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.

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.

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

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

Anyone can make the simple complicated. Creativity is making the complicated simple.

Whenever I fill out the job description I put ‘songwriter’, never ‘singer’ or ‘artist.’ Singers come and go.

I expect the audience to come up to my level.

When the music changes, so does the dance.

We all do ‘do, re, mi’ but you got to find the other notes yourself.

Blow your life through your horn.

When you hear somebody with balls, that’s me.

Anything I do has to be directly related to my music. If it isn’t, I don’t really see a point to it.

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.

Creativity and artistic endeavors have a mission that goes far beyond just making music for the sake of music.

Man, all music is folk music. You ain’t never heard no horse sing a song, have you?

Get around, be on the scene, play it clean, be seen, be keen and be over eighteen.

It seems like I always had to work harder than other people. Those nights when everybody else is asleep, and you sit in your room trying to play scales. I just wonder where I was when the talent was being given out, like George Benson, Kenny Burrell, Eric Clapton… oh, there’s many more! I wouldn’t want to be like them, you understand, but I’d like to be equal, if you will.

If someone thinks that peace and love are just a cliche that must have been left behind in the 60s, that’s a problem. Peace and love are eternal.

I used to play – when I first started trying to be professional, I disk jockey from 1949 to 1955 in Memphis, Tennessee, and I was quite popular there as a disk jockey.