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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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Wynton Marsalis
Age: 63
Born: 1961
Born: October 18
Bandleader
Composer
Conductor
Jazz Musician
Trumpeter
New Orleans
Louisiana
Wynton Learson Marsalis
Bandstand
Instrument
Instruments
Jazz
Leave
Play

More quotes by Wynton Marsalis

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I believe in professionalism, but playing is not like a job. You have to be grateful to have the opportunity to play.
Wynton Marsalis
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The best way to be, is to do.
Wynton Marsalis
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I try to put a lot of our music in my music - by that I mean of American music.
Wynton Marsalis
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Jazz music creates so many phenomenal figures.
Wynton Marsalis
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My schedule is always tight. But I like to have the pressure of having to finish doing something it gives me an added edge.
Wynton Marsalis
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The blues. It runs through all American music. Somebody bending the note. The other is the two-beat groove. It's in New Orleans music, it's in jazz, it's in country music, it's in gospel.
Wynton Marsalis
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Commercialism that has absolutely no relationship to quality whatsoever, only quantitative assessment of a thing.
Wynton Marsalis
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The real power of Jazz is that a group of people can come together and create improvised art and negotiate their agendas... and that negotiation is the art
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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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.
Wynton Marsalis
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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.
Wynton Marsalis
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The first time I ever played the trumpet in public, I played the Marine Hymn. I sounded terrible.
Wynton Marsalis
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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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Humility is the doorway 2 truth & clarity of objectives... it's the doorway 2 learning.
Wynton Marsalis
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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.
Wynton Marsalis
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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!
Wynton Marsalis
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Nothing else will ever capture the democratic process in sound as perfectly as Jazz.
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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Trumpet players are just belligerant, and cocky, and you know, just hard-headed.
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