Wynton Marsalis Quotes About Tradition

Quotes about: Tradition

• Because the blues is the basis of most American music in the 20th century. It's a 12-bar form that's played by jazz, bluegrass and country musicians. It has a rhythmic vocabulary that's been used by rock n' roll. It's related to spirituals, and even the American fiddle tradition.

  Wynton Marsalis

  Inspiring, Country, Vocabulary

• Jazz is not just 'Well, man, this is what I feel like playing.' It's a very structured thing that comes down from a tradition and requires a lot of thought and study.

  Wynton Marsalis

  Men, Jazz, Study

• I hope it might help players have confidence in our own ways, and not to be afraid of them, as Bernstein showed - things like hoe-downs, fiddle songs, and the art of improvisation, and the New Orleans funeral tradition, and call-and-response church singing, and the fact that the blues run through everything. And in our relationship to European music, in that we don't have to imitate it, it's a part of us, inseparable.

  Wynton Marsalis

  Running, Song, Art

• 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.

  Wynton Marsalis

  Cutting, Battle, Band

  Interview with Steve LeVeille, radiofreesteve.wordpress.com. 1994.

• New Orleans had a great tradition of celebration. Opera, military marching bands, folk music, the blues, different types of church music, ragtime, echoes of traditional African drumming, and all of the dance styles that went with this music could be heard and seen throughout the city. When all of these kinds of music blended into one, jazz was born.

  Wynton Marsalis

  Military, Echoes, New Orleans

• I travel up and down the country and I've been all around the middle of America for many years. Middle America is not one big mass of people with a proverbial beer in its hand, keeping the country down. That is not my experience of it and I don't labor under that misconception. And we have a long tradition of coming together through music in our country.

  Wynton Marsalis

  Country, Beer, Hands

  Interview with Vickie Karp, www.huffingtonpost.com. January 18, 2009.

• We need more math classes, we need more science. It's the art of math and the art of science that creates all the innovation, and we have a tradition of great arts, great music.

  Wynton Marsalis

  Art, Math, Class

  Source: www.pbs.org

• 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.

  Wynton Marsalis

  Mean, Musician, Needs

  Source: www.pbs.org

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