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" I play piano and drums very poorly and French horn and tuba all equally as bad. "

Wynton Marsalis

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" When I was 12, I began listening to John Coltrane and I developed a love for jazz, which I still have more and more each year. "

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" When you create change with your point of view, you have to be ready for what comes with that. "

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" This rebuilding of New Orleans gives us the perfect opportunity to see if we're ready to extend the legacy of Dr. King. "

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" I got my first trumpet when I was six years old, from Al Hirt. My father was playing in Al Hirt's band at that time. "

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" 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. "

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" 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. "

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" A musician's whole life is to listen. "

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" There's always the cliche of the choir shouting and clapping. OK, you have to do that, but there's also introspective parts, parts where you just follow someone that's preaching. There's lots of different emotions and moods that a service requires. "

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" I never minded giving my opinions. They are just opinions, and I had studied music and I had strong feelings. I was happy for my opinions to join all the other opinions. But you have to be prepared for what comes back, especially if you don't agree with the dominant mythology. "

Wynton Marsalis

" The history of jazz lets us know that this period in our history is not the only period we've come through together. If we truly understood the history of our national arts, we'd know that we have mutual aspirations, a shared history, in good times and bad. "

Wynton Marsalis

" Many of our greatest musicians abandoned all of their aesthetic objectives to try to become pertinent. And, at the end of the day, they never became pop stars. I counter stated that very strongly, and I continue to do that. "

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" I grew up in the South, and our way of dealing with each other was teasing, ribbing, making fun and scrapping in the street. Criticism doesn't bother me so much. It actually made me, when I was younger, more aggressive. But you get into middle age, and you lose interest in that stuff. It's not serious. "

Wynton Marsalis

" 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. "

Wynton Marsalis

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

Wynton Marsalis

" Jazz comes from our way of life, and because it's our national art form, it helps us to understand who we are. "

Wynton Marsalis

" When I first came to New York everybody on the scene would treat me like I could play, but I couldn't. "

Wynton Marsalis

" I believe in professionalism, but playing is not like a job. You have to be grateful to have the opportunity to play. "

Wynton Marsalis

" I feel that for years of teaching in the country and reading criticism in books, I feel like the things most needed in our culture are the understanding of the meanings of our music. We haven't done that good of job teaching our kids what our music means or how we developed our taste in music that reminds us and teaches us who we are. "

Wynton Marsalis

" I have absolutely no idea what my generation did to enrich our democracy. We dropped the ball. We entered a period of complacency and closed our eyes to the public corruption of our democracy. "

Wynton Marsalis

" Trumpet players see each other, and it's like we're getting ready to square off or get into a fight or something. "

Wynton Marsalis

" 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. "

Wynton Marsalis

" I always read all these books about the slaves. My mother is very educated. My father would talk to us like we were grown men. We never knew what he was talking about half the time. "

Wynton Marsalis

" Don't settle for style. Succeed in substance. "

Wynton Marsalis

" Don't wish for someone else to do later what you can do now. "

Wynton Marsalis

" I didn't want to get that ring around my lips from practicing the trumpet, because I thought the girls wouldn't like me. So I never practiced. "

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" What, other than injustice, could be the reason that the displaced citizens of New Orleans cannot be accommodated by the richest nation in the world? "

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" 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. "

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" Only a few act - the rest of us reap the benefits of their risk. "

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" The heart of a music is its rhythm. The heart of rhythm section music is the rhythm. "

Wynton Marsalis

" 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. "

Wynton Marsalis