Branford Marsalis

We all played bad before we played good.

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

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

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

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

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

A guitar is something you can hold and love and it’s never going to bug you. But here’s the secret about the guitar – it’s defiant. It will never let you conquer it. The more you get involved with it, the more you realize how little you know.

Sometimes you need to stand with your nose to the window and have a good look at Jazz.

Keeping your artistic self as creative as possible is a balancing act.

I have been doing music all my life so everyday when I get up I expect music will be part of it.

You can have the greatest player in terms of mastering an instrument and be yawning your head off.

Always look ahead, but never look back.

Jazz isn’t the kind of music you’re going to learn in 3 or 4 years or get because you have talent for music.

As far back as I can remember, singing was in my blood. My parents loved music, and I loved to sing. I was scatting at an early age.

If a literary man puts together two words about music, one of them will be wrong.

If the audience doesn’t hear what is going on, is it going on?

I am the sum total of everything that I have experienced musically.

I have a nice car, a Mercedes. And then I have an old El Camino truck that I’m crazy about. I like to get in that truck and go up in the hills near where I live, in Vegas, and take my camera. That, to me, is Heaven, being out in nature, taking pictures of the wildlife.

Perhaps it is a peculiarity of mine that despite the fact that I am a professional performer, it is true that I have always preferred playing without an audience.

Stevie didn’t use the technology to drive the song. He used it to enhance. I use the tools to further my work, I don’t use my work to further the tools.

Jazz has evolved with an inner necessity characteristic of any true art form.