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
As a jazz musician, you have individual power to create the sound. You also have a responsibility to function in the context of other people who have that power also.
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.
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.
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.
When it comes to songs and music, yeah, people love to sing and dance and play music and tunes, and that stream of consciousness that exists in music, nobody knows where that comes from.
It's our job to just do as much as we can to enlighten the people about it and to represent it by playing it with some integrity. That's what I try to do.
It's important to address young people in the reopening of New Orleans. In rebuilding, let's revisit the potential of American democracy and American glory.
This music heals people because music is vibration, and the proper vibration heals.
We all teach from that same frame of reference. We're like neighborhood - the people who have had the opportunity through this music to gain a platform and spread the message of this music, which is basically love in a form of communication that's honest and truthful.
You need a team. You need people to push you. You need opponents.
The fact that we are culturally ignorant and we don't know what our heritage is, the price that we pay is that we act outside of ourselves almost all the time. We make very bad decisions how we deal with other people and their culture.
I sounded like myself. People be saying I sound like Miles or Clifford Brown.
I'm just lucky to have the type of friends and musicians and people dedicated to my music that I do.
When me and my brother would go to see our daddy playing, there'd be 30 people in the audience. I was only 14 or 15, but I realised something was wrong.