Top 25 Branford Marsalis Quotes

I gave up my base in popular culture when I left the Tonight Show.

If you listen to a lot of the songs that are popular now, there’s very little melody in there. People love the beat. But to musicians, it’s melody, because we understand how elusive it is and how hard it is to hold.

I’m not going to play funk licks on a jazz album. That makes no sense.

My dad was a musician, it was just what he did, like another guy’s dad drives a meat truck. Our house was normal. We weren’t taken with the fact our dad was a musician.

There’s a certain kind of motion and pacing that our music has, and this just doesn’t have that. We just kind of rushed to the conclusion of most of the songs. I just would’ve preferred to done them over.

Humans are imperfect. That’s one of the reasons that classical and jazz are in trouble. We’re on the quest for the perfect performance and every note has to be right. Man, every note is not right in life.

One of the things that’s clear to me from interviews that I’ve read is that the more popular successful jazz musicians had audiences above and beyond the music community.

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

When you’re dealing with music without words, titles are more a means of identification than anything else. What’s the point of getting lofty?

If it’s not going to sound like Terrapin Station, what’s the point of playing Terrapin Station?

The whole point is, give me a break with the standards. You go to the average jazz label and suggest a record and they want to know which standards you’re going to play. I’m saying let’s break the formula.

It’s hard to get into Newsweek because, as more of our former intellectual magazines take on a pop focus, if there’s no buzz, there’s no interest.

I like to make records sound good. I’m more like a reducer than a producer. If an artist cannot produce themselves, what’s the point?

The biggest problem with American music right now, is that kids don’t listen. They come by it honestly, Americans don’t listen anyway. When people go to concerts, they say I’m going to see… not, I’m going to hear.

We played it as long as we could play it on that CD and I think it might be 50 minutes, maybe. What you have to do is play a couple of songs and then get off the stage because everything that trails it sounds stupid.

The lion’s share of what I hear right now are people who, intentional or accidental, have avoided all jazz prior to 1960. And all the musicians who were successful in the ’60s spent their entire lives, prior to 1960, listening to all the musicians these people avoid.

I suspect that we might actually start selling some records with these artists in about 10 years. Some the people who invested, they’re a little tight-because it’s a lot of money to start up a company.

I think that if you keep banging at the door all you need is a little foothold, a little tiny foothold, and then the rest will take care of itself.

One of the things that I loved about listening to Miles Davis is that Miles always had an instinct for which musicians were great for what situations. He could always pick a band, and that was the thing that separated him from everybody else.

The piano is the X factor. People have a tough time following the structures when there’s no piano there, spelling it out. It makes it more easily understood, particularly to people who don’t know as much about music.

You hear it in your brain. Whatever makes sense. Some songs work well as quartet songs, sometimes they don’t.

If I were like a lot of other people, then it wouldn’t be fun; but since I’m like me, it’s okay.

I think that one of the problems that jazz has is that it’s so incestuous that it’s starting to kill itself.

That’s kind of like how jazz is sometimes. You’re out there predicting the future, and no one believes you.

Coltrane came to New Orleans one day and he was talking about the jazz scene. And Coltrane mentions that the problem with jazz was that there were too few groups.