What I've learned how to do as I've gotten older is to take all of the information that I have, and push it aside, and try to distill each song into an emotional theme. The hardest thing that I've ever had to learn how to do in playing music is use the sound of my instrument to create an emotional effect.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the importance of emotional expression in music over technical proficiency.
Wynton Marsalis reflects on his journey as a musician, highlighting how he has learned to set aside technical details and focus on conveying deep emotions through his music. He acknowledges that the challenge lies in harnessing the sound of his instrument to evoke feelings, underscoring the artist's role in connecting with their audience emotionally rather than merely showcasing skill.
In practice
In a speech at a music festival, you might inspire musicians to focus on emotional themes in their compositions.
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'm a method writer. In order to write about the emotion, I have to experience it. I get physically tired and exhausted, devoting hours and hours and hours to it.
There are professions more harmful than industrial design, but only a few.
I'm going to take the kids away over Christmas but I don't, I've written 14 musicals now, I don't want to rush into doing something just for the sake of doing it. I want to do it when I find a story.
Whatever happens in my life, whether I stand up or I fall down, whatever the case, I'm going to use it in my art. Why? Because I'm an artist and I have to.
Everyone is a virtuoso on his own instrument, but together they add up to an intolerable cacophony.
The experimental poetry thing is not my thing. It's a programme of the avant-garde: basically a refusal of the kind of poetry I write.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.