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" Trumpet players see each other, and it's like we're getting ready to square off or get into a fight or something. "

Wynton Marsalis

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" 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

" 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

" Ethics are more important than laws. "

Wynton Marsalis

" I feel that for years of teaching in the country and reading criticism in books, I feel like the things most needed in our culture are the understanding of the meanings of our music. We haven't done that good of job teaching our kids what our music means or how we developed our taste in music that reminds us and teaches us who we are. "

Wynton Marsalis

" 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

" The first time I ever played the trumpet in public, I played the Marine Hymn. I sounded terrible. "

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

" 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

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

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

" 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

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

Wynton Marsalis

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

Wynton Marsalis

" Maybe the preoccupation with technological progress has overshadowed our concern with human progress. "

Wynton Marsalis

" Don't wish for someone else to do later what you can do now. "

Wynton Marsalis

" 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

" 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

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

Wynton Marsalis

" Don't settle for style. Succeed in substance. "

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

" Because the blues is the basis of most American music in the 20th century. It's a 12-bar form that's played by jazz, bluegrass and country musicians. It has a rhythmic vocabulary that's been used by rock n' roll. It's related to spirituals, and even the American fiddle tradition. "

Wynton Marsalis

" 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

" I'm just lucky to have the type of friends and musicians and people dedicated to my music that I do. "

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

" 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

" 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

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

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

" 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

" Jazz music creates so many phenomenal figures. "

Wynton Marsalis