Branford Marsalis

You don’t know what you like, you like what you know. In order to know what you like, you have to know everything.

My job is to write songs that have emotional meaning to me.

So much of Jazz doesn’t have an audience other than music students or musicians.

Pop doesn’t really look back. It can’t. What makes pop work is simplicity.

Jazz is so incestuous that it’s starting to kill itself.

We quest for the perfect performance and every note has to be right. Man, every note is not right in life.

A kiss that is never tasted, is forever and ever wasted.

I think I’ve tried to stay true to my music since the beginning. It’s kind of hard because of the access and technology but I just do what I do.

People who are meant to be drawn to your music will find you.

My music had roots which I’d dug up from my own childhood, musical roots buried in the darkest soil.

Jazz is a democratic musical form. We take our respective instruments and collectively create a thing of beauty.

In order to complete your cycle, a musician needs to write; document what is going through your mind and where you are harmonically, theoretically, historically.

I sing to the realists; people who accept it like it is.

Improvisation is the most widespread of all musical activities. Why did so many people spend so long pretending it never happened?

Music is a verb.

It’s difficult for me to dislike an artist, no matter what he’s creating.

Music is my life, professionally, for nearly 60 years. To be recognized by the academy is still the highest honor.

I stole everything I ever heard, but mostly I stole from the horns.

In my family on my mother’s side we’re all church musicians first so I don’t remember a time when we weren’t doing something musical. My brothers and I sang in a little quartet, my aunts and uncles sang and my grandfather was a minister of music in our church, so walking and talking was like doing music for us.

One of the advantages of growing older is you learn what to leave out.

A great thing about being a musician is you don’t stop until the day you die.