YouSaid · the spoken record

Wynton Marsalis

lines on the record: 27
first: 2020-12-18
most recent: 2020-12-18
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Doing is that right, man, I still smell simile on you. I don't know what you're talking about. Yeah, I'm going to do this till I die if I can, if the good law willing and people will have me. I've been blessed to do something kind of disract and get unbelievable support from people. That's why earlier when I answered the question of racism for somebody like me to complain is. I'd have to be out of my mind”
2020-12-18 · The David Rubenstein Show · Wynton Marsalis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because we didn't have to denigrate or cut anybody down or do anything negative to anybody to create this. It's a non-predatory form. It's a symbiotic form. And you can be as rich as you want to be in jazz and nobody else has to be poor.”
2020-12-18 · The David Rubenstein Show · Wynton Marsalis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because it has a development section, so you have to follow what musicians play from one point. It's like what I loved about that Beethoven symphony. It wasn't just one thing repeated over and over and again. It was a thing. And then another thing, another jazz is the music that's most in the world like conversation. Jazz is a music that prizes individuality. You have a lot of great individuals you can interface with from Lester Young to Billy Holliday to Chick Coreer, Herbie Hancock. You can just name musicians. You have great groups that you can love. They play in different forms. And you have the whole Afro-Latin form of jazz that takes you everywhere from Brazil to Cuba to Puerto Rico. It integrates your citizenship and your understanding of the world. And mostly and most importantly, it gives you tremendous pride and”
2020-12-18 · The David Rubenstein Show · Wynton Marsalis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Jazz has never really been popular, so no, it's not popular like Like Funk was popular, like rock and roll is popular. It's not popular. It is meaningful and is necessary. So those who are interested in that like jazz, those who are not, they don't like jazz. There's a lot of other things to like. We need to teach our kids about the music. It is a national art form. And I always make the point. People say, what's going to be new in jazz? I said, people are going to listen to it. That's what's the new thing.”
2020-12-18 · The David Rubenstein Show · Wynton Marsalis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Position to position people's dedication will bring me to tears. And that's why we're struggling like all the arts organizations are because we've lost the ability to earn revenue, but we are so for real about our mission in achieving it even under this type of duress. I think it's really the greatest blessing I've had in my life has been to work with this high quality people for this amount of time. I'm so grateful for that opportunity. I don't even consider it to be work.”
2020-12-18 · The David Rubenstein Show · Wynton Marsalis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I do many things. I'm also the managing director of our organization. So I deal with everything in our staff, our executive director, Greg Scholl, and our management team. They're all fantastic. Colleagues, if anything, I mean, I work all the time. So I don't separate anything. My work is also my hobby. And this pandemic is, I always respected all of my colleagues, but I'm going to tell you that the pandemic has given me such a greater appreciation of the quality of people. I've been blessed to work with our orchestra. We still have a vast majority of our staff on. We're open for business. We're getting things done. The orchestra is so supportive of the mission of the organization. We have 11 arranges in our orchestra. That's something that has never happened. Composers, teachers, the phone calls I get, then when you get to our staff and our managers of every division of our building, our CFO, I can go.”
2020-12-18 · The David Rubenstein Show · Wynton Marsalis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We had a lot of support from the top of the organization. Everybody was dedicated. And, you know, when it was founded, Baby Lincoln Center didn't think about the music or maybe the initial founders Rockefeller, they didn't like the music. It doesn't matter. The Constitution was not written with the rights of Afro-Americans and Native Americans in mind, but the Constitution can be amended. And it has been amended.”
2020-12-18 · The David Rubenstein Show · Wynton Marsalis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We wanted to fill a space in American arts and provide enough education and music and advocacy, enough concerts for us as a nation to have our native art form when it came time for us to address our mythology and correct it so that we could move forward as a nation. So we've succeeded beyond any of our wildest imagination with the volume of concerts we've been able to do. We built three concert halls in the middle of men, Manhattan on 59th Street, the House of Swing. We have put on concert series over 30 years. We have 12 education programs and even since this pandemic, I mean, we've put out over 500, 600 pieces virtually. You know, we're deeply engaged.”
2020-12-18 · The David Rubenstein Show · Wynton Marsalis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The thing about Dizzy hit me first was the depth of his intelligence. I met him when I was 14 and just when he started talking, oh, way my daddy and other musicians listened to him. Yeah, Dizzy was very intelligent. He's part of the reason that we develop jazz at Lincoln Center because I didn't want to play in a big band because I had always grown up playing small band music. And Dizzy told me I called him and asked him, man, what do you think I should do? He said to lose one's orchestral heritage should not be considered an achievement. So he was telling me because you need to figure out how to keep our orchestral heritage. We paid a lot of dues to build up orchestral music in jazz and for us to just give it away and say the big band is old fashioned. That's not intelligent.”
