Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I've had a wonderful life with music.
Bebop has set music back twenty years.
I don't follow what everybody else does.
There’s something to be said for doing one thing right.
I live in New York, but I'm gone 310, 320 days a year. My apartment is storage.
Practice and practice and practice, and you'll make friends all over the world.
As long as I have teeth, I'll keep playing. You can't play trumpet without teeth.
If anyone ever tells me something doesn't go together, it makes me want to try it.
The music that I make, the younger musicians are referring to it as 'stretch' music.
I wouldn't argue that anyone living can play the trumpet better than Wynton Marsalis.
I think a lot of musicians and artists are really one that really only have one trick.
When I'm home, I practice four or five hours a day...I warm up for an hour before a gig.
OneBeat is one of the greatest initiatives in advancing the meeting of cultures worldwide.
[Wynton] Marsalis does not aspire to be an innovator, no one else is allowed to have new ideas either.
I can take any series of numbers and turn it into music, from Bach to bebop, Herbie Hancock to hip-hop.
I'm a jazz musician by education and vocation, but I don't think jazz should [ dictate] what I want to do.
Jazz is really 20th-century fusion music. You take West African harmony and rhythm, mix with European harmony, and boom!
Black has always been a staple for me, but that's not really a good favorite color. I've been really into browns lately.
I wish you wouldn't make the strings such an important part of your arrangements because frankly they're only a tax dodge!
Here in Seattle, I'm the most productive I've ever been. I don't allow myself personal distractions. I'm extremely disciplined here.
They use all of the music that I did in the '50s, '60s and the '70s behind people like Tupac and LL Cool J. I'm into all that stuff.
Creating an environment musically that shows that we all belong together is what I'm interested in doing, and that happened really early on.
My work sometimes can be abstract and appear not to have a direct relationship to Afro-American concerns, but, in fact, it is based on that.
Depending on what you allow, you can still get the blues, man. I'm still trying to figure out where the blues really lies, where the street is.
My concerns have been about myself and not about giving something back and putting something in, even though that's been in the back of my head.
Man I mean, the great thing about playing clubs in Harlem is people have an appreciation not just for the music but for the history of the music.
Economy: that what you played had to have meaning, not just a bunch of sixteenth notes. You learn to make better choices of notes as you get older.
I don't just play the trumpet because it's something that resonates with me: I play the trumpet because I realize it's a means to help free a lot of people that ain't free.
We didn't have much, but I was raised to believe if you had books, you had a lot. My grandfather and my parents made me and my twin brother Kiel read at least a book a week.
You can't grow if you're going to say: 'The contributions of my predecessors are greater than anything I can ever achieve.' Each generation has to have a chance to find itself.
The trumpet is a very violent instrument - probably one of the most archaic of all the modern instruments. It's physically really demanding: you have to stay in pretty good shape.
The main problem is to free your mind when you play. I find that in my own playing, whenever I feel any kind of tension, I'm restricted to playing the most fundamental kinds of things.
The one thing that I've learned is that people don't change. Each new generation has the same stuff that the last one did. It's one of those things where jazz kind of works in five-year cycles.
I hate the natural sound of the trumpet, but I think I'm naturally set up to be a trumpet player. I know that sounds weird. But pretty much anytime I play a note, I'm uncomfortable in a general sense.
I thought that I would like to be affiliated with some school or institution. As time went on, I also decided on the subject that I wanted to get involved with in addition to music: it was Black Studies.
My main horn is a hybrid of a flugelhorn a coronet and a trumpet, but that's really because, for me, each instrument to me had a different voice, and I liked them all, but I didn't like any one of them singularly.
Even if I have a good day, I still am aware of other people that are going through really hard, tumultuous things. I don't want to be the person who has a platform and neglects the things I see in my life and experiences.
It's funny because as a composer, you want to hear your songs live on. I think a lot of times people will create a song and it becomes stagnant or something that they're no longer interested in playing, and they leave it alone.
It's an incredible dilemma to be an artist of color and to always be in denial about that, saying, 'I'm a choreographer first and then I'm black,' when in fact, that's not the case. I'm black first and then I'm also a choreographer.
I came up with a 'forecasting cell,' which is basically a mixed intention cell or chord that is a complete hybrid of a consonance and a dissonance, and what that does when you are improvising is lead you to where you are supposed to go.
At Mardi Gras, the different tribes will basically play war games, and so my brother is what you call a Flag Boy, which is more of less like a tribe's diplomat. He carries the game's standard and is really the line of where the game starts.
I kind of prefer to be sort of ahead of the pack checking things out, priming the canvas, if you will, for the younger guys that are going to come up and try to make their own statements about what they feel and what they have to contribute.
New Orleans is a place where people are deliberately undereducated so that they can be a labour class - the economy there is tourism, and one of the only outlets that black males have traditionally been allowed is to play jazz music, y'know?
It doesn't matter if I ever win another award or get to play another major jazz festival in America. I would rather not garner any of those things and speak honestly about the things that I see my people endure in this country and all over the world.
To me, trying to achieve the balance is when you become good: when you have enough technique to be able to play what is that you want, but also when you can refine what you want to communicate to people. As a younger person, it wasn't something I thought about so much.
I was being ridiculed for going to school... But, you see, I had looked hard at the other musicians and the whole show-business scene... They were doing with jazz musicians what they usually reserved for rock n' roll cats: making them overnight successes, then overnight antiques.
To date, [Wynton] Marsalis has received a total of nine Grammy Awards; a Pulitzer Prize (the first ever awarded to a jazz musician)... and twenty-nine honorary degrees, including Columbia, Brown, Princeton and Yale; the National Medal of Arts; and numerous awards from other countries.
Through the dark days of legalized segregation and on into the civil rights era, jazz shone as a beacon for achieving interracial respect and understanding. It seemed as if the dream of a color-blind society was within reach in the jazz world, where musicians were judged on merit and not skin color.
I skipped school one day to see Dizzy Gillespie, and that's where I met Coltrane. Coltrane and Jimmy Heath just joined the band, and I brought my trumpet, and he was sitting at the piano downstairs waiting to join Dizzy's band. He had his saxophone across his lap, and he looked at me and he said, 'You want to play?'
Anyone should be able to express themselves in any context. Obviously, there are arguments against appropriation, but it's one thing when someone is doing something for satire or making fun of a culture, but if they respects the tenets of the culture and they want to be a part of that, what could be more beautiful than that?