Wynton Marsalis Play Quotations

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.

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

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

In the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra we play such a diversity of music, with 10 arrangers in the band, we don't really worry about whether it's contemporary or not.

Milk in a mother's breast-that's cool. Milk in a mouth-that's cool too. But milk in my trumpet? Not so cool. I have to play that thing.

When it comes to songs and music, yeah, people love to sing and dance and play music and tunes, and that stream of consciousness that exists in music, nobody knows where that comes from.

But you listen to Coltrane and that's something human, something that's about elevation. It's like making love to a woman. It's about something of value, it's not just loud. It doesn't have that violent connotation to it. I wanted to be a jazz musician so bad, but I really couldn't. There was no way I could figure out to learn how to play.

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.

Don't bullshit' just play.

This is our bandstand. If you don't want to play, get up off the instrument and leave.

Those who play for applause....Tha t’s all they get.

Grace Kelly plays with intelligence, wit and feeling. She has a great amount of natural ability and the ability to adapt. That is the hallmark of a first-class jazz musician.

You don't try to duplicate certain things that other cats do, because you could never do it as well as they do. Nobody can get on that tenor saxophone and play like Trane, because he's the only one who can spell out chords and sound good when he does it.

As long as there is democracy, there will be people wanting to play jazz because nothing else will ever so perfectly capture the democratic process in sound. Jazz means working things out musically with other people. You have to listen to other musicians and play with them even if you don't agree with what they're playing. It teaches you the very opposite of racism and anti-Semitism. It teaches you that the world is big enough to accommodate us all.

I always like to play very contemporary concepts of swing right next to New Orleans music because it highlights continuum.