic story, like the Iliad-something so perfect it can never be old.
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If you're not making mistakes, you're not trying.
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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.
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I dress up a certain way because I respect the music.
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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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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.
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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.
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Jazz music celebrates life! Human life the range of it, the absurdity of it, the ignorance of it, the greatness of it, the intelligence of it, the sexuality of it, the profundity of it. And it deals with it. In all of its... It deals with it!
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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.
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The black hole in democracy is integrity. The great unspoken is integrity. When integrity is not first and foremost, it's quite palpable but not visible. It's always there. Jazz highlights it because musicians and jazz always represented a high level of integrity.
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There really have only ever been a few people in each generation who step out, are willing to put themselves on the line, and risk everything for their beliefs.
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The history of jazz lets us know that this period in our history is not the only period we've come through together. If we truly understood the history of our national arts, we'd know that we have mutual aspirations, a shared history, in good times and bad.
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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.
Wynton Marsalis