Wynton Marsalis Quotes

Jazz is about being in the moment.

Jazz is letting everybody do his or her thing with the music.

Jazz is a music of great achievements but speed and chops serve a different function in jazz.

Jazz is smooth and cool. Jazz is rage. Jazz flows like water. Jazz never seems to begin or end. Jazz isn't methodical, but jazz isn't messy either. Jazz is a conversation, a give and take. Jazz is the connection and communication between musicians. Jazz is abandon.

Jazz of the sort we play is a happy, extroverted music. You don't have to think about it too much.

Jazz music is an intensified feeling of nonchalance.

Jazz is rhythm and meaning.

I think music naturally wants to be played with more than one person. There's a surprise element, and you don't know what it will be, and it's up to that other person's energy to help create this third thing.

Jazz is people's music, a collectivity.

In fact, jazz has such a great feeling and great emotional content that it really doesn't require you to have technical understanding of it. I think you just have to allow your feelings to go with the music and you will find yourself carried along by it fairly quickly.

Jazz music is to be played sweet, soft, plenty rhythm.

A good quartet is like a good conversation among friends interacting to each other's ideas.

A jazz beat is a dynamic changing rhythm.

Jazz music, as is also the case with the old down-home spirituals, gospel and jubilee songs, jumps, shouts and moans, is essentially an American vernacular or idiomatic modification of musical conventions imported from Europe, beginning back during the time of the early settlers of the original colonies.

That's what music-making is: a dialogue.

Rock bands don't really swing... a lot of rock is stiff. They don't understand the feel, the movement, you know, the jungle of it all.

Jazz is really 20th-century fusion music. You take West African harmony and rhythm, mix with European harmony, and boom!

Great melody over great riffs is, to me, the secret of it all.

There is no roles. No one is keeping any roles. The drummer is also answering everybody and everything. So it is a constant conversation and communication between musicians on an extremely high level with extremely valuable material, motifs, and melodies.

Musicians playing together, it's a conversation, and ideally I want our conversation to be really intriguing and interesting and beautiful.

I just love to play and I get a chance to play with other musicians and I jump on it.

Yeah, improvising only really works 100% when you're with somebody.

You get this really cool groove when you're playing just piano, bass, and drums where everyone's sort of feeling each other's space, which is the only way to put it, but it really is true, and everyone's sort of sitting in their own pocket. It's kind of jazz-like.

Music is like a conversation. One person says one thing that speaks with a harmonica, with a bass, with a drum. They're all conversating, and we're just trying to find a way to make conversation rather than blah, blah, blah. But it's not really so hard a thing to do if you know the way to approach it.

I mean, in the course of an evening, people will take a solo here and there, but generally it's all about the rhythm of that music. Dealing with the rhythm with everything. That's essentially at least my concept of what that group is.