It's funny because as a composer, you want to hear your songs live on. I think a lot of times people will create a song and it becomes stagnant or something that they're no longer interested in playing, and they leave it alone.
Even if I have a good day, I still am aware of other people that are going through really hard, tumultuous things. I don't want to be the person who has a platform and neglects the things I see in my life and experiences.
It doesn't matter if I ever win another award or get to play another major jazz festival in America. I would rather not garner any of those things and speak honestly about the things that I see my people endure in this country and all over the world.
Man I mean, the great thing about playing clubs in Harlem is people have an appreciation not just for the music but for the history of the music.
I think a lot of musicians and artists are really one that really only have one trick.
At Mardi Gras, the different tribes will basically play war games, and so my brother is what you call a Flag Boy, which is more of less like a tribe's diplomat. He carries the game's standard and is really the line of where the game starts.
I kind of prefer to be sort of ahead of the pack checking things out, priming the canvas, if you will, for the younger guys that are going to come up and try to make their own statements about what they feel and what they have to contribute.
New Orleans is a place where people are deliberately undereducated so that they can be a labour class - the economy there is tourism, and one of the only outlets that black males have traditionally been allowed is to play jazz music, y'know?
I came up with a 'forecasting cell,' which is basically a mixed intention cell or chord that is a complete hybrid of a consonance and a dissonance, and what that does when you are improvising is lead you to where you are supposed to go.
My main horn is a hybrid of a flugelhorn a coronet and a trumpet, but that's really because, for me, each instrument to me had a different voice, and I liked them all, but I didn't like any one of them singularly.
The music that I make, the younger musicians are referring to it as 'stretch' music.
I live in New York, but I'm gone 310, 320 days a year. My apartment is storage.
I don't just play the trumpet because it's something that resonates with me: I play the trumpet because I realize it's a means to help free a lot of people that ain't free.
Depending on what you allow, you can still get the blues, man. I'm still trying to figure out where the blues really lies, where the street is.
The one thing that I've learned is that people don't change. Each new generation has the same stuff that the last one did. It's one of those things where jazz kind of works in five-year cycles.
If anyone ever tells me something doesn't go together, it makes me want to try it.
We didn't have much, but I was raised to believe if you had books, you had a lot. My grandfather and my parents made me and my twin brother Kiel read at least a book a week.
I wouldn't argue that anyone living can play the trumpet better than Wynton Marsalis.
You can't grow if you're going to say: 'The contributions of my predecessors are greater than anything I can ever achieve.' Each generation has to have a chance to find itself.
Jazz is really 20th-century fusion music. You take West African harmony and rhythm, mix with European harmony, and boom!
I hate the natural sound of the trumpet, but I think I'm naturally set up to be a trumpet player. I know that sounds weird. But pretty much anytime I play a note, I'm uncomfortable in a general sense.
Creating an environment musically that shows that we all belong together is what I'm interested in doing, and that happened really early on.Collection: Together
What we're doing now, is to try to eradicate the limited notion of how people are interacting with each other through hyper-racialized ideas. A lot of it deal with, as an example, genre. If I ask you to visualize a trap musician or a hip-hop musician, you'll see one thing. If I say visualize a western classical musician, you'll see a very different thing. A lot of how music is disseminated to us is hyper-racialized. It's not something that we think about all the time, but if you take a minute to look back, it's why you get this argument when there's a white rapper.Collection: Thinking
People call what we do "stretch music." This is our style, and one of the newer, in vogue ways of playing creative, improvised music. It really grew out of me trying to address something that I saw in my everyday life in my neighborhood - trying to develop that and refine that and excavate exactly what that was in a way that, when I communicated it, it was palpable and easily read. That started really early. Why it started was from something that I was really angry about.Collection: People
Anyone should be able to express themselves in any context. Obviously, there are arguments against appropriation, but it's one thing when someone is doing something for satire or making fun of a culture, but if they respects the tenets of the culture and they want to be a part of that, what could be more beautiful than that?Collection: Beautiful
I was a really good youth boxer, and I enjoyed the sport very much. Once I actually started to play the trumpet, it is very similar to boxing. Most of the great trumpet players boxed: Miles Davis was a boxer, Wallace Roney is a boxer, Terrence Blanchard is a boxer. In a boxing ring, no one can help you. It's just you and the other guy, and your job is to get him out of there, to outscore him in the best sense of it. When you learn to box, the first thing they teach you is to protect yourself at all times, and some people also learn that they like being hit.Collection: Sports
The trumpet is a very violent instrument - probably one of the most archaic of all the modern instruments. It's physically really demanding: you have to stay in pretty good shape.Collection: Modern
I liked trumpet because it's related to boxing, but also it has a capacity to create a different type of beauty. There are fight fans, people who want to see that, but what they're really there to see is pretty rough. They're there for blood, which is fine. It's part of it. I enjoyed having the same type of internal, mental, physical fight, but enduring that sort of trauma or pain to send a message of love. I can still have the fight, but what I'm fighting for is more a reality that I want to create.Collection: Pain
To me, trying to achieve the balance is when you become good: when you have enough technique to be able to play what is that you want, but also when you can refine what you want to communicate to people. As a younger person, it wasn't something I thought about so much.Collection: People