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Jazz musician Wynton Marsalis says rap and hip-hop are ‘more damaging than a statue of Robert E. Lee
“My words are not that powerful. I started saying in 1985 I don’t think we should have a music talking about niggers and bitches and hoes. It had no impact. I’ve said it. I’ve repeated it. I still repeat it. To me that’s more damaging than a statue of Robert E. Lee.” Keep reading »
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Teaching A Taste For Jazz In A Hip Hop Age
They are young, gifted and surprisingly, just beginning to learn about jazz. Surprising, because this is Harlem, the cradle of jazz. “You know what’s great about a jazz solo,” a teacher tells a class of students. “It’s yours.” Every Thursday, a Harlem community center becomes a music school for prodigies like 8-year old Jalen Wilson, reports CBS News Correspondent Randall Pinkston. Keep reading »
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Significant music: Marsalis places excellent ritual over novelty
Wynton Marsalis has been known to spark controversy as a result of his rigid views on jazz pedigree, but he backs them up with passion, logic, and raw skill with his horn. He’s easily the most important voice of the trumpet in decades, and for the past 20 years, he’s been the artistic director of Jazz at Lincoln Center. This Tuesday, September 11, he brings the fruits of that project to one of the Paramount Theater’s most impressive shows of the season.
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Wynton Marsalis: Wynton Throws Down the Gauntlet
Like Howard Beale in Network, Wynton Marsalis is mad as hell and he’s not gonna take it anymore. Of course, the 45-year-old trumpeter-bandleader and celebrated jazz ambassador has always been riled and outraged, ever since he was an audacious, outspoken kid back in New Orleans. And over the course of the past 20 years, he has always spoken his mind in interviews or in casual conversation. Like his equally unguarded brother Branford, you know where Wynton stands. He pulls no punches, never attempts to obfuscate. Like him or not, he’s painfully direct, unwavering in his convictions.
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Shock of the new
Wynton Marsalis is 10 minutes into an angry denunciation of hip-hop and he’s just hitting his stride. “I call it ‘ghetto minstrelsy’,” he says. “Old school minstrels used to say they were ‘real darkies from the real plantation’. Hip-hop substitutes the plantation for the streets. Now you have to say that you’re from the streets, you shot some brothers, you went to jail. Rappers have to display the correct pathology. Rap has become a safari for people who get their thrills from watching African-American people debase themselves, men dressing in gold, calling themselves stupid names like Ludacris or 50 Cent, spending money on expensive fluff, using language like ‘bitch’ and ‘ho’ and ‘nigger’.”
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Wynton interviewed by The Independent
It doesn’t take much to annoy Wynton Marsalis. Jazz after about 1965? Forget it. Rap? Don’t get him started. But these days the trumpeter is turning his furious attention to some of the US’s biggest issues: corporate ethics, the continued persecution of black Americans and the inadequate government response to Hurricane Katrina. Sholto Byrnes tries, in vain, to calm him down
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