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.
Interpretation
This quote highlights the rich musical heritage of New Orleans and how diverse influences combined to create jazz.
Wynton Marsalis emphasizes the vibrant cultural tapestry of New Orleans, illustrating how various musical styles and traditions intertwine to form the unique genre of jazz. This blend of opera, military bands, folk music, and African drumming reflects not only the city's creative spirit but also its ability to celebrate diversity and innovation through art.
In practice
In a speech about cultural heritage, one might quote this to illustrate the significance of music in shaping identity.
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.
When you rehearse a play, you spend four weeks with one goal in mind - to wean the actor away from you. You want the actor to become completely independent and to understand all the emotional and psychological moves within the character.
Art for art's sake is an empty phrase. Art for the sake of truth, art for the sake of the good and the beautiful, that is the faith I am searching for.
I don't remember not dancing. When I realized I was alive and these were my parents, and I could walk and talk, I could dance.
I am a poet who composes what life proses, and who proses what life composes.
Purer colors... have in themselves, independently of the objects they serve to express, a significant action on the feelings of those who look at them.
How many shows on TV do you see young black people, both women and men, really embody a full-fledged human being, flaws and all?
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