Wynton Marsalis

“I sounded like myself. People be saying I sound like Miles or Clifford Brown.”

“When I first came to New York everybody on the scene would treat me like I could play, but I couldn't.”

“The nerves are a problem on trumpet, because when you mess up everyone can hear it. Just remember most people are too polite to say anything about it. That should calm your nerves.”

“I grew up in the South, in New Orleans, where guys torture you all the time. So I didn't really grow up on the self-esteem campaign. When you were lousy at something, they told you you were lousy, and they told you how to fix it.”

“What I've learned how to do as I've gotten older is to take all of the information that I have, and push it aside, and try to distill each song into an emotional theme. The hardest thing that I've ever had to learn how to do in playing music is use the sound of my instrument to create an emotional effect.”

“The young very seldom lead anything in our country today. It's been quite some time since a younger generation pushed an older one to a higher standard.”

“Many of our greatest musicians abandoned all of their aesthetic objectives to try to become pertinent. And, at the end of the day, they never became pop stars. I counter stated that very strongly, and I continue to do that.”

“The blues. It runs through all American music. Somebody bending the note. The other is the two-beat groove. It's in New Orleans music, it's in jazz, it's in country music, it's in gospel.”

“Jazz is not the kind of music you are going to learn to play in three or four years or that you can just get because you have some talent for music.”

“There's the tradition in jazz of having the Battle of the Bands, and you do not want to get your head cut when you're playing.”

“Ethics are more important than laws.”

“What I really have in my head, my imagination, my understanding of music, I never really get that out.”

“I play piano and drums very poorly and French horn and tuba all equally as bad.”

“It was Dr. King's tireless activism that fostered our modern way of relating to one another.”

“Don't settle for style. Succeed in substance.”

“Through improvisation, jazz teaches you about yourself. And through swing, it teaches you that other people are individuals too. It teaches you how to coordinate with them.”

“My daddy thought - no, he expected - that my brothers and I and our generation would make the world a better place. He was correct in his belief because he had lived in an America of continual social progress, depression followed by prosperity, segregation by integration, and so on.”

“The majority of the high schools and the public schools in N.Y.C. don't even have band programs. Hip-hop in a lot of ways is an outgrowth of a lack of instruments and a desire to play music, so we can't really fault the kids for that.”

“I didn't have a philosophical understanding of music until I came to New York. I didn't understand how it applied to my kind and my generation. I thought it was just old people talking.”

“I feel like a lot of the fundamental material, I've assimilated. So now the question is: Am I going to really get into my spiritual inheritance of music and really develop my abilities?”