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The only justification for looking down on anyone is that you're going to stop and pick them up.

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
Picks
Stop
Looking
Anyone
Going
Justification
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More quotes by Wynton Marsalis

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What I really have in my head, my imagination, my understanding of music, I never really get that out.
Wynton Marsalis
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If you are serious about American culture and you are serious about Afro-American culture, you are in a lot of pain. You are not - you are not smiling about it.
Wynton Marsalis
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There's so much spirit of integration and democracy in jazz.
Wynton Marsalis
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We created the spirituals. We created so much great music, jazz chief amongst our innovations, teaching us how to prize ourselves and how to speak to one another, that our kids don't know that achievement, there's no way in the world that could be good for us.
Wynton Marsalis
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The blues is always there. It's going to be hard out here, but it's all right. It's all right, and that's what the blues teaches you. You got to roll with the punches and find your equilibrium.
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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What takes its place is very dry education. And the tools that actually can teach you - singing and playing, learning how to participate with other people, spiritual richness - are replaced with a big emphasis on how to memorize things. That's such an incomplete education. Survival of the fittest used to mean being bigger and stronger.
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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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.
Wynton Marsalis
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Love is the spiritual essence of what we do. Technique is the manifestation of the preparation and investment as a result of the love.
Wynton Marsalis
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When I did the Abyssinian mass, I went through the whole history of the church music and the gospel music, even with the Anglo American hymns, the Afro American hymns, the spirituals and how it developed, up to Thomas Dorsey and the Dixie Hummingbirds, going through the history of the music, jazz musicians.
Wynton Marsalis
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To say that the Afro American created jazz doesn't mean anything bad about Anglo Americans, and I always teach my younger jazz musicians that at this point the entirety of the American tradition is your heritage, and you need to know it.
Wynton Marsalis
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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.
Wynton Marsalis
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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.
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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But you listen to Coltrane and that's something human, something that's about elevation. It's like making love to a woman. It's about something of value, it's not just loud. It doesn't have that violent connotation to it. I wanted to be a jazz musician so bad, but I really couldn't. There was no way I could figure out to learn how to play.
Wynton Marsalis
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We're blues people. And blues never lets tragedy have the last word.
Wynton Marsalis
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Jazz music creates so many phenomenal figures.
Wynton Marsalis
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When it comes to songs and music, yeah, people love to sing and dance and play music and tunes, and that stream of consciousness that exists in music, nobody knows where that comes from.
Wynton Marsalis