List of Wynton Marsalis Quotes

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.

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."

Jazz Celebrates Older Generations And Not Just The Youth Movement. When You "sell" Only To People Of A Certain Age, You Get Cut Off From The Main Body Of Experience. The Power Of Couple Dancing And Courtship, It's Elegant, And You Wouldn't Realize America Was Once A Nation Of Dancers And Singers Today. People Of All Races Could Dance And Sing.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Commercialism That Has Absolutely No Relationship To Quality Whatsoever, Only Quantitative Assessment Of A Thing.

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.

So When We Spend All Of Our Time Trying To Separate That Which Is Already Joined, It's A Waste Of Time.

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.