Everything comes out in blues music: joy , pain , struggle . Blues is affirmation with absolute elegance.
Interpretation
The quote expresses how blues music captures the entirety of human emotions with grace and sophistication.
Wynton Marsalis highlights the unique ability of blues music to convey deep emotions and life experiences, including joy, pain, and struggle. It suggests that blues serves as a powerful form of artistic expression, asserting the richness of human experience with an elegant flair that resonates with listeners on multiple levels.
In practice
In a speech about the impact of music on culture, one might quote Marsalis to illustrate how blues music encapsulates human experience.
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.
I can hold a cup of sake on a full moon in Japan, and the reflection of the moon in that little cup can make me feel so enthusiastic about beauty. That one good, magical moment can give me enough to create other things like the teardrop earring or necklace.
Honest songs aren`t written for money.
My goal was to tell a dialogue between high fashion and streetwear. So, the name Off-White, in my mind, is between black and white. So, that middle ground is a mixture between both genres of fashion.
I grew up in a family that believed that art should be used as an instrument for social change.
A word is not the same with one writer as with another. One tears it from his guts. The other pulls it out of his overcoat pocket.
All the writing elements are the same. You need to tell a good story... You've got good characters... People think there's some dramatic difference between writing 'Little Bear' and the 'Hunger Games,' and as a writer, for me, there isn't.
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