Wynton Marsalis

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.

A beat is a moment in the life a groove.

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

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

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

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

Pop doesn’t really look back. It can’t. What makes pop work is simplicity.

You don’t have to live the blues to play the blues.

Music and song are, in my opinion, so fine and necessary a part of life that without them we cannot be said really to live at all.

A Jazz musician is a juggler who uses harmonies instead of oranges.

Music must be an innovation.

You could go out and eat and come back and the note would still be playing.

Music’s a good thing, it calm the beast in the man.

After two takes you’re imitating yourself.

I loved Billie Holiday more than any other person other than myself on the stage.

I grew up with the piano. I learned its language as I learned to speak.

I’ll play it first and tell you what it is afterwards.

To me, the guitar cuts through. It carries more than the organ, but the organ has got more guts.

Instrumental music is increasingly marginalized.

The prospect of having to sit through one of Rachmaninov’s extended symphonies or piano concertos tends, quite frankly, to depress me. All those notes, and to what end?

I wanted to put jazz on the record, all the loves of music that I had on the record, so I could show people I was ahead of my 19 years. It may have been over the heads of some people.