Wynton Marsalis
Wynton Marsalis
Wynton Learson Marsalisis a trumpeter, composer, teacher, music educator, and artistic director of Jazz at Lincoln Center in New York City, United States. Marsalis has promoted the appreciation of classical and jazz music often to young audiences. Marsalis has been awarded nine Grammys in both genres, and his Blood on the Fields was the first jazz composition to win the Pulitzer Prize for Music. Marsalis is the son of jazz musician Ellis Marsalis, Jr., grandson of Ellis Marsalis, Sr., and...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionComposer
Date of Birth18 October 1961
CityNew Orleans, LA
CountryUnited States of America
Wynton Marsalis quotes about
Commercialism that has absolutely no relationship to quality whatsoever, only quantitative assessment of a thing.
What is deeper than respect and love? That’s what we felt: veneration.
I get so much from having the opportunity to interface with the younger people and to bring information to them and to represent our culture and our way of life. The feeling and the warmth and the love, it's unbelievable. The type of exchange that goes on between students and teachers or visiting people who are doing master classes, and not just when they're musicians. Even general classes, when the students are not necessarily musicians.
Everything comes out in blues music: joy , pain , struggle . Blues is affirmation with absolute elegance.
Love is the spiritual essence of what we do. Technique is the manifestation of the preparation and investment as a result of the love.
The blues is always there. It's going to be hard out here, but it's all right. It's all right, and that's what the blues teaches you. You got to roll with the punches and find your equilibrium.
In Jazz, improvisation isn't a matter of just making any ol' thing up. Jazz, like any language, has its own grammer and vocabulary. There's no right or wrong, just some choices that are better than others.
Through improvisation, jazz teaches you about yourself. And through swing, it teaches you that other people are individuals too. It teaches you how to coordinate with them.
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.
Jazz is democracy in music.
Jazz is not the kind of music you are going to learn to play in three or four years or that you can just get because you have some talent for music.
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.
Everything about the swing is about some guideline and some grid and the elegant way that you negotiate your way through that grid.
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."