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.
The two things you can't fake are good food and good music
I'd been making music that was intended to be like painting, in the sense that it's environmental, without the customary narrative and episodic quality that music normally has. I called this 'ambient music.' But at the same time I was trying to make visual art become more like music, in that it changed the way that music changes.
There are writers in Germany who drink the Absolute like water; and there are books in which even the dogs make references to the Infinite.
The best part of making music, for me, is collaborating and working with new people and fresh sounds and all those things that get people excited to continue in this business that we all love so much.
Writing is both bomb and bomb disposal-a necessary shattering of cliche and assumption, and a powerful defusing of the soul-destroying messages of modern life (that nothing matters, nothing changes, money is everything, etc). Writing is a state of being as well as an act of doing.
Just as music is noise that makes sense, a painting is colour that makes sense, so a story is life that makes sense.
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