The history of jazz lets us know that this period in our history is not the only period we've come through together. If we truly understood the history of our national arts, we'd know that we have mutual aspirations, a shared history, in good times and bad.
Interpretation
Jazz reflects our shared history and collective aspirations as a society.
Wynton Marsalis highlights that the evolution of jazz music is a testament to the shared experiences and aspirations that have united people throughout history. By understanding the roots and developments of national arts like jazz, we recognize that we have gone through various challenges and triumphs together, emphasizing a sense of unity and mutual understanding across different times and struggles.
In practice
During a speech at a cultural event, one might reference this quote to emphasize the importance of shared artistic traditions in building community.
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 I write something, I can't remember in the end if this is a memory or if it's not - I'm talking about fiction. So for me, it's the same thing.
What was any art but a mould in which to imprison for a moment the shining elusive element which is life itself - life hurrying past us and running away, too strong to stop, too sweet to lose.
Some actors, I think, want to feel that they are as creative as the writer. And the answer is, frankly, they're not.
A studio, like a poem, is an intimacy and a freedom you can look out from, into each part of your life and a little beyond.
All these actors who died before I was born, all the theaters and the artistic movements - all that stuff fills you up and makes you feel like you're the inheritor of all this information and of all its passion.
Drama criticism ... is a self-knowing account of the way in which one's consciousness has been modified during an evening at the theatre.
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