2020-12-18 · The David Rubenstein Show · Wynton Marsalis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Great, you know, I love Duke and Duke's intelligence, his dedication over 2,000 pieces. And I love him. And because I grew up also listening to classical music, I love Beethoven”
2020-12-18 · The David Rubenstein Show · Wynton Marsalis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What is it for a pimp to be your hero or be at the top of your mythology? But to not get sidetracked with that, yeah, I thought that, but later I learned and understood who Lewis Armstrong was as a musician. That's a totally different story. That man was a genius of such magnitude you can't even, you could lie about how great he was and you still wouldn't be saying enough.”
2020-12-18 · The David Rubenstein Show · Wynton Marsalis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, because it's hard for later generations to understand the challenges of earlier generations. and norms and things of show business and what Lewis Armstrong did, it doesn't mean that necessarily even with my, now I understand more of his genius and who he was and when he played, but it still doesn't mean that when I look at the movies he made or the positions he went, I still don't necessarily like that. I don't like a lot of where black people are in any of the American movies of the 1930s and 40s and 50s. And as a matter of fact, some of it now, a lot of it now that has that same type of destructive mythology. If you consider the fact that when I was a teenager, the heroic figure for black youth in movies were pimps.”
2020-12-18 · The David Rubenstein Show · Wynton Marsalis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's the improvisation part. That one part allows you to, you have a lot of latitude to do things. That's like the way Americans conduct business. All the innovations we have, the freedom we have to speak, the fact that we think we can step into a space and use our personality to transform a tradition. Yes, we have that freedom. But balancing that freedom is we have the responsibility to extend a courtesy and an understanding to other people who have those freedoms and nurture that common space. That's the part of jazz we struggle with.”
2020-12-18 · The David Rubenstein Show · Wynton Marsalis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The systemic dehumanizing ownership of brutalizing of a large underclass of people for free labor because of their skin color. It's too much injustice to correct. So we're forced to say that those people are responsible for the problem. They're less than human. And it's just their condition. But if they aren't, if it's not their condition, it means that our mythology and belief about ourselves is not true. Now, is Elvis going to not be the king? Man, well, you're going to put Jazz if Elvis is the king.”
2020-12-18 · The David Rubenstein Show · Wynton Marsalis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“System, make sure that a certain group remains ignorant. And the average white jazz writer is actually a rock fan who's for a long time wished that jazz would actually be something else without black folks at the core of it. Or they may be jazz would just die away. That's why if you study jazz, there's a longstanding tradition of article after article and decade after decade saying it's jazz dead. That's probably one of the most questions that's been asked since the 1930s. Now all of this investment and the destruction of jazz is to further obscure a big lie that jazz uncovers. And it's important to look at this because it's a serious thing to consider if we are to transform our nation. If we say our nation is based on human freedom and we're the first on earth founded on the glorious celebration of human freedom, dignity and rights, how do we then reconcile and correct?”
2020-12-18 · The David Rubenstein Show · Wynton Marsalis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Things that we do down to the three branches of government, like the rhythm section, or to amend the Constitution is like adding to an arrangement. I could go on and on. And after a while of giving you these examples, you'll realize these are not superficial things that are contrived that they actually come out of the American way of life. Now, to kind of give you, it's going to be a little longer answer, but it's important because the central question of Jazz's position in our country concerns the relationship of slavery to the American identity and our mythology as a country. Black Americans, by and large in our country, have little or no knowledge of Jazz. And Jazz is the greatest achievement of the Afro-American culture in the context of the American culture, meaning it's Afro-American, but it applies to all Americans as many things in American culture apply to all Americans. Our poor public education”
2020-12-18 · The David Rubenstein Show · Wynton Marsalis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, Jazz is our national art form, and as such, it objectifies a lot of our basic principles. And if a group of people are blessed to have an art form, which you can have a civilization and a society, you may never create an art form that has, that does that. It's a blessing. So America was blessed with a group of musicians and a social condition that produced this music. The music has three fundamental elements. The first is improvisation, which is our kind of individuality and what we believe in. We have rights and freedoms and things that are about the individual, then swing, which is about nurturing common ground, finding balance with other people, working out an agenda as you go along under the pressure of time. And then the blues. And the blues is an optimism, not naive. So the blues also implies an acuity. That's a democratic thing. Now, suffice to say that everything in the music ties in.”
2020-12-18 · The David Rubenstein Show · Wynton Marsalis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Funny story about my father. He went to the Grammys. He was not into those kind of things. And he sat through the whole show and he was like, wow, you know, this is the Grammys. So at the end of the show, I won. I was in the back in the hotel with him and my mother. I was like, you know, getting ready to go out to a party or something. And I was like, yeah, man, my daddy looked at me and he was wondering. He said, man, he said, I'm glad Chad was the grandmase, huh? He said, Jeff, I'm glad you won. I mean, don't get me wrong. It's great that you won. But you don't think this means you can play, do you? So I started laughing because I was like 22 and I knew what he was saying because I still, of course, had a long way to go to learn how to play.”
