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" 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

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" I have friends who will critique me much harder than any review. "

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" Duke Ellington always had a style: original, clean with interesting color combinations. He had an artist's eye. "

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

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" 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. "

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" Whenever you face a man who's playing your instrument, there's a competition. "

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" 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. "

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" My daddy thought - no, he expected - that my brothers and I and our generation would make the world a better place. He was correct in his belief because he had lived in an America of continual social progress, depression followed by prosperity, segregation by integration, and so on. "

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" Thank the good Lord for a job. "

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

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" 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. "

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" 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. "

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

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" 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. "

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" 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. "

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" 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. "

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" You need a team. You need people to push you. You need opponents. "

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" 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. "

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" 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. "

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" I'm not a person who writes really abstract things with oblique references. I look at abstraction like I look at condiments. Give me some Tabasco sauce, some ketchup, some mayonnaise. I love all of that. Put it on a trumpet. I've just got to have the ketchup and Tabasco sauce. That's my attitude about musical philosophy. "

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" Jazz comes from our way of life, and because it's our national art form, it helps us to understand who we are. "

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

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" 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. "

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" 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. "

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

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" 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. "

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" 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. "

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" 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. "

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" I believed in studying just because I knew education was a privilege. It was the discipline of study, to get into the habit of doing something that you don't want to do. "

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" When you create change with your point of view, you have to be ready for what comes with that. "

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