Branford Marsalis

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

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.

We all played bad before we played good.

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

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

The way I think about the practicing, it is my undercover work.

A musician starting out today should get a great teacher and learn all there is to know about the instrument.

A chimpanzee could learn what I do physically, but it goes way beyond that. When you play, you play life.

Man, you tell a story.

Apparently Jazz is now considered high art and the average person has trouble understanding it.

They’re not particular about whether you’re playing a flatted fifth or a ruptured 129th as long as they can dance to it.

There are some people that if they don’t know, you can’t tell them.

The truth is I never gave it much thought. I just played what I had to play.

The point of Jazz is, you do something and then you go on.

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

My neighbors always listen to very hip Jazz… whether they like it or not.

When I sing, I play in my mind; the minute I stop singing orally, I start to sing by playing Lucille.

A Jazz performance centers upon the process of creation. The final objective is not only the finished product, but the path and process taken towards it.

I’ll play it first and tell you what it is afterwards.

Will the people in the cheaper seats clap your hands? All the rest of you, if you