Wynton Marsalis
Wynton Marsalis
Wynton Learson Marsalisis a trumpeter, composer, teacher, music educator, and artistic director of Jazz at Lincoln Center in New York City, United States. Marsalis has promoted the appreciation of classical and jazz music often to young audiences. Marsalis has been awarded nine Grammys in both genres, and his Blood on the Fields was the first jazz composition to win the Pulitzer Prize for Music. Marsalis is the son of jazz musician Ellis Marsalis, Jr., grandson of Ellis Marsalis, Sr., and...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionComposer
Date of Birth18 October 1961
CityNew Orleans, LA
CountryUnited States of America
I think that when the education system started to be dismantled during the first Great Depression in the 1930s, we didn't recover from that.
The people are not coming because of me. They didn't come before me. It's because of a lack of education and understanding, so it makes me more motivated. It's like my mother said about having an artistic child - she learned more from him and he gets more attention and more of the love, not less.
The arts shows that you're civilized, and it makes life sweet. So you can exist and you can buy more things and you can be more - we're dealing with a form of commercialism that obscures a prior relationship to quality, and it's a national problem.
For me as a person who's in the arts and as someone who understands the magnitude of our contributions and the price that was paid to contribute to that, that we just have not gotten that together. I will do all that I can to get in front of our kids, to try to teach them, but at a certain point the people have to want it and come towards it.
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.
When I first came to New York everybody on the scene would treat me like I could play, but I couldn't.
For Black people, we're one of the only groups of people that for some reason to express love of yourself, in some ways, is misconstrued as a dislike for someone else.
Maybe the preoccupation with technological progress has overshadowed our concern with human progress.
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.
When I auditioned for my high school band the band director was excited because my father was known to be a great musician. When he heard me, he said 'Are you sure you're Ellis's son?'
There are forces all around you who wish to exploit division, rob you of your freedom, and tell you what to think. But young folks can rekindle the weary spirit of a slumbering nation.
Trumpet players see each other, and it's like we're getting ready to square off or get into a fight or something.
The heart of a music is its rhythm. The heart of rhythm section music is the rhythm.
The musicians I respected were much older than me. I expected them to cut my head, and they did.