150 Wynton Marsalis Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “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

52. “Don’t wish for someone else to do later what you can do now.”

— Wynton Marsalis

53. “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

54. “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

55. “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

56. “Sustained intensity equals ecstacy.”

— Wynton Marsalis

57. “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

58. “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

59. “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.”

— Wynton Marsalis

60. “We learn a language through its song, and even if you don’t have music you have the song of people you love’s voice, and you’ll notice that song in their voice.”

— Wynton Marsalis

61. “New Orleans – the real New Orleans – is the soul of the country.”

— Wynton Marsalis

62. “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

63. “I believe in professionalism, but playing is not like a job. You have to be grateful to have the opportunity to play.”

— Wynton Marsalis

64. “Louis Armstrong is jazz. He represents what the music is all about.”

— Wynton Marsalis

65. “The black hole in democracy is integrity. The great unspoken is integrity. When integrity is not first and foremost, it’s quite palpable but not visible. It’s always there. Jazz highlights it because musicians and jazz always represented a high level of integrity.”

— Wynton Marsalis

66. “I think that virtuosity is the first sign of morality in a musician. It means you’re serious enough to practice.”

— Wynton Marsalis

67. “What is deeper than respect and love? That’s what we felt: veneration.”

— Wynton Marsalis

68. “Through improvisation, jazz teaches you about yourself. And through swing, it teaches you that other people are individuals too. It teaches you how to coordinate with them.”

— Wynton Marsalis

69. “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

70. “Having heard Clifford Brown play all those fast runs, I used to really practice Clarke trumpet exercises all day long so that I could play fast. That’s all I wanted to do. I was like a child with a toy.”

— Wynton Marsalis

71. “The bandstand is a sacred place.”

— Wynton Marsalis

72. “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

73. “The Duke and Swing represent affirmation in the face of adversity.”

— Wynton Marsalis

74. “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

75. “Through first-class education, a generation marches down the long uncertain road of the future with confidence.”

— Wynton Marsalis

76. “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

77. “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

78. “Grace Kelly plays with intelligence, wit and feeling. She has a great amount of natural ability and the ability to adapt. That is the hallmark of a first-class jazz musician.”

— Wynton Marsalis

79. “The blues. It runs through all American music. Somebody bending the note. The other is the two-beat groove. It’s in New Orleans music, it’s in jazz, it’s in country music, it’s in gospel.”

— Wynton Marsalis

80. “I never minded giving my opinions. They are just opinions, and I had studied music and I had strong feelings. I was happy for my opinions to join all the other opinions. But you have to be prepared for what comes back, especially if you don’t agree with the dominant mythology.”

— Wynton Marsalis

81. “Commercialism that has absolutely no relationship to quality whatsoever, only quantitative assessment of a thing.”

— Wynton Marsalis

82. “The best way to be, is to do.”

— Wynton Marsalis

83. “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.”

— Wynton Marsalis

84. “I wanted to make somebody feel like Coltrane made me feel, listening to it.”

— Wynton Marsalis

85. “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.”

— Wynton Marsalis

86. “Our culture is what we did together. What did Walt Whitman represent for all of us? What was his message to us? That is an inheritance, and when we squander that inheritance we act outside. We don’t know who we are; we don’t know where we are.”

— Wynton Marsalis

87. “If you looked around, you’d be glad you couldn’t see.”

— Wynton Marsalis

88. “The arts speak across epochs. If you think that people started to build a cathedral in 1315 and the people worked on that cathedral, it wasn’t going to be finished until 1585. So they were thinking 200 years from now. Maybe by the time I die, this wall might be put up.”

— Wynton Marsalis

89. “Milk in a mother’s breast-that’s cool. Milk in a mouth-that’s cool too. But milk in my trumpet? Not so cool. I have to play that thing.”

— Wynton Marsalis

90. “No particular music makes me feel nostalgic. If it’s great, it just keeps me in the present moment. That level of music is like a classic story, like the Iliad-something so perfect it can never be old.”

— Wynton Marsalis

91. “My mother always took my brothers and me to music lessons. There were six children. Our parents attended our concerts and encouraged us to study and enjoy many different types of music.”

— Wynton Marsalis

92. “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

93. “Benny Goodman’s band was integrated before baseball. Even before it was physically integrated, music was integrated. Everyone listened to Armstrong and Ellington. The 20s was called the Jazz Age. It’s part of being American.”

— Wynton Marsalis

94. “The people are not coming because of me. They didn’t come before me. It’s because of a lack of education and understanding, so it makes me more motivated. It’s like my mother said about having an artistic child – she learned more from him and he gets more attention and more of the love, not less.”

— Wynton Marsalis

95. “Jazz music creates so many phenomenal figures.”

— Wynton Marsalis

96. “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.”

— Wynton Marsalis

97. “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

98. “Even in these times, there are still neighbors that will turn their backs on neighbors.”

— Wynton Marsalis

99. “The heart of a music is its rhythm. The heart of rhythm section music is the rhythm.”

— Wynton Marsalis

100. “We looked up to our father. He still is much greater than us.”

— Wynton Marsalis