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We don't have the leadership or the understanding of the value of this, and when your political systems and your economic systems start to fail, it's only a cultural understanding that allows you to reconstruct them and to get back to who you are. For some reason, it hasn't dawned on us yet.

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
Values
Allows
Political
Fail
Back
Failing
Reason
Leadership
Reconstruct
Value
Dawned
Economic
Hasn
Start
Systems
Understanding
Cultural

More quotes by Wynton Marsalis

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Many of our greatest musicians abandoned all of their aesthetic objectives to try to become pertinent. And, at the end of the day, they never became pop stars. I counter stated that very strongly, and I continue to do that.
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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It's like we're suffering from an identity crisis, and that identity is in our arts and the fact that we don't find it chief amongst our agendas to teach our kids who we are as a nation and the battles we've had on this ground and how they've been successfully resolved. We can't enjoy the fruits of the labor of our ancestors.
Wynton Marsalis
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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?
Wynton Marsalis
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One thing about excellence, it&Mac226s an exclusive club. And it&Mac226s only for those who really want to pay dues to the s--. My daddy told me when I was a boy: The only way you can be different from other people is to do some s-- they don't want to do.
Wynton Marsalis
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A beat is a moment in the life a groove.
Wynton Marsalis
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We all teach from that same frame of reference. We're like neighborhood - the people who have had the opportunity through this music to gain a platform and spread the message of this music, which is basically love in a form of communication that's honest and truthful.
Wynton Marsalis
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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 creates so many phenomenal figures.
Wynton Marsalis
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In the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra we play such a diversity of music, with 10 arrangers in the band, we don't really worry about whether it's contemporary or not.
Wynton Marsalis
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If you're not making mistakes, you're not trying.
Wynton Marsalis
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I dress up a certain way because I respect the music.
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.
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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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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The rebuilding of New Orleans is an important point in the history of the United States.
Wynton Marsalis
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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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There really have only ever been a few people in each generation who step out, are willing to put themselves on the line, and risk everything for their beliefs.
Wynton Marsalis
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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.
Wynton Marsalis
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Jazz music is America's past and its potential, summed up and sanctified and accessible to anybody who learns to listen to, feel, and understand it. The music can connect us to our earlier selves and to our better selves-to-come. It can remind us of where we fit on the time line of human achievement, an ultimate value of art.
Wynton Marsalis