This is our bandstand. If you don't want to play, get up off the instrument and leave.
Interpretation
Everyone has a role to play, and if you're not contributing, it's best to step aside.
Wynton Marsalis uses the metaphor of a bandstand to convey that in any collaborative endeavor or community, every member is expected to actively participate. If someone is unwilling to contribute, they should recognize their choice to step away rather than disrupt the harmony of the group. This quote emphasizes the importance of active engagement and responsibility within a team.
In practice
In a team meeting to discuss project responsibilities.
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 sing to the realists; people who accept it like it is.
Michael Bloomfield came in after rock n roll started, and he was a great guitarist. He idolized me - I know that. What else can I say ? he was a young, excitable man. To him, drugs were plentiful, and that was no good. I talked to him like he was a son of mine. He was a great and he was gonna be greater. But he was part of the "in-crowd" and so he never got there
It used to be called boogie-woogie, it used to be called blues, used to be called rhythm and blues...It's called rock now.
If you've got a problem, take it out on a drum.
When I was eight, my piano teacher played seven or eight notes, and I sang them. She stopped and looked at me in shock! That was the first time I'd gotten that reaction. I'd had looks of horror, but never shock in a positive way.
Until it's on the radio or online, it's not real. With U2, our album isn't finished until it's in the stores.
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