Wynton Marsalis Quotes - Page 5

Quotes about:

• What takes its place is very dry education. And the tools that actually can teach you - singing and playing, learning how to participate with other people, spiritual richness - are replaced with a big emphasis on how to memorize things. That's such an incomplete education. Survival of the fittest used to mean being bigger and stronger.

  Wynton Marsalis

  Spiritual, Mean, People

  Interview with Vickie Karp, www.huffingtonpost.com. January 18, 2009.

  4 Copy quote

• We created the spirituals. We created so much great music, jazz chief amongst our innovations, teaching us how to prize ourselves and how to speak to one another, that our kids don't know that achievement, there's no way in the world that could be good for us.

  Wynton Marsalis

  Teaching, Kids, Achievement

  Source: www.pbs.org

  4 Copy quote

• Who creates a thing is not as important as what the thing is. Who created baseball? Who created basketball? Who created the space program? Who created - we could go on and on. We could argue about who created something. We all are participants in it.

  Wynton Marsalis

  Basketball, Baseball, Space

  Source: www.pbs.org

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  4 Copy quote

• Many heroic things happened during slavery. And remember that there was a national movement away from it even at the time. The era of Reconstruction and then the subsequent dismantling of Reconstruction sent us in a tailspin. Then we had the Civil Rights movement. Now we have our first non-white president. We have a pattern of moving apart and then coming back together throughout the history of this country. Each time, we come closer.

  Wynton Marsalis

  Country, Moving, Rights

  Interview with Vickie Karp, www.huffingtonpost.com. January 18, 2009.

  4 Copy quote

• I have friends who will critique me much harder than any review.

  Wynton Marsalis

  Reviews, Harder, Critique

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• When did we begin to lose faith in our ability to effect change?

  Wynton Marsalis

  Ability, Effects, Loses

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• 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

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  Wynton Marsalis

  New York, Philosophical, Home

  Interview with Vickie Karp, www.huffingtonpost.com. January 18, 2009.

  4 Copy quote

• I didn't want to get that ring around my lips from practicing the trumpet, because I thought the girls wouldn't like me. So I never practiced.

  Wynton Marsalis

  Girl, Want, Lips

  8 Copy quote

• 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 others

  Wynton Marsalis

  Swings, Views, Giving

  6 Copy quote

• Thank the good Lord for a job.

  Wynton Marsalis

  Jobs, Lord

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• 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

  6 Copy quote

• 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

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• 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

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• When I was 12, I began listening to John Coltrane and I developed a love for jazz, which I still have more and more each year.

  Wynton Marsalis

  Years, Listening, Jazz

  Scholastic Interview, www.scholastic.com. February 2002.

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• 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.

  Wynton Marsalis

  Art, War, Moving

  Interview with Vickie Karp, www.huffingtonpost.com. January 18, 2009.

  7 Copy quote

• 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.

  Wynton Marsalis

  Art, Math, Class

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• 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

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• 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

  7 Copy quote

• 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.

  Wynton Marsalis

  Cat, Play, Trying

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• The Duke and Swing represent affirmation in the face of adversity.

  Wynton Marsalis

  Adversity, Swings, Faces

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• 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

  Country, Marijuana, Generations

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