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.
Interpretation
Jazz music embodies spontaneity and emotional connection through musical conversation.
In this quote, Wynton Marsalis emphasizes the essence of jazz music as an improvised form of art that thrives on the present moment. He suggests that, unlike scripted performances, jazz musicians engage in a dynamic dialogue that reflects their immediate feelings and experiences, creating powerful emotional moments for both the musicians and the audience.
In practice
During a lecture on the importance of creativity in art, one might cite this quote to illustrate jazz's spontaneous nature.
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.
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.
New Orleans had a great tradition of celebration. Opera, military marching bands, folk music, the blues, different types of church music, ragtime, echoes of traditional African drumming, and all of the dance styles that went with this music could be heard and seen throughout the city. When all of these kinds of music blended into one, jazz was born.
I'll always love rap, no matter what's going on.
I'll make a song with Rick Rubin, a song with Beyonce, a song with Lenny Kravitz. I just believe in making good music. I'm not trying to section myself off into just making hard-core rap music.
One thing that sticks in my mind is that jazz means freedom and openness. It's a music that, although it developed out of the African American experience, speaks more about the human experience than the experience of a particular people.
Just blow in it and sound bad for about a year and then make it sound a little bit better, and you get a little band together, and then you get a few jobs. You take four guys that sound half bad, but if they're 25 percent each, they can give 100 percent, you know?
Minneapolis just embraced me. There are a lot of weirdos here. It's awesome, because I'm a weirdo. Thankfully, the city embraced me with open arms. A lot about Minneapolis helped carve my musicality and open my eyes. The whole town is so open-minded compared to like, you know, Texas.
If you play more than two chords, you're showing off.
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