Wynton Marsalis Quotes

A beat is a moment in the life a groove.

Milk in a mother’s breast-that’s cool. Milk in a mouth-that’s cool too. But milk in my trumpet? Not so cool. I have to play that thing.

What is deeper than respect and love? That’s what we felt: veneration.

Whenever you face a man who’s playing your instrument, there’s a competition.

My mother always took my brothers and me to music lessons. There were six children. Our parents attended our concerts and encouraged us to study and enjoy many different types of music.

Love is the spiritual essence of what we do. Technique is the manifestation of the preparation and investment as a result of the love.

Benny Goodman’s band was integrated before baseball. Even before it was physically integrated, music was integrated. Everyone listened to Armstrong and Ellington. The 20s was called the Jazz Age. It’s part of being American.

As long as there is democracy, there will be people wanting to play jazz because nothing else will ever so perfectly capture the democratic process in sound. Jazz means working things out musically with other people. You have to listen to other musicians and play with them even if you don’t agree with what they’re playing. It teaches you the very opposite of racism and anti-Semitism. It teaches you that the world is big enough to accommodate us all.

If you didn’t have the amalgam of Blacks and African-type sensibility and European sensibility, you wouldn’t have jazz. Even in the negative and in the positive ways – if there was no slavery and the abolition of slavery, there would be no jazz.

When did we begin to lose faith in our ability to effect change?

People have taken time out of their day and spent their money to come sit down at a concert. And it’s jazz music-it’s not easy for them to get to it. I don’t want them ever to feel that I’m taking their presence lightly.

We need more math classes, we need more science. It’s the art of math and the art of science that creates all the innovation, and we have a tradition of great arts, great music.