Wynton Marsalis

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

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.

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

Jazz music is the power of now.

A beat is a moment in the life a groove.

Don’t bullshit, just play.

Creativity and artistic endeavors have a mission far beyond just making music for the sake of music.

I don’t have a definition of Jazz. You’re just supposed to know it when you hear it.

Stevie didn’t use the technology to drive the song. He used it to enhance. I use the tools to further my work, I don’t use my work to further the tools.

I say this because it’s a good message to give to young talents who feel as I used to. You hear musicians playing with great fluidity and complete conception early on, and you don’t have that ability. I didn’t. I had to know what I was doing. And ultimately it turned out that these people weren’t able to carry their thing very far. I found myself being more attracted to artists who have developed through the years and become better and deeper musicians.I believe in things that are developed through hard work.

It is becoming increasingly difficult to decide where jazz starts or where it stops, where Tin Pan Alley begins and jazz ends, or even where the borderline lies between classical music and jazz. I feel there is no boundary line.

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

The piano ain’t got no wrong notes.

If music is sound and came from silence, then silence is potentially greater than sound.

There’s a category for me. I like to be referred to as a good singer of good songs in good taste.

Most of the stuff I learned to play, I learned in high school. I had a band in high school, a jazz-fusion thing, and I was the keyboard player. I was interested in how the instruments worked and the theory behind playing with them.

Everybody did something. It was very entertaining. We had a lot of fun. Lot of fun. And there was no segregation, that I could see. I never saw any.

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

I have to be a star like another man has to breathe.

Inspiration comes from tunes you play, other musicians and your own imagination.

When you hear somebody with balls, that’s me.