Branford Marsalis

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.

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

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.

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

Women bring something different to an instrument if they are respectful of their feminine aesthetic.

If you want to know about the Sixties, play the music of The Beatles.

A good player can make any instrument sound good.

I went back and listened to the first three albums I made and tried to figure out what was special about them, why people keep going back to them. I think it was because I didn’t know what I was doing. I had no idea if they were going to play it on the radio or anything. All I did was write songs, so that’s what I got back to.

Well, for me it’s – music is the instrument of life.

When I start writing songs and it turns into an overly belabored intellectual process, I just throw it out.

When I decided that I wanted to be a Jazz musician, I knew that it was about improvising.

When it comes to music, don’t lie to yourself; just tell yourself the truth.

I don’t consider myself a musician who has achieved perfection and can’t develop any further.

Man, you tell a story.

While many attempts have been made to define Jazz, what’s the point really. Jazz is to be experienced – period.

Every day when I sit down to play, I learn something new.

I always wanted to be a spontaneous composer.

Being so inescapably a part of it, I’ll never know what the listener gets, what the listener feels and that’s too bad.

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