Branford Marsalis

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

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

We all played bad before we played good.

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

Play for the spiritual aspect, the emotion.

I am an improviser, I improvise music. Whatever you want to call it, it’s all improvised music. I may capture it and go back and write it down for others, but it was originally improvised.

The essentials of Jazz are: melodic improvisation, melodic invention, swing and instrumental personality.

If you can’t play the blues, you might as well hang it up.

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

Quiet is the absence of sound. Silence is the presence of silence.

Jazz has borrowed from other genres of music and also has lent itself to other genres of music.

Keep searching for that sound you hear in your head until it becomes a reality.

I’m no good with chords. I’m horrible with chords.

I have a deep respect for harmony, melodic patterns and form.

It pulled me like a magnet, jazz did, because it was a way that I could express myself.

The time is now.

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

The genius of our country is improvisation, and jazz reflects that. It’s our great contribution to the arts.

Jazz is not background music. You must concentrate in order to get the most out of it. You must absorb it.