Best quotes by Wynton Marsalis on Music

Checkout quotes by Wynton Marsalis on Music

• ‟ Jazz music is America's past and its potential, summed up and sanctified and accessible to anybody who learns to listen to, feel, and understand it. The music can connect us to our earlier selves and to our better selves-to-come. It can remind us of where we fit on the time line of human achievement, an ultimate value of art.

  - Wynton Marsalis
  

• ‟ The heart of a music is its rhythm. The heart of rhythm section music is the rhythm.

  - Wynton Marsalis
  

• ‟ I'm just lucky to have the type of friends and musicians and people dedicated to my music that I do.

  - Wynton Marsalis
  

• ‟ Everything comes out in blues music: joy, pain, struggle. Blues is affirmation with absolute elegance. It's about a man and a woman. So the pain and the struggle in the blues is that universal pain that comes from having your heart broken. Most blues songs are not about social statements.

  - Wynton Marsalis
  

• ‟ Because the blues is the basis of most American music in the 20th century. It's a 12-bar form that's played by jazz, bluegrass and country musicians. It has a rhythmic vocabulary that's been used by rock n' roll. It's related to spirituals, and even the American fiddle tradition.

  - Wynton Marsalis
  

• ‟ The blues. It runs through all American music. Somebody bending the note. The other is the two-beat groove. It's in New Orleans music, it's in jazz, it's in country music, it's in gospel.

  - Wynton Marsalis
  

• ‟ What I've learned how to do as I've gotten older is to take all of the information that I have, and push it aside, and try to distill each song into an emotional theme. The hardest thing that I've ever had to learn how to do in playing music is use the sound of my instrument to create an emotional effect.

  - Wynton Marsalis
  

• ‟ What I really have in my head, my imagination, my understanding of music, I never really get that out.

  - Wynton Marsalis
  

• ‟ In the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra we play such a diversity of music, with 10 arrangers in the band, we don't really worry about whether it's contemporary or not.

  - Wynton Marsalis
  

• ‟ Don't worry about what others say about your music. Pursue whatever you are hearing... but if everybody really hates your music maybe you could try some different approaches.

  - Wynton Marsalis
  

• ‟ 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.

  - Wynton Marsalis
  

• ‟ 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?

  - Wynton Marsalis