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Wynton Marsalis Quotes


Don't settle for style. Succeed in substance.

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

Don't worry about what others say about your music. Pursue whatever you are hearing... but if everybody really hates your music maybe you could try some different approaches.

Even in these times, there are still neighbors that will turn their backs on neighbors.

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.

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

I believed in studying just because I knew education was a privilege. It was the discipline of study, to get into the habit of doing something that you don't want to do.

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.

I dress up a certain way because I respect the music.

I feel like a lot of the fundamental material, I've assimilated. So now the question is: Am I going to really get into my spiritual inheritance of music and really develop my abilities?

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.

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.

I sounded like myself. People be saying I sound like Miles or Clifford Brown.

I wanted to make somebody feel like Coltrane made me feel, listening to it.

It was Dr. King's tireless activism that fostered our modern way of relating to one another.

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.

Jazz is not the kind of music you are going to learn to play in three or four years or that you can just get because you have some talent for music.

Many a revolution started with the actions of a few. Only 56 men signed the Declaration of Independence. A few hanging together can lead a nation to change.

Maybe the preoccupation with technological progress has overshadowed our concern with human progress.

My daddy expected that my brothers and I and our generation would make the world a better place. He had lived in an America of continual social progress.