Wynton Marsalis
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 artCollection: Art
If you want to be different, do something different.Collection: Healing
Jazz music is the power of now. There is no script. It's conversation. The emotion is given to you by musicians as they make split-second decisions to fulfill what they feel the moment requires.Collection: Music
Those who play for applause....Tha t’s all they get.Collection: Play
The only justification for looking down on anyone is that you're going to stop and pick them up.Collection: Justification
I always like to play very contemporary concepts of swing right next to New Orleans music because it highlights continuum.Collection: New Orleans
Love is the spiritual essence of what we do. Technique is the manifestation of the preparation and investment as a result of the love.Collection: Spiritual
We're blues people. And blues never lets tragedy have the last word.Collection: Music
And that's the soulful thing about playing: you offer something to somebody. You don't know if they'll like it, but you offer it.Collection: Jazz
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.Collection: Music
Let the critics criticize and let the doers do.Collection: Doers
Music is always for the listener, but the first listener is always the musicianCollection: Musician
Ethics are more important than laws. Which means that the exact note is less important than the feeling of the note.Collection: Mean
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.Collection: Spiritual
Louis Armstrong is jazz. He represents what the music is all about.Collection: Jazz
Milk in a mother's breast-that's cool. Milk in a mouth-that's cool too. But milk in my trumpet? Not so cool. I have to play that thing.Collection: Mother
I think that virtuosity is the first sign of morality in a musician. It means you're serious enough to practice.Collection: Mean
Some stances are just conducive to swinging. If I stand up straight for too long it's harder to swing. Plus my feet hurt.Collection: Hurt
One thing about excellence, it&Mac226s an exclusive club. And it&Mac226s 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.Collection: Boys
Nothing else will ever capture the democratic process in sound as perfectly as Jazz.Collection: Music
This is our bandstand. If you don't want to play, get up off the instrument and leave.Collection: Play
The Duke and Swing represent affirmation in the face of adversity.Collection: Adversity
Grace Kelly plays with intelligence, wit and feeling. She has a great amount of natural ability and the ability to adapt. That is the hallmark of a first-class jazz musician.Collection: Class
Our culture is what we did together. What did Walt Whitman represent for all of us? What was his message to us? That is an inheritance, and when we squander that inheritance we act outside. We don't know who we are; we don't know where we are.Collection: Together
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.Collection: Jobs
It's like we're suffering from an identity crisis, and that identity is in our arts and the fact that we don't find it chief amongst our agendas to teach our kids who we are as a nation and the battles we've had on this ground and how they've been successfully resolved. We can't enjoy the fruits of the labor of our ancestors.Collection: Art
We no longer want to be a melting pot, because we don't understand what is already melted.Collection: Melting
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.Collection: Art
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.Collection: Mother
When I first came to New York everybody on the scene would treat me like I could play but I couldn't.Collection: New York
I hope it might help players have confidence in our own ways, and not to be afraid of them, as Bernstein showed - things like hoe-downs, fiddle songs, and the art of improvisation, and the New Orleans funeral tradition, and call-and-response church singing, and the fact that the blues run through everything. And in our relationship to European music, in that we don't have to imitate it, it's a part of us, inseparable.Collection: Running
And my identity...I never really wondered about it because, unfortunately, I sounded like myself. People be saying I sound like Miles or Clifford Brown.Collection: People
Everything about the swing is about some guideline and some grid and the elegant way that you negotiate your way through that grid.Collection: Swings
We don't have the leadership or the understanding of the value of this, and when your political systems and your economic systems start to fail, it's only a cultural understanding that allows you to reconstruct them and to get back to who you are. For some reason, it hasn't dawned on us yet.Collection: Political
I remember when I wrote a piece, "Blood on the Fields," it was a while ago, it was about slavery and about two characters, and I studied so much of music, I would always go back to the original documents, and as much as I can get original chants and slave chants and different type of beats and rhythms and ring shout.Collection: Character
When I did the Abyssinian mass, I went through the whole history of the church music and the gospel music, even with the Anglo American hymns, the Afro American hymns, the spirituals and how it developed, up to Thomas Dorsey and the Dixie Hummingbirds, going through the history of the music, jazz musicians.Collection: Church Music
When I came to New York, to Brooklyn, I met Alvin Ailey and Stanley Crouch and August Wilson. They were always putting things in a philosophical context. All the great jazz musicians did, too. There was always a sub-context to what they were saying about music even though they would be very down home and earthy. So I started to develop, in addition to my power and ability to simply hear, a way to place myself in a time.Collection: New York
Jazz music is the power of now.Collection: Music
Certain music, jazz in particular, has the ability to make you a better citizen of the world. It helps you expand your world view and gives you more confidence in your cultural achievements. Improvisational jazz teaches you about yourself while the swing in jazz teaches you how to work with othersCollection: Swings
Art is a luxury. It's not necessary for you to - you can work your job and you can make some money and never know who Walt Whitman was, and never read a poem.Collection: Art
I try to put a lot of our music in my music - by that I mean of American music.Collection: Mean
The musicians, Duke Ellington, his thing was not about separating himself from the rest of America. Louis Armstrong - go to the forefathers of our music - Jelly Roll Morton - they're not preaching a separatist agenda. They're not taking their music and saying, "This is for me."Collection: America
We need more math classes, we need more science. It's the art of math and the art of science that creates all the innovation, and we have a tradition of great arts, great music.Collection: Art
I worry more about the marketing that's taken hold since the 70s. The Jazz era, the Swing era, those were huge. Entire decades were named for music. In the 1940s - after World War II - changes in taxation, ballrooms closing, people moving to the suburbs, and the onset of target marketing and the confusion of commerce with art caused some things to happen as a result that have taken us away from jazz and what jazz offers us.Collection: Art
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.Collection: Thinking
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.Collection: Country
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.Collection: Cat
He [Benny Carter] is all that every jazz musician the world over wants to be. He's performed 20,000 nights. How many shoes have been shined? How much mascara put on? Rouge? How many of those impossible bowties have been tied? How many love songs have been sung? How many dances have been danced? How many have passed to the sound of his music? It's been said that a man should not be forced to live up to his art. Benny Carter is one of the rare instances when we wonder whether the great art that a man has created can live up to him.Collection: Song
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.Collection: Running