Top 100 Marsalis Quotes
#1. Kenny G is not real jazz. I don't even think Wynton Marsalis is real jazz. I don't think Harry Connick Jr. is real jazz. If there is such a thing as real jazz, The Lounge Lizards is real jazz, Henry Threadgill is real jazz, Bill Frisell is real jazz, you know?
John Lurie
#2. I started off playing by ear, and being around a bunch of musicians and playing in the streets and in the different parades and, then, I got accepted to go to New Orleans Center for Creative Artists ... it's where Wynton Marsalis, Harry Connick, Jr. and all those guys went out.
Troy Andrews
#3. [Wynton] Marsalis does not aspire to be an innovator, no one else is allowed to have new ideas either.
Randy Sandke
#4. To date, [Wynton] Marsalis has received a total of nine Grammy Awards; a Pulitzer Prize (the first ever awarded to a jazz musician) ... and twenty-nine honorary degrees, including Columbia, Brown, Princeton and Yale; the National Medal of Arts; and numerous awards from other countries.
Randy Sandke
#5. I've never heard anything Wynton [Marsalis] played sound like it meant anything at all. Wynton has no voice and no presence. His music sounds like a talented high-school trumpet player to me ... he's jazzy the same way someone who drives a BMW is sporty.
Keith Jarrett
#6. As Branford Marsalis said in a beautiful essay he write upon Clarence's death, C was blessed with 'the power of musical intent.
Bruce Springsteen
#7. We have been working with Habitat for Humanity and we have built eighty homes, 80% of which are being lived in by New Orleans' musicians. It is called the Musicians' Village and at the center is the Ellis Marsalis Center for Music.
Harry Connick Jr.
#8. I wouldn't argue that anyone living can play the trumpet better than Wynton Marsalis.
Christian Scott
#9. Wynton Marsalis' skills have grown as fast as his ambition, and he is the most ambitious younger composer in Jazz.
Jon Pareles
#10. 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
#11. 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
#12. We played it as long as we could play it on that CD and I think it might be 50 minutes, maybe. What you have to do is play a couple of songs and then get off the stage because everything that trails it sounds stupid.
Branford Marsalis
#13. 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
#14. My father is a jazz musician, so I grew up hearing jazz. My parents loved it, but I didn't like it. It went on for too long. Yes, I had certain teachers that really inspired me, like Danny Barker, and John Longo. And I had no idea that I would have any impact on jazz.
Wynton Marsalis
#15. So when we spend all of our time trying to separate that which is already joined, it's a waste of time.
Wynton Marsalis
#16. I didn't want to get that ring around my lips from practicing the trumpet, because I thought the girls wouldn't like me. So I never practiced.
Wynton Marsalis
#17. 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
#18. 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
#20. 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
#21. You need a team. You need people to push you. You need opponents.
Wynton Marsalis
#22. 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
#23. You hear it in your brain. Whatever makes sense. Some songs work well as quartet songs, sometimes they don't.
Branford Marsalis
#24. 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
#26. What is jazz? It, It's almost like asking, What is French? Jazz is a musical language. It's a musical dialect that actually embodies the spirit of America.
Branford Marsalis
#27. Whenever you face a man who's playing your instrument, there's a competition.
Wynton Marsalis
#28. The first time I ever played the trumpet in public, I played the Marine Hymn. I sounded terrible.
Wynton Marsalis
#29. 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
#31. 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
#32. The fact that we are culturally ignorant and we don't know what our heritage is, the price that we pay is that we act outside of ourselves almost all the time. We make very bad decisions how we deal with other people and their culture.
Wynton Marsalis
#33. There are forces all around you who wish to exploit division, rob you of your freedom, and tell you what to think. But young folks can rekindle the weary spirit of a slumbering nation.
Wynton Marsalis
#34. I became a man in New York. New York made me the musician that I am and the person that I am, so it's impossible for me to say I regret having lived there.
Wynton Marsalis
#35. 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
#36. 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
#37. 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
#38. 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
#39. This is our bandstand. If you don't want to play, get up off the instrument and leave.
Wynton Marsalis
#40. I have friends who will critique me much harder than any review.
Wynton Marsalis
#41. I wanted to make somebody feel like Coltrane made me feel, listening to it.
Wynton Marsalis
#42. Nothing else will ever capture the democratic process in sound as perfectly as Jazz.
Wynton Marsalis
#43. Blues is like the roux in a gumbo. People ask me if jazz always has the blues in it. I say, if it sounds good it does.
