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Quote by Wynton Marsalis

“To say that the Afro American created jazz doesn't mean anything bad about Anglo Americans, and I always teach my younger jazz musicians that at this point the entirety of the American tradition is your heritage, and you need to know it.”

Quote by Wynton Marsalis

Author

Wynton Marsalis

Wynton Marsalis is an American trumpeter, composer, and bandleader. Born on October 18, 1961, he has made significant contributions to the field of jazz music. Marsalis has won numerous awards, including nine Grammy Awards, and has been a leading figure in the jazz community. more

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“The musicians, Duke Ellington, his thing was not about separating himself from the rest of America. Louis Armstrong - go to the forefathers of our music - Jelly Roll Morton - they're not preaching a separatist agenda. They're not taking their music and saying, "This is for me."”

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“When I say "our," I definitely mean all of America. It's not less pertinent for you because it comes from a Black person, just like a great achievement by an Anglo American is less important.”

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“For me as a person who's in the arts and as someone who understands the magnitude of our contributions and the price that was paid to contribute to that, that we just have not gotten that together. I will do all that I can to get in front of our kids, to try to teach them, but at a certain point the people have to want it and come towards it.”

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“The people are not coming because of me. They didn't come before me. It's because of a lack of education and understanding, so it makes me more motivated. It's like my mother said about having an artistic child - she learned more from him and he gets more attention and more of the love, not less.”

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“It's our job to just do as much as we can to enlighten the people about it and to represent it by playing it with some integrity. That's what I try to do.”

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“I think that when the education system started to be dismantled during the first Great Depression in the 1930s, we didn't recover from that.”

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“We started to confuse entertainment with art, because art has a component of entertainment. It has to have that or it becomes too boring. It becomes too lost in its own devices. But I just think that we started to lose, and even before that, it's not necessary.”

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“Art is a luxury. It's not necessary for you to - you can work your job and you can make some money and never know who Walt Whitman was, and never read a poem.”

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Author:Wynton Marsalis

“The arts shows that you're civilized, and it makes life sweet. So you can exist and you can buy more things and you can be more - we're dealing with a form of commercialism that obscures a prior relationship to quality, and it's a national problem.”

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“We don't have the leadership or the understanding of the value of this, and when your political systems and your economic systems start to fail, it's only a cultural understanding that allows you to reconstruct them and to get back to who you are. For some reason, it hasn't dawned on us yet.”

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Author:Wynton Marsalis