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.

Jazz fans love Miles and I love him for a myriad of reasons, but the overviews are always too simplistic.

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.

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

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

Music is an addiction.

If I don’t practice for a day, I know it… for two days, the critics know it… three days, the public knows it.

It’s true I’ve always been attracted to the jazz band in an orchestral way, rather than a band way.

It’s not uncomfortable for me to be a sideman, but I feel more comfortable as a bandleader.

The human being receives the pleasure from music, not from the argument over what it is.

I think the idea is now for blacks to write about the history of our music. It’s time for that, because whites have been doing it all the time. It’s time for us to do it ourselves and tell it like it is.

A Jazz Diet will make you hipper, thinner, taller, smarter, richer, happier and more attractive to members of both sexes.

The drummer; he inspired me to play like no one else I have ever met.

We in the Western world suffer from too many categories and classes; we’ve forgotten that we all still have diapers on. We’ve separated music from life.

Working with Benny was important for me and for black musicians in general.

I feel that Jazz improvisation is the ultimate. You have to create on the spot, the essence of this music.

You have to be a bastard to make it, and that’s a fact. And the Beatles are the biggest bastards on earth.

I never thought Jazz was meant to be a museum piece like other dead things once considered artistic.

The hippest thing you can do is not play at all. Just listen.

By and large, jazz has always been like the kind of a man you wouldn’t want your daughter to associate with.