Creativity Quote by Wynton Marsalis

Marsalis is talking about clothing, but he’s really arguing for a whole moral ecosystem around jazz: discipline, lineage, and the idea that the bandstand is a civic space, not a casual hangout. “I dress up” sounds personal, almost quaint, yet he frames it as an act of deference to something bigger than the self. The suit becomes a kind of secular uniform, signaling that the music deserves ceremony. In a culture that loves the myth of the unbothered genius, Marsalis insists that care is the point.

The subtext is a quiet rebuke to sloppiness - not just sartorial, but artistic. Dressing well is a proxy for showing up prepared, listening hard, and treating your collaborators and audience as partners rather than consumers. It’s also a coded defense of jazz as high craft in the face of decades of being marketed as either rebellious youth culture or background mood music. Marsalis, the great institutionalizer of jazz, isn’t embarrassed by respectability; he weaponizes it.

Context matters: his rise coincides with the 1980s “neo-traditional” turn, when jazz fought for funding, legitimacy, and a place in concert halls. In that arena, appearance is part of rhetoric. A sharp look reassures skeptical gatekeepers while also honoring older bandstand traditions - Ellington elegance, Basie polish - where style and sound were inseparable. The line lands because it’s simple, almost conservative, but it hides a radical claim: reverence can be a form of resistance.