Jazz comes from our way of life, and because it's our national art form, it helps us to understand who we are.
Interpretation
Jazz symbolizes the American experience and reflects our identity and culture.
Wynton Marsalis highlights that jazz music is deeply rooted in the American experience, representing not only a unique art form but also serving as a mirror to our societal values and identity. It illustrates how this genre can convey our collective stories, struggles, and triumphs, allowing us to gain insight into who we are as a nation.
In practice
Use this quote in a presentation about the cultural significance of jazz in America.
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 beauty of the band was you never knew what was going to come out next.
I don't want you to write about what you know, because you don't know anything. I don't want to hear about your boyfriend or your grandma... I'm getting a little tired of 'my life story as fiction'. Please don't tell me about your little life - is there nothing larger? More important?
To think in terms of what the effect of a story is going to be, as opposed to trying to discover its inner logic, is one of the fundamental dangers in the process.
It is the writer's privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart.
The great advantage of being a writer is that you can spy on people. You're there, listening to every word, but part of you is observing. Everything is useful to a writer, you see - every scrap, even the longest and most boring of luncheon parties.
I paint the way someone bites his fingernails; for me, painting is a bad habit because I don't know nor can I do anything else.
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