Branford Marsalis

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.

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.

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

We all played bad before we played good.

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

There’s so much music out there and so many possibilities. I like anyone who plays any instrument.

Learning to read music in Braille and play by ear helped me develop a damn good memory.

If you don’t know what it is, don’t mess with it.

Some players get very philosophical and cerebral about Jazz. You don’t need any prologues, you just play.

Music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent.

For most dates I was paid the sum of $1 per hr and they always tipped me at the end of the night.

Jazz is very much alive. Everywhere I go there’s a new generation of musicians playing Jazz music.

The inspired moment may sometimes be described as a kind of hallucinatory state of mind: one half of the personality emotes and dictates while the other half listens and notates. The half that listens has better look the other way, had better simulate a half attention only, for the half that dictates is easily disgruntled and avenges itself for too close inspection by fading entirely away.

I do not wear my emotions on my sleeve; I write about them.

When you begin to teach Jazz, the most dangerous thing is to teach style.

The way a band works is a metaphor for all sorts of collaborative and larger enterprises that people do.

You’ve got to be willing to put stuff on the line, otherwise it doesn’t have much meaning.

Jazz is not something that can be defined through blunt instruments. It is much more poetic than that.

I’m always looking for ways to develop as a Jazz artist, to find different ways of using my voice.