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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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Wynton Marsalis
Age: 63
Born: 1961
Born: October 18
Bandleader
Composer
Conductor
Jazz Musician
Trumpeter
New Orleans
Louisiana
Wynton Learson Marsalis
Contemporary
Concepts
Next
Music
Continuum
Play
Highlights
Right
Orleans
Always
Swing
Like
Swings

More quotes by Wynton Marsalis

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Flexibility is an essential part of Jazz. It's what gives Jazz music the ability to combine with all other types of music and not lose its identity.
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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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Even in these times, there are still neighbors that will turn their backs on neighbors.
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I feel like a lot of the fundamental material, I've assimilated. So now the question is: Am I going to really get into my spiritual inheritance of music and really develop my abilities?
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Who creates a thing is not as important as what the thing is. Who created baseball? Who created basketball? Who created the space program? Who created - we could go on and on. We could argue about who created something. We all are participants in it.
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I grew up in the South, in New Orleans, where guys torture you all the time. So I didn't really grow up on the self-esteem campaign. When you were lousy at something, they told you you were lousy, and they told you how to fix it.
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Don't worry about what others say about your music. Pursue whatever you are hearing... but if everybody really hates your music maybe you could try some different approaches.
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There's the tradition in jazz of having the “Battle of the Bands” and you do not want to get your head cut when you're playing.
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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.
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The majority of the high schools and the public schools in N.Y.C. don't even have band programs. Hip-hop in a lot of ways is an outgrowth of a lack of instruments and a desire to play music, so we can't really fault the kids for that.
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So when we spend all of our time trying to separate that which is already joined, it's a waste of time.
Wynton Marsalis
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For Black people, we're one of the only groups of people that for some reason to express love of yourself, in some ways, is misconstrued as a dislike for someone else.
Wynton Marsalis
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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.
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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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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There's always the cliche of the choir shouting and clapping. OK, you have to do that, but there's also introspective parts, parts where you just follow someone that's preaching. There's lots of different emotions and moods that a service requires.
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When me and my brother would go to see our daddy playing, there'd be 30 people in the audience. I was only 14 or 15, but I realised something was wrong.
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And that's the soulful thing about playing: you offer something to somebody. You don't know if they'll like it, but you offer it.
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Everything about the swing is about some guideline and some grid and the elegant way that you negotiate your way through that grid.
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