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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 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

" 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

" I play piano and drums very poorly and French horn and tuba all equally as bad. "

Wynton Marsalis

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

Wynton Marsalis

" The heart of a music is its rhythm. The heart of rhythm section music is the rhythm. "

Wynton Marsalis

" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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

" Swing is extreme coordination. It's a maintaining balance, equilibrium. It's about executing very difficult rhythms with a panache and a feeling in the context of very strict time. So, 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

" 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

" We always hear about the rights of democracy, but the major responsibility of it is participation. "

Wynton Marsalis

" 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

" 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

" Don't worry about what others say about your music. Pursue whatever you are hearing... but if everybody really hates your music maybe you could try some different approaches. "

Wynton Marsalis

" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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

" It was Dr. King's tireless activism that fostered our modern way of relating to one another. "

Wynton Marsalis

" What I've learned how to do as I've gotten older is to take all of the information that I have, and push it aside, and try to distill each song into an emotional theme. The hardest thing that I've ever had to learn how to do in playing music is use the sound of my instrument to create an emotional effect. "

Wynton Marsalis

" 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

" The best way to be, is to do. "

Wynton Marsalis

" 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

" 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

" 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

" I dress up a certain way because I respect the music. "

Wynton Marsalis

" When people dress well, they play well. "

Wynton Marsalis

" 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

" I grew up in the South, and our way of dealing with each other was teasing, ribbing, making fun and scrapping in the street. Criticism doesn't bother me so much. It actually made me, when I was younger, more aggressive. But you get into middle age, and you lose interest in that stuff. It's not serious. "

Wynton Marsalis