Wynton Marsalis

Jazz music is the power of now.

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.

Don’t bullshit, just play.

Jazz isn’t the kind of music you’re going to learn in 3 or 4 years or get because you have talent for music.

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

Don’t settle for style. Succeed in substance.

The guitar is just a wonderful instrument. It’s everything: a bartender, a psychiatrist, a housewife. It’s everything, but it’s elusive.

I think Ive done the best I could have done. But I keep wanting to play better, go further. There are so many sounds I still want to make, so many things I havent yet done. When I was younger I thought maybe Id reached that peak. But Im 86 now, and if I make it through to next month, Ill be 87. And now I know it can never be perfect, it can never be exactly what it should be, so you got to keep going further, getting better.

I don’t care about the rules, if I don’t break the rules at least 10x every song then I’m not doing my job.

If I can’t feel it, I don’t want to sing it.

Women have not been socialized to play drums. It’s not natural for us to hit thing.

Playing the guitar is like telling the truth – you never have to worry about repeating the same [lie] if you told the truth. You don’t have to pretend, or cover up. If someone asks you again, you don’t have to think about it or worry about it because there it is. It’s you.

One of the things I like about Jazz, kid, is I don’t know what’s going to happen next. Do you?

I feel like….Music is the – it’s the answer. It’s the reason.

The louder they [the band] play the softer I sing.

The audience, they’re not professionals. They just love music. It isn’t necessary to play over their heads to be admired.

I’ve always had a deep love of live performance, it’s when I feel most alive.

The inspired moment may sometimes be described as a kind of hallucinatory state of mind: one half of the personality emotes and dictates while the other half listens and notates. The half that listens has better look the other way, had better simulate a half attention only, for the half that dictates is easily disgruntled and avenges itself for too close inspection by fading entirely away.

There’s a sadness to all kinds of music if you want to hear it. There’s also happiness to it if you want to hear it.

It’s like an act of murder; you play with intent to commit something.

Music is my mistress and she plays second fiddle to no one.