Wynton Marsalis

I wanted to make somebody feel like Coltrane made me feel.

Music does not come to you. You have to come to it and you’ll walk away with something you didn’t have before.

In Jazz, improvisation isn’t a matter of just making any ol’ thing up. Jazz, like any language, has its own grammer and vocabulary. There’s no right or wrong, just some choices that are better than others.

Find the best teachers, listen to the finest playing and try to emulate that. Be true to the music.

Don’t bullshit, just play.

Don’t settle for style. Succeed in substance.

Music happens to be an art form that transcends language.

It could be my British need for discipline that makes me admire the American appetite for freedom and passion.

Jazz stands for freedom.

The reward for playing Jazz is playing Jazz.

If I were to call it black music, that would be untrue. I don’t know what that is, unless it would be some African drums or something.

For me, the Les Paul is the greatest rock ‘n’ roll guitar of all time. If you’re not playing a Gibson guitar and you’re playing this kind of music, whether it’s punk, metal or anything grounded in rock ‘n’ roll, you’re not really doing it right. I don’t think professionally I’d every play anything else. Gibson, thank you for making greatest guitars ever.

When you hear my lyrics, you hear the shots that I throw at people. I throw shots because I always been the underdog. I got rejected so many times, and I say it in my lyrics constantly.

It’s important to reflect on what made Jazz so special.

I, myself, came to enjoy the players who didn’t only just swing but who invented new rhythmic patterns, along with new melodic concepts. And those people are: Art Tatum, Bud Powell, Max Roach, Sonny Rollins, Lester Young, Dizzy Gillespie and Charles Parker, who is the greatest genius of all to me because he changed the whole era around.

It bugs me when people try to analyze jazz as an intellectual theorem. It’s not. It’s feeling.

[In 1972] At the moment, we’re getting the same thrill from seeing the Eagles, Jackson Browne, Jo Jo Gunne, and Judee Sill happen… It’s as hard to do it with Jackson Browne as it was to do it with Joni five years ago.

There’s always this sound out there that’s just a little beyond my reach and that just sort of keeps me going.

For a long time I wasn’t listening to music, to the rock and roll stuff on the radio, because it would cause me to get sweaty–it would bring back memories I didn’t want to know about, or I would get that feeling that I’m not alive ’cause I’m not making it. And if it was good, I hated it ’cause I wasn’t doing it. And if it was bad, I was furious ’cause I could’ve done it better…

People involve themselves with the superficiality of Jazz without digging for its soul.

It made no sense to ignore them and to continue writing as if they did not exist. I felt that it was worth the effort to see if I couldn’t say what I had to say in the simplest possible terms.