Top 150 Wynton Marsalis Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “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

102. “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

103. “We no longer want to be a melting pot, because we don’t understand what is already melted.”

— Wynton Marsalis

104. “Certain music, jazz in particular, has the ability to make you a better citizen of the world. It helps you expand your world view and gives you more confidence in your cultural achievements. Improvisational jazz teaches you about yourself while the swing in jazz teaches you how to work with others.”

— Wynton Marsalis

105. “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

106. “So when we spend all of our time trying to separate that which is already joined, it’s a waste of time.”

— Wynton Marsalis

107. “What I really have in my head, my imagination, my understanding of music, I never really get that out.”

— Wynton Marsalis

108. “My thing is, once you start to put a backbeat on your music or something that has a machine in it, you have popularity, but you lose the flexibility. And you lose a richness.”

— Wynton Marsalis

109. “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.”

— Wynton Marsalis

110. “My daddy expected that my brothers and I and our generation would make the world a better place. He had lived in an America of continual social progress.”

— Wynton Marsalis

111. “We started to confuse entertainment with art, because art has a component of entertainment. It has to have that or it becomes too boring. It becomes too lost in its own devices. But I just think that we started to lose, and even before that, it’s not necessary.”

— Wynton Marsalis

112. “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

113. “I had to figure out how to survive in New York, and most of my time was occupied in getting an apartment and getting money. A lot of older jazz guys looked out for me and found me gigs and places to stay.”

— Wynton Marsalis

114. “Jazz shows us how to find a groove with other people, how to hold on to it, and how to develop it.”

— Wynton Marsalis

115. “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

116. “My older brother and myself always played together in bands, but we never knew we would be professional musicians.”

— Wynton Marsalis

117. “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

118. “I always like to play very contemporary concepts of swing right next to New Orleans music because it highlights continuum.”

— Wynton Marsalis

119. “I’ll write down and catalogue all the different devices that are Americana to me, and I try to have a historic depth and breadth and also the things that we do in our time, the type of vamps and chants, things that are available to us.”

— Wynton Marsalis

120. “If you didn’t have the amalgam of Blacks and African-type sensibility and European sensibility, you wouldn’t have jazz. Even in the negative and in the positive ways – if there was no slavery and the abolition of slavery, there would be no jazz.”

— Wynton Marsalis

121. “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

122. “The arts shows that you’re civilized, and it makes life sweet. So you can exist and you can buy more things and you can be more – we’re dealing with a form of commercialism that obscures a prior relationship to quality, and it’s a national problem.”

— Wynton Marsalis

123. “I sounded like myself. People be saying I sound like Miles or Clifford Brown.”

— Wynton Marsalis

124. “The history of jazz lets us know that this period in our history is not the only period we’ve come through together. If we truly understood the history of our national arts, we’d know that we have mutual aspirations, a shared history, in good times and bad.”

— Wynton Marsalis

125. “I always read all these books about the slaves. My mother is very educated. My father would talk to us like we were grown men. We never knew what he was talking about half the time.”

— Wynton Marsalis

126. “The musicians, Duke Ellington, his thing was not about separating himself from the rest of America. Louis Armstrong – go to the forefathers of our music – Jelly Roll Morton – they’re not preaching a separatist agenda. They’re not taking their music and saying, “This is for me.””

— Wynton Marsalis

127. “I have absolutely no idea what my generation did to enrich our democracy. We dropped the ball. We entered a period of complacency and closed our eyes to the public corruption of our democracy.”

— Wynton Marsalis

128. “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.”

— Wynton Marsalis

129. “This rebuilding of New Orleans gives us the perfect opportunity to see if we’re ready to extend the legacy of Dr. King.”

— Wynton Marsalis

130. “Nothing else will ever capture the democratic process in sound as perfectly as Jazz.”

— Wynton Marsalis

131. “This is our bandstand. If you don’t want to play, get up off the instrument and leave.”

— Wynton Marsalis

132. “In learning about a person, you learn something about the world and about yourself, and if you can handle what you learn, you can get closer, much closer to them.”

— Wynton Marsalis

133. “Young kids are always singing and painting. When you get to that second and third grade level, you’re supposed to put all that aside.”

— Wynton Marsalis

134. “I play piano and drums very poorly and French horn and tuba all equally as bad.”

— Wynton Marsalis

135. “It’s important to address young people in the reopening of New Orleans. In rebuilding, let’s revisit the potential of American democracy and American glory.”

— Wynton Marsalis

136. “Thank the good Lord for a job.”

— Wynton Marsalis

137. “What, other than injustice, could be the reason that the displaced citizens of New Orleans cannot be accommodated by the richest nation in the world?”

— Wynton Marsalis

138. “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.”

— Wynton Marsalis

139. “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

140. “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.”

— Wynton Marsalis

141. “The best musicians know this music isn’t about “schools” at all. Like my father says, “There’s only one school, the school of ‘Can you play?”

— Wynton Marsalis

142. “I try to put a lot of our music in my music – by that I mean of American music.”

— Wynton Marsalis

143. “When I first came to New York everybody on the scene would treat me like I could play, but I couldn’t.”

— Wynton Marsalis

144. “The rebuilding of New Orleans is an important point in the history of the United States.”

— Wynton Marsalis

145. “I have friends who will critique me much harder than any review.”

— Wynton Marsalis

146. “There was one thing Beethoven didn’t do. When one of his string quartets was played, you can believe the second violin wasn’t improvising.”

— Wynton Marsalis

147. “It was Dr. King’s tireless activism that fostered our modern way of relating to one another.”

— Wynton Marsalis

148. “Some stances are just conducive to swinging. If I stand up straight for too long it’s harder to swing. Plus my feet hurt.”

— Wynton Marsalis

149. “You need a team. You need people to push you. You need opponents.”

— Wynton Marsalis

150. “It’s hard to be prejudiced against someone you love.”

— Wynton Marsalis