Wynton Marsalis
‘Make it sing.’
‘I’ve been on the road more than twenty years. Every day I have the opportunity to meet lots of different people. Try to make connections between them. I try to understand what they tell me. The hardest part of hearing jazz is understanding what the musician is saying to you. On the bandstand, when you play something someone can relate to, they break out with “uh-huh,” or “yes!” or “Preach. Speak to me, tell it.” Or they just laugh in recognition.’
‘I like the late-night sound of the train, clunking down the tracks, through the distant air the scream of its whistle changing pitches as it passes from one somewhere to another who-knows-where. It makes me feel like a boy again.’
‘To be heard, you have to develop your own sound. You might as well, because who you are will forever be in your voice.’
‘It’s like the feeling I used to get going to my great-aunt Marguerite’s house. She had the tiniest stove in the back room of an old shotgun house. They didn’t even have running hot water. But lord help us for what came off of that stove. Nothing but the type of food that would make old Epicurus lose his mind. She was a little bitty woman, but put something big in that food. And that’s what the musicians always talked about in New Orleans. When you put love in it, that’s what it becomes.’
‘Intensity without volume. that’s the goal on the bandstand. And off.’
‘It’s good we haven’t rehearsed this again, or too much of the swing might have leaked away during the rehearsal.’
‘Once I got to eigth grade, I was practicing my horn at least four hours, sometimes six, every day. My father told me, if you want to be good and separate yourself from other musicians you have to be willing to do what they don’t want to do. A lot might practice one or so hours, but almost none four or five.’
