I believe in professionalism, but playing is not like a job. You have to be grateful to have the opportunity to play.
Interpretation
Professionalism in art requires gratitude and passion, not just work.
Wynton Marsalis emphasizes the distinction between professionalism and the joy of playing music. While professionalism involves a commitment to quality and dedication to one's craft, true fulfillment comes from appreciating the opportunity to engage in artistic expression, where play transcends the boundaries of mere work.
In practice
During a speech at a music festival, this quote can inspire young musicians to embrace their passion.
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.
Every time I try to retire, or even think of retiring from acting, my agent comes up with a script.
The characters I've played, especially Bret Maverick and Jim Rockford, almost never use a gun, and they always try to use their wits instead of their fists.
An artist is a man who says a difficult thing in a simple way
It's ironic that while I was a worker in Detroit, which I left when I was twenty six, my sense was that the thing that's going to stop me from being a poet is the fact that I'm doing this crummy work.
The attempt to divide art and politics is a bourgeois which says good poetry, art, cannot be political, but since everything is β¦ political, even an artist or work that claims not to have any politics is making a political statement by that act.
I'd love to be an artist always, but if no one wants me, I'd love to write songs for other people, be a manager, nurture new talent.
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