Wynton Marsalis Quotes & Sayings (Page 4)

“When people dress well, they play well.”

“My daddy expected that my brothers and I and our generation would make the world a better place. He had lived in an America of continual social progress.”

“My thing is, once you start to put a backbeat on your music or something that has a machine in it, you have popularity, but you lose the flexibility. And you lose a richness.”

“There's the tradition in jazz of having the Battle of the Bands, and you do not want to get your head cut when you're playing.”

“Through first-class education, a generation marches down the long uncertain road of the future with confidence.”

“Whenever you face a man who's playing your instrument, there's a competition.”

“I grew up in the South, in New Orleans, where guys torture you all the time. So I didn't really grow up on the self-esteem campaign. When you were lousy at something, they told you you were lousy, and they told you how to fix it.”

“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.”

“There is an idea that a mind is wasted on the arts unless it makes you good in math or science. There is some evidence that the arts might help you in math and science.”

“I didn't have a philosophical understanding of music until I came to New York. I didn't understand how it applied to my kind and my generation. I thought it was just old people talking.”