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
Nothing else will ever capture the democratic process in sound as perfectly as Jazz.
I feel like a lot of the fundamental material, I've assimilated. So now the question is: Am I going to really get into my spiritual inheritance of music and really develop my abilities?
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.
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.
We no longer want to be a melting pot, because we don't understand what is already melted.
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.
There's so much spirit of integration and democracy in jazz.
Trumpet players are just belligerant, and cocky, and you know, just hard-headed.
The Duke and Swing represent affirmation in the face of adversity.
Jazz music creates so many phenomenal figures.
My older brother and myself always played together in bands, but we never knew we would be professional musicians.
The heart of a music is its rhythm. The heart of rhythm section music is the rhythm.
The rebuilding of New Orleans is an important point in the history of the United States.
The musicians I respected were much older than me. I expected them to cut my head, and they did.