This is our bandstand. If you don't want to play, get up off the instrument and leave.
Interpretation
Everyone has a role to play, and if you're not contributing, it's best to step aside.
Wynton Marsalis uses the metaphor of a bandstand to convey that in any collaborative endeavor or community, every member is expected to actively participate. If someone is unwilling to contribute, they should recognize their choice to step away rather than disrupt the harmony of the group. This quote emphasizes the importance of active engagement and responsibility within a team.
In practice
In a team meeting to discuss project responsibilities.
Swing is extreme coordination. It's a maintaining balance, equilibrium. It's about executing very difficult rhythms with a panache and a feeling in the context of very strict time. So, everything about the swing is about some guideline and some grid and the elegant way that you negotiate your way through that grid.
Many of our greatest musicians abandoned all of their aesthetic objectives to try to become pertinent. And, at the end of the day, they never became pop stars. I counter stated that very strongly, and I continue to do that.
Jazz music is the power of now. There is no script. It's conversation. The emotion is given to you by musicians as they make split-second decisions to fulfill what they feel the moment requires.
The blues. It runs through all American music. Somebody bending the note. The other is the two-beat groove. It's in New Orleans music, it's in jazz, it's in country music, it's in gospel.
In Jazz, improvisation isn't a matter of just making any ol' thing up. Jazz, like any language, has its own grammer and vocabulary. There's no right or wrong, just some choices that are better than others.
My daddy thought - no, he expected - that my brothers and I and our generation would make the world a better place. He was correct in his belief because he had lived in an America of continual social progress, depression followed by prosperity, segregation by integration, and so on.
The Maestro says it's Mozart but it sounds like bubble gum when you're waiting for the miracle to come.
There is no such thing as happy music.
The E Street band casts a pretty wide net. Our influences go all the way back to the early primitive garage music, and also, we've had everything in the band from jazz players to Kansas City trumpet players to Nils Lofgren, one of the great rock guitarists in the world.
When I play, maybe 'Back o' Town Blues,' I'm thinking about one of the old, low-down moments - when maybe your woman didn't treat you right. That's a hell of a moment when a woman tell you, 'I got another mule in my stall.'
There's no substitute for live work to keep a band together.
This banjo surrounds hate and forces it to surrender.
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