Wynton Marsalis Quotes - Page 8

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• It's like we're suffering from an identity crisis, and that identity is in our arts and the fact that we don't find it chief amongst our agendas to teach our kids who we are as a nation and the battles we've had on this ground and how they've been successfully resolved. We can't enjoy the fruits of the labor of our ancestors.

  Wynton Marsalis

  Art, Kids, Suffering

  Source: www.pbs.org

  4 Copy quote

• Our culture is what we did together. What did Walt Whitman represent for all of us? What was his message to us? That is an inheritance, and when we squander that inheritance we act outside. We don't know who we are; we don't know where we are.

  Wynton Marsalis

  Together, Culture, Inheritance

  Source: www.pbs.org

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  4 Copy quote

• We fight for territory. We see it in our Congress, we see it in our political systems, we see it in our ways of life, how separated we are. When we moved out of the cities and we lost all of the memory that was in cities, and we - one of the highest achievements in our culture is to be able to segregate yourself from everyone else, and the deep thing is the deepest punishment is solitary confinement.

  Wynton Marsalis

  Memories, Fighting, Punishment

  Source: www.pbs.org

  4 Copy quote

• My father was a teacher, my mama was a community worker, I taught in so many schools. So when you get that experience of how to communicate with younger people, put that hand on them and give them that old-school feeling, the maturity and adult, a lot of our kids just need the feeling of that love, and that's the frame of reference that I teach from and that's the frame of reference that all of our musicians in the Jazz at Lincoln Center.

  Wynton Marsalis

  Teacher, Father, Kids

  Source: www.pbs.org

  14 Copy quote

• 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

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  4 Copy quote

• As you get older - for example, in our band we have members of our orchestra, like Carlos Enriquez and Ali Jackson and Walter Blanning. I taught them when they were in high school, and now they teach me.I'll regularly call Ali and say, "Man, can you break this rhythm down for me?" Or Carlos was actually our music director in Cuba, and he's been instrumental in a lot of my education, and I started to develop a saying with them, because they tease me all the time - you get older, you have that familiar relationship - I say, "You have to follow your young leadership, too."

  Wynton Marsalis

  School, Men, Directors

  Source: www.pbs.org

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  Wynton Marsalis

  Teacher, Opportunity, Class

  Source: www.pbs.org

  4 Copy quote

• When those who are educated using their education to exploit those who aren't. That's what the sub-prime scandal represents - people of education using it at the expense of others. At Jazz at Lincoln Center, we have 22 educational programs. Not just the word but the substance of education is guided by the arts.

  Wynton Marsalis

  Art, Educational, Lincoln Center

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

  4 Copy quote

• I travel up and down the country and I've been all around the middle of America for many years. Middle America is not one big mass of people with a proverbial beer in its hand, keeping the country down. That is not my experience of it and I don't labor under that misconception. And we have a long tradition of coming together through music in our country.

  Wynton Marsalis

  Country, Beer, Hands

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

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  4 Copy quote

• I love Gustavo Dudamel and I love what he does for classical music, and I love what he comes out of, El Sistema and the old man Abreu. When we were in Venezuela, I had the chance to go to his building. He had, like, five or six orchestras playing of kids from the hood playing, like, Mahler's third symphony and Shostakovich fifth and Beethoven. Man, it's unbelievable. I mean, they could play.

  Wynton Marsalis

  Kids, Mean, Men

  Source: www.pbs.org

  4 Copy quote

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