But you listen to Coltrane and that's something human, something that's about elevation. It's like making love to a woman. It's about something of value, it's not just loud. It doesn't have that violent connotation to it. I wanted to be a jazz musician so bad, but I really couldn't. There was no way I could figure out to learn how to play.
Interpretation
The quote expresses the deep emotional and transcendent connection between music and humanity, akin to love.
Wynton Marsalis reflects on the profound impact of jazz music, particularly the work of Coltrane, suggesting that it embodies a spiritual elevation and a deep appreciation for beauty and value. He contrasts the essence of jazz, which is rich and meaningful, with the idea that it should not be perceived as merely loud or aggressive, but rather as an expression of love and human experience, which he aspired to be part of despite feeling unable to achieve the skill required to play it.
In practice
This quote can be used in a discussion about the emotional impact of music in a classroom setting.
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.
When someone picks up one of my songs and records it, I'm a flattered man, it's a blessing to me
A good, sympathetic review is always a wonderful surprise.
Conceptual art became the liberating idea that gave the art of the next 40 years its real impetus.
It is one of the primary motives of modern art that it wants to abolish the distance which the viewer, the consumer, the audience maintain vis-a-vis a work of art. There is no doubt that the leaders of the creative artists of the last 50 years concentrated their efforts mainly on eliminating that distance.
Music makes me forget myself, my true condition, it carries me off into another state of being, one that isn't my own.
I don't know what the hell I'm doing up there half the time. These performers that go on about their technique and craft - oh, puleeze! How boring! I don't know what technique means. But I do know what experience is. I know in my gut when I've done a scene right.
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