2020-12-18 · The David Rubenstein Show · Wynton Marsalis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I grew up always wanting to play jazz, but jazz is always much more difficult to learn in that time, especially than classical music. Because my father was a jazz musician, I was always around the music. I was raised in. Jazz, it was difficult at that time for a person my age and my generation to figure out what it was because it was not a part of the American mythology. Whereas with classical music, you had competitions and classes you could go to so you could get a track record on your resume. Like if you see what did I do, it will say when I was 14, I won a competition to play the Hide and Trumpet Concerto with the New Orleans Philharmonic. But I was playing jazz the whole time. But what could I say that I did? I played in a club called Tyler's Beer Gardens on a Wednesday.”
2020-12-18 · The David Rubenstein Show · Wynton Marsalis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, when I was six, my father was playing with Alfurt, and Albert gave me a trumpet for my sixth birthday. So that's true. And my father later was talking to Miles Davis and said, I'm getting my son a trumpet before Al got me a trumpet. My father was talking to Miles. You standing with Al. And Miles said, don't get that boy a trumpet. It's too hard. So that is a true story.”
2020-12-18 · The David Rubenstein Show · Wynton Marsalis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It doesn't matter. So that's only in direct response to your question because I don't want to confuse it with when I was growing up or the situations that I found myself in or my father's situation or grandfather's or let's go back in the generations. So I'm not doing that. And I'm very, very grateful for how I've been treated by people all over this country of all kinds.”
2020-12-18 · The David Rubenstein Show · Wynton Marsalis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Would be pairs gratuitous. So if you ask me the question directly, yes, I will say I've been treated unfairly by newspapers, something like the New York Times the way our institutions at Lincoln Center has been covered is abominable. Even though we get articles, the quality of those articles are always very poor, poorly researched. The writers oftentimes down through the history of lack, the intelligence and depth of engagement with the form to be qualified to speak on it in a paper of record because it's jazz.”
2020-12-18 · The David Rubenstein Show · Wynton Marsalis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, I feel that. Feel it in terms of the kind of intellectual patronization that I receive, the low level of criticism of our music. I'm subject to things. Of course, nothing like what I grew up with, nor do I make a habit of complaining about it constantly because I'm also treated in a way with so much respect by so many people that for me to complain would be.”
2020-12-18 · The David Rubenstein Show · Wynton Marsalis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, we're not anywhere near advanced past what I grew up with. So no, I'm not surprised by it. I had the honor to go into so many American schools throughout the 80s and 90s and early 2000s. Probably well over a thousand schools. So we have a segregation in our systems in general. So no, it doesn't none of it is surprising to me.”
2020-12-18 · The David Rubenstein Show · Wynton Marsalis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That defined the entire segregation, discrimination, racism. That was just a part of life. Like, it's not something you could. This is not philosophy I'm talking now. It's just how it was your neighborhood looked a certain way, the white neighborhoods looked certain way. Black people generally lived in our area on one side of the railroad tracks. We still had ditches in our streets and any type of systems always worked against you. And you had to, it was just what the system was. You didn't have distance from it, so you didn't have, it's easy to look back on a thing and experience it, not the way you experienced it when you grew in it. When you grew in it, it was very much a fact of life. So I happened to be someone who never liked it. So I fought with it a lot and had a lot of problems in that system. But most people adapted to it and were okay with it. They didn't like it, but they sometimes in a bad situation. In this case, we talk about racism. It could be anything. It could be a health situation. The degree to which you're willing.”
2020-12-18 · The David Rubenstein Show · Wynton Marsalis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, he didn't push any of us into anything. I always hung out with him. My father really struggled when I was growing up. He was trying to play modern jazz in the era of segregation and in clubs and with a populace that didn't like that style of music. So much of my experience was going to sparsely populated clubs with him in colorful areas. So I love to go because I was always the only kid in the room. And it started when I was three, four, five years old. And it continued until I got into high school and started to work myself. But I always went with him and identified with his struggle, really, because he continued to play, even though he didn't get audience support. He was not well known. He wasn't famous. He struggled financially. He never complained, and he was very high-minded in his belief in jazz and in his belief in the necessity of it as a tool for healing people and raising.”
2020-12-18 · The David Rubenstein Show · Wynton Marsalis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, for all of us My brothers, of course, as he's our father, we loved him so much. He was such a example for us. Such man and a man with a with a large worldview and also a large person he never he didn't do it small Things. He was very philosophical. He wasn't a touchy, feely. Person, he's from that generation too. It wasn't a lot of hugging, and I love it. I love you, it was going on. But there was underneath a lot of resolve and seriousness and just kind of deep love, not just for us, but also he had many students who love him and love to tell stories about him. And he supported a lot of us.”
2020-12-18 · The David Rubenstein Show · Wynton Marsalis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source