Branford Marsalis

Pop doesn’t really look back. It can’t. What makes pop work is simplicity.

We all played bad before we played good.

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

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.

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

Words are the children of reason and therefore can’t translate the feeling of Jazz because they’re not part of it.

I don’t know anything about music. In my line you don’t have to.

When you are studying Jazz best thing to do is listen to records and live music as much you can and absorb everything.

He almost adds a Chet-like sound to it.

There’s a sadness to all kinds of music if you want to hear it. There’s also happiness to it if you want to hear it.

I can’t understand these guys who just have to have your autograph. I asked one of them ‘What do you do when you get home, take it out and look at it?’

There is no truer truth obtainable by man than comes of music.

We never play anything the same way once.

Musicians need enough experience to develop a vocabulary.

Just don’t give up trying to do what you really want to do. Where there is love and inspiration, I don’t think you can go wrong.

I’m not playing for other musicians. We’re trying to reach the guy who works all day and wants to spend a buck at night. We’ll keep him happy.

I think that those elements – light and sound – are beyond democratic. They’re into the creative part of life.

I was never interested in singing in the church or school. I was more interested in becoming a musician.

Just because I’m playing jazz I don’t forget about me. I play or write me the way I feel through jazz, or whatever. Music is, or was, a language of the emotions.

To be a true artist you have to play the way you feel not the way others think you should feel.