Wynton Marsalis
#44. It's our job to just do as much as we can to enlighten the people about it and to represent it by playing it with some integrity. That's what I try to do.
Wynton Marsalis
#45. It was Dr. King's tireless activism that fostered our modern way of relating to one another.
Wynton Marsalis
#46. The Duke and Swing represent affirmation in the face of adversity.
Wynton Marsalis
#47. What I really have in my head, my imagination, my understanding of music, I never really get that out.
Wynton Marsalis
#48. Music is always for the listener, but the first listener is always the musician
Wynton Marsalis
#49. I'm just lucky to have the type of friends and musicians and people dedicated to my music that I do.
Wynton Marsalis
#50. As a jazz musician, you have individual power to create the sound. You also have a responsibility to function in the context of other people who have that power also.
Wynton Marsalis
#51. 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
#52. Music is the art of all the invisible things that are real. Art, emotion, spiritual essence, consciousness - these things are hard to prove. Music helps you to focus on your sound. We understand that for very young kids.
Wynton Marsalis
#53. 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
#54. I think that virtuosity is the first sign of morality in a musician. It means you're serious enough to practice.
Wynton Marsalis
#55. 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
#56. We have something that is unique. We have our craft. We have our art. We have our desire.
Branford Marsalis
#58. That's kind of like how jazz is sometimes. You're out there predicting the future, and no one believes you.
Branford Marsalis
#59. We looked up to our father. He still is much greater than us.
Wynton Marsalis
#60. 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
#61. 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
#62. Walt Whitman's "Leaves of Grass" is still in print. They're debating right now over Mark Twain. He's still available. Winslow Homer can still be seen. Our arts are - they're there. We got to go get them and understand that this is an important legacy for our country.
Wynton Marsalis
#63. So much of Jazz doesn't have an audience other than music students or musicians.
Branford Marsalis
#66. 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
#67. Maybe the preoccupation with technological progress has overshadowed our concern with human progress.
Wynton Marsalis
#68. What is deeper than respect and love? That's what we felt: veneration.
Wynton Marsalis
#69. Duke Ellington always had a style: original, clean with interesting color combinations. He had an artist's eye.
Wynton Marsalis
#70. I generally work right up to when I have to do something - I'm always doing a lot.
Wynton Marsalis
#73. Louis Armstrong is jazz. He represents what the music is all about.
Wynton Marsalis
#74. 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
#75. 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
#76. New Orleans - the real New Orleans - is the soul of the country.
Wynton Marsalis
#77. Even in these times, there are still neighbors that will turn their backs on neighbors.
Wynton Marsalis
#78. 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
#79. If I were like a lot of other people, then it wouldn't be fun; but since I'm like me, it's okay.
Branford Marsalis
#80. Jazz fans love Miles and I love him for a myriad of reasons, but the overviews are always too simplistic.
Branford Marsalis
#81. How great musicians demonstrate a mutual respect and trust on the bandstand can alter your outlook on the world and enrich every aspect of your life, understanding what it means to be a global citizen in the most modern sense.
Wynton Marsalis
#82. 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
#84. When you create change with your point of view, you have to be ready for what comes with that.
Wynton Marsalis
#85. Only a few act - the rest of us reap the benefits of their risk.
Wynton Marsalis
#86. Humility is the doorway 2 truth & clarity of objectives ... it's the doorway 2 learning.
Wynton Marsalis
#87. One thing about excellence, it's an exclusive club. And it's 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
#88. I like to make records sound good. I'm more like a reducer than a producer. If an artist cannot produce themselves, what's the point?
Branford Marsalis
#89. I gave up my base in popular culture when I left the Tonight Show.
Branford Marsalis
#90. 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
#91. I sounded like myself. People be saying I sound like Miles or Clifford Brown.
Wynton Marsalis
#92. 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
#93. If it's not going to sound like Terrapin Station, what's the point of playing Terrapin Station?
Branford Marsalis
#94. 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
#95. Trumpet players are just belligerant, and cocky, and you know, just hard-headed.
Wynton Marsalis
#96. One of the things that's clear to me from interviews that I've read is that the more popular successful jazz musicians had audiences above and beyond the music community.
Branford Marsalis
#97. My older brother and myself always played together in bands, but we never knew we would be professional musicians.
Wynton Marsalis
#100. It's hard to get into Newsweek because, as more of our former intellectual magazines take on a pop focus, if there's no buzz, there's no interest.
Branford Marsalis
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