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Music is always for the listener, but the first listener is always the musician

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
Listener
Listeners
Musician
Music
Firsts
First
Always

More quotes by Wynton Marsalis

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We looked up to our father. He still is much greater than us.
Wynton Marsalis
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When did we begin to lose faith in our ability to effect change?
Wynton Marsalis
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Jazz music is America's past and its potential, summed up and sanctified and accessible to anybody who learns to listen to, feel, and understand it. The music can connect us to our earlier selves and to our better selves-to-come. It can remind us of where we fit on the time line of human achievement, an ultimate value of art.
Wynton Marsalis
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In the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra we play such a diversity of music, with 10 arrangers in the band, we don't really worry about whether it's contemporary or not.
Wynton Marsalis
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This is our bandstand. If you don't want to play, get up off the instrument and leave.
Wynton Marsalis
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I have friends who will critique me much harder than any review.
Wynton Marsalis
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I'm not a person who writes really abstract things with oblique references. I look at abstraction like I look at condiments. Give me some Tabasco sauce, some ketchup, some mayonnaise. I love all of that. Put it on a trumpet. I've just got to have the ketchup and Tabasco sauce. That's my attitude about musical philosophy.
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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One thing about excellence, it&Mac226s an exclusive club. And it&Mac226s only for those who really want to pay dues to the s--. My daddy told me when I was a boy: The only way you can be different from other people is to do some s-- they don't want to do.
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 thing is, once you start to put a backbeat on your music or something that has a machine in it, you have popularity, but you lose the flexibility. And you lose a richness.
Wynton Marsalis
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Humility is the doorway 2 truth & clarity of objectives... it's the doorway 2 learning.
Wynton Marsalis
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What I really have in my head, my imagination, my understanding of music, I never really get that out.
Wynton Marsalis
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When I say our, I definitely mean all of America. It's not less pertinent for you because it comes from a Black person, just like a great achievement by an Anglo American is less important.
Wynton Marsalis
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My daddy expected that my brothers and I and our generation would make the world a better place. He had lived in an America of continual social progress.
Wynton Marsalis
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Through first-class education, a generation marches down the long uncertain road of the future with confidence.
Wynton Marsalis
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Don't bullshit' just play.
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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Thank the good Lord for a job.
Wynton Marsalis
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It was Dr. King's tireless activism that fostered our modern way of relating to one another.
Wynton Marsalis