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Whenever you face a man who's playing your instrument, there's a competition.

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
Men
Instrument
Instruments
Whenever
Competition
Playing
Face
Faces

More quotes by Wynton Marsalis

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Jazz is not the kind of music you are going to learn to play in three or four years or that you can just get because you have some talent for music.
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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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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And my identity...I never really wondered about it because, unfortunately, I sounded like myself. People be saying I sound like Miles or Clifford Brown.
Wynton Marsalis
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My older brother and myself always played together in bands, but we never knew we would be professional musicians.
Wynton Marsalis
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Those who play for applause....Tha t’s all they get.
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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I almost never watch TV, except for '60 Minutes' and pro football. I love Drew Brees, the Manning brothers and the Steelers' linebackers.
Wynton Marsalis
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It's our job to just do as much as we can to enlighten the people about it and to represent it by playing it with some integrity. That's what I try to do.
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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The main three components are the blues, improvisation - which is some kind of element that people are trying to make it up - and swing, which means even though they're making up music, they're trying to make it up together. It feels great, like you're having a great conversation with somebody.
Wynton Marsalis
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Don't wish for someone else to do later what you can do now.
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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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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I play piano and drums very poorly and French horn and tuba all equally as bad.
Wynton Marsalis
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When I auditioned for my high school band the band director was excited because my father was known to be a great musician. When he heard me, he said 'Are you sure you're Ellis's son?'
Wynton Marsalis
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For me as a person who's in the arts and as someone who understands the magnitude of our contributions and the price that was paid to contribute to that, that we just have not gotten that together. I will do all that I can to get in front of our kids, to try to teach them, but at a certain point the people have to want it and come towards 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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Thank the good Lord for a job.
Wynton Marsalis
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I have friends who will critique me much harder than any review.
Wynton Marsalis