Music is always for the listener, but the first listener is always the musician
Interpretation
This quote highlights the relationship between musicians and their audience, emphasizing that the musician is the first to experience their own music.
Wynton Marsalis's quote reflects the intrinsic bond between musicians and their art, suggesting that while music is ultimately created for an audience, the musician themselves engages with and appreciates the music first. This establishes a unique intimacy with the work, where the emotions and intentions of the musician profoundly shape the experience for future listeners.
In practice
During a music workshop, one could use this quote to inspire aspiring musicians to connect with their craft.
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.
A writer should care about one thing - the language. To write well - that is his duty. That is his only duty.
I'm a Method actor. I spent years training for the drinking and carousing I had to do in this film.
We need a type of theatre which not only releases the feelings, insights and impulses possible within the particular historical field of human relations in which the action takes place, but employs and encourages those thoughts and feelings which help transform the field itself.
I thought fashion was just the pretext to do images with lots of freedom and get them published in magazines. You could express your point of view, make statements about women and about what you believe in.
Delacroix was passionately in love with passion, but coldly determined to express passion as clearly as possible.
Not only do I have to live, right, I have to get some cash for my troubles - it's a scary thing, and people need to start to think about the messages that they send in the movies.
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