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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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Wynton Marsalis
Age: 63
Born: 1961
Born: October 18
Bandleader
Composer
Conductor
Jazz Musician
Trumpeter
New Orleans
Louisiana
Wynton Learson Marsalis
Important
American
Great
Less
Like
Black
Comes
America
Anglo
Persons
Pertinent
Person
Achievement
Mean
Definitely

More quotes by 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?'
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I got my first trumpet when I was six years old, from Al Hirt. My father was playing in Al Hirt's band at that time.
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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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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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This is our bandstand. If you don't want to play, get up off the instrument and leave.
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In Jazz, improvisation isn't a matter of just making any ol' thing up. Jazz, like any language, has its own grammer and vocabulary. There's no right or wrong, just some choices that are better than others.
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Louis Armstrong is jazz. He represents what the music is all about.
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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
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The heart of a music is its rhythm. The heart of rhythm section music is the rhythm.
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We're blues people. And blues never lets tragedy have the last word.
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Everything comes out in blues music: joy, pain, struggle. Blues is affirmation with absolute elegance. It's about a man and a woman. So the pain and the struggle in the blues is that universal pain that comes from having your heart broken. Most blues songs are not about social statements.
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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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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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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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Jazz is not just 'Well, man, this is what I feel like playing.' It's a very structured thing that comes down from a tradition and requires a lot of thought and study.
Wynton Marsalis
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It's really not a stretch. The checks and balances are the same. The drums are the executive branch. The jazz orchestra is the legislative branch. Logic and reason are like jazz solos. The bass player is the judicial branch. One our greatest ever is Milt Hinton, and his nickname is The Judge.
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The young very seldom lead anything in our country today. It's been quite some time since a younger generation pushed an older one to a higher standard.
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When I was 12, I began listening to John Coltrane and I developed a love for jazz, which I still have more and more each year.
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Jazz comes from our way of life, and because it's our national art form, it helps us to understand who we are.
Wynton Marsalis
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I think that when the education system started to be dismantled during the first Great Depression in the 1930s, we didn't recover from that.
Wynton Marsalis