Latest Wynton Marsalis Quotes from Interviews

Quotes about:

• When it comes to songs and music, yeah, people love to sing and dance and play music and tunes, and that stream of consciousness that exists in music, nobody knows where that comes from.

  Wynton Marsalis

  Song, Play, People

  Source: www.pbs.org

• 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.

  Wynton Marsalis

  Equilibrium, Teach, Hard

  Source: www.pbs.org

• We learn a language through its song, and even if you don't have music you have the song of people you love's voice, and you'll notice that song in their voice.

  Wynton Marsalis

  Song, Voice, People

  Source: www.pbs.org

• Even if nobody's singing, just when you talk, you're singing. I'll meet somebody and say, "Oh, I'm tone-deaf." I say, "You're not tone-deaf, because if you were tone-deaf you would speak like that. But you're 'Oh, I'm tone-deaf.' You already sang a song to me."

  Wynton Marsalis

  Song, Singing, Tone

  Source: www.pbs.org

• I try to put a lot of our music in my music - by that I mean of American music.

  Wynton Marsalis

  Mean, Trying, American Music

  Source: www.pbs.org

• I'll write down and catalogue all the different devices that are Americana to me, and I try to have a historic depth and breadth and also the things that we do in our time, the type of vamps and chants, things that are available to us.

  Wynton Marsalis

  Writing, Trying, Depth

  Source: www.pbs.org

• 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.

  Wynton Marsalis

  Church Music, Hymns, Musician

  Source: www.pbs.org

• When you study our greatest artists, you will find that they give us a key to understand how to deal with each other, and that our bloodlines are intertwined. It's not hyphenated America. That there is an America, and it is expressed in those arts. It gives us a key to figure out how to negotiate with each other, and it tells us actually who we are.

  Wynton Marsalis

  Art, America, Keys

  Source: www.pbs.org

• 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.

  Wynton Marsalis

  Character, Blood, Two

  Source: www.pbs.org

• 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.

  Wynton Marsalis

  Country, Art, Important

  Source: www.pbs.org

• The arts speak across epochs. If you think that people started to build a cathedral in 1315 and the people worked on that cathedral, it wasn't going to be finished until 1585. So they were thinking 200 years from now. Maybe by the time I die, this wall might be put up.

  Wynton Marsalis

  Art, Wall, Thinking

  Source: www.pbs.org

• Commercialism that has absolutely no relationship to quality whatsoever, only quantitative assessment of a thing.

  Wynton Marsalis

  Assessment, Quality, Commercialism

  Source: www.pbs.org

• 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.

  Wynton Marsalis

  Political, Understanding, Failing

  Source: www.pbs.org

• 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.

  Wynton Marsalis

  Art, Jobs, Luxury

  Source: www.pbs.org

• The arts shows that you're civilized, and it makes life sweet. So you can exist and you can buy more things and you can be more - we're dealing with a form of commercialism that obscures a prior relationship to quality, and it's a national problem.

  Wynton Marsalis

  Sweet, Art, Quality

  Source: www.pbs.org

• 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.

  Wynton Marsalis

  Art, Thinking, Entertainment

  Source: www.pbs.org

• 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.

  Wynton Marsalis

  Jobs, Integrity, People

  Source: www.pbs.org

• 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.

  Wynton Marsalis

  Thinking, Firsts, Great Depression

  Source: www.pbs.org

• For me as a person who's in the arts and as someone who understands the magnitude of our contributions and the price that was paid to contribute to that, that we just have not gotten that together. I will do all that I can to get in front of our kids, to try to teach them, but at a certain point the people have to want it and come towards it.

  Wynton Marsalis

  Art, Kids, People

  Source: www.pbs.org

• 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.

  Wynton Marsalis

  Mother, Children, People

  Source: www.pbs.org

• When I say "our," I definitely mean all of America. It's not less pertinent for you because it comes from a Black person, just like a great achievement by an Anglo American is less important.

  Wynton Marsalis

  Mean, America, Achievement

  Source: www.pbs.org

• 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."

  Wynton Marsalis

  America, Musician, Jelly

  Source: www.pbs.org

• For Black people, we're one of the only groups of people that for some reason to express love of yourself, in some ways, is misconstrued as a dislike for someone else.

  Wynton Marsalis

  People, Black, Groups

  Source: www.pbs.org

• To say that the Afro American created jazz doesn't mean anything bad about Anglo Americans, and I always teach my younger jazz musicians that at this point the entirety of the American tradition is your heritage, and you need to know it.

  Wynton Marsalis

  Mean, Musician, Needs

  Source: www.pbs.org

• So when we spend all of our time trying to separate that which is already joined, it's a waste of time.

  Wynton Marsalis

  Trying, Waste, Wasting Time

  Source: www.pbs.org