Top 45 Wynton Marsalis Quotes

Words matter. These are the best Wynton Marsalis Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.

I think that the blues is in everything, so it's not po

I think that the blues is in everything, so it’s not possible to neglect it. You hear somebody go ‘Ooh ooh oooh,’ and that’s the blues. You hear a rock n’ roll song. That’s the blues. Somebody playing a guitar solo? They’re playing the blues.
Wynton Marsalis
The majority of the high schools and the public schools in N.Y.C. don’t even have band programs. Hip-hop in a lot of ways is an outgrowth of a lack of instruments and a desire to play music, so we can’t really fault the kids for that.
Wynton Marsalis
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.
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
What I really have in my head, my imagination, my understanding of music, I never really get that out.
Wynton Marsalis
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
Maybe the preoccupation with technological progress has overshadowed our concern with human progress.
Wynton Marsalis
There really have only ever been a few people in each generation who step out, are willing to put themselves on the line, and risk everything for their beliefs.
Wynton Marsalis
The main three components are the blues, improvisation – which is some kind of element that people are trying to make it up – and swing, which means even though they’re making up music, they’re trying to make it up together. It feels great, like you’re having a great conversation with somebody.
Wynton Marsalis
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
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
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
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 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
It’s important to address young people in the reopening of New Orleans. In rebuilding, let’s revisit the potential of American democracy and American glory.
Wynton Marsalis
My mother always took my brothers and me to music lessons. There were six children. Our parents attended our concerts and encouraged us to study and enjoy many different types of music.
Wynton Marsalis
There is an idea that a mind is wasted on the arts unless it makes you good in math or science. There is some evidence that the arts might help you in math and science.
Wynton Marsalis
When I first came to New York everybody on the scene would treat me like I could play, but I couldn’t.
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
We looked up to our father. He still is much greater than us.
Wynton Marsalis
It was Dr. King’s tireless activism that fostered our modern way of relating to one another.
Wynton Marsalis
Duke Ellington always had a style: original, clean with interesting color combinations. He had an artist’s eye.
Wynton Marsalis
There’s so much spirit of integration and democracy in jazz.
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
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
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
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
Through first-class education, a generation marches down the long uncertain road of the future with confidence.
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
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
As a jazz musician, you have individual power to create

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
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
Jazz comes from our way of life, and because it’s our national art form, it helps us to understand who we are.
Wynton Marsalis
When me and my brother would go to see our daddy playing, there’d be 30 people in the audience. I was only 14 or 15, but I realised something was wrong.
Wynton Marsalis
Don’t settle for style. Succeed in substance.
Wynton Marsalis
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.
Wynton Marsalis
Whenever you face a man who’s playing your instrument, there’s a competition.
Wynton Marsalis
When you create change with your point of view, you have to be ready for what comes with that.
Wynton Marsalis
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.
Wynton Marsalis
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
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
The nerves are a problem on trumpet, because when you mess up everyone can hear it. Just remember most people are too polite to say anything about it. That should calm your nerves.
Wynton Marsalis
The musicians I respected were much older than me. I expected them to cut my head, and they did.
Wynton Marsalis
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.
Wynton Marsalis