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I think that virtuosity is the first sign of morality in a musician. It means you're serious enough to practice.

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
Thinking
Serious
Practice
Means
Firsts
Virtuosity
First
Sign
Enough
Jazz
Mean
Morality
Think
Musician

More quotes by Wynton Marsalis

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I wanted to make somebody feel like Coltrane made me feel, listening to it.
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The arts shows that you're civilized, and it makes life sweet. So you can exist and you can buy more things and you can be more - we're dealing with a form of commercialism that obscures a prior relationship to quality, and it's a national problem.
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Humility is the doorway 2 truth & clarity of objectives... it's the doorway 2 learning.
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The soul gives us resilience - an essential quality since we constantly have to rebound from hardship.
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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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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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The only justification for looking down on anyone is that you're going to stop and pick them up.
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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.
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Jazz music creates so many phenomenal figures.
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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.
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What takes its place is very dry education. And the tools that actually can teach you - singing and playing, learning how to participate with other people, spiritual richness - are replaced with a big emphasis on how to memorize things. That's such an incomplete education. Survival of the fittest used to mean being bigger and stronger.
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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.
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This is our bandstand. If you don't want to play, get up off the instrument and leave.
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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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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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It was Dr. King's tireless activism that fostered our modern way of relating to one another.
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.
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People have taken time out of their day and spent their money to come sit down at a concert. And it's jazz music-it's not easy for them to get to it. I don't want them ever to feel that I'm taking their presence lightly.
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You don't try to duplicate certain things that other cats do, because you could never do it as well as they do. Nobody can get on that tenor saxophone and play like Trane, because he's the only one who can spell out chords and sound good when he does it.
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