Wynton Marsalis

Don’t bullshit, just play.

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.

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.

Nothing else will ever capture the democratic process in sound as perfectly as Jazz.

A beat is a moment in the life a groove.

Everything I record, I just try to sound like me and come up with songs that suit what I do and then just go for it. I never know what the public’s going to like, anyway.

I don’t consider myself a musician who has achieved perfection and can’t develop any further.

Django Reinhardt was fantastic. he must have been playing all the time to be that good.

When I achieved what I thought the musicians were trying to do, the sound sort of bloomed. When it’s right, everything is beautiful.

I didn’t need to worry about keys, chords, melody if I had that emotion that brought tears and laughter to people’s hearts.

The way I think about the practicing, it is my undercover work.

Jazz is not to be sliced into bites by mass marketing geniuses who assume we are mindless cattle.

What makes my approach special is that I do different things. I do jazz, blues, country music and so forth. I do them all, like a good utility man.

Love songs last because they are about feelings that don’t change.

Lionel Richie told me forget about the critics. But if you come back with hit after hit, you don’t have to worry about anything.

Jazz is a work in progress. We’ll be defining traditions in Jazz for 200-300 years.

I never thought Jazz was meant to be a museum piece like other dead things once considered artistic.

I used to play a place in Twist, Arkansas… It used to get quite cold in Twist. And they used to take something that looked like a big garbage pail and set it in the middle of the floor, half-fill it with kerosene. They’d light that fuel and that’s what we’d use for heat… But this particular night, two guys started to fighting and one of them knocked the other one over onto this container. When they did it spilled on the floor. Now, it was already burning so when it spilled it looked like a river of fire. Everybody ran for the front door including yours truly. But when I got on the outside then I realized that I’d left the guitar inside. I went back for it. The building was a wooden building and it was burning so fast that when I got my guitar it started to collapse around me. So I almost lost my life trying to save the guitar. But the next morning we found that these two guys who were fighting were fighting about a lady. I never did meet the lady but I learned that her name was Lucille. So I named my guitar Lucille to remind me not to do a thing like that again.

It’s just exciting to be part of something that is brand-new.

Inspiration may be a form of super-consciousness, or perhaps of subconsciousness—I wouldn’t know. But I am sure it is the antithesis of self-consciousness.