I don’t care who likes it or buys it. Because if you use that criterion, Mozart would have never written Don Giovanni, Charlie Parker never would have played anything but swing music. There comes a point at which you have to stand up and say, this is what I have to do.
BRANFORD MARSALISWhen people go to concerts, they say I’m going to see… not, I’m going to hear.
More Branford Marsalis Quotes
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Everybody talks about finding your voice. Do your homework and your voice will find you.
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You don’t know what you like, you like what you know. In order to know what you like, you have to know everything.
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So much of Jazz doesn’t have an audience other than music students or musicians.
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When people go to concerts, they say I’m going to see… not, I’m going to hear.
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You know, being America, being the land of “number ones”, everyone wants to be a leader before they follow.
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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.
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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.
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I’m not going to play funk licks on a jazz album. That makes no sense.
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The biggest problem with American music right now, is that kids don’t listen. They come by it honestly, Americans don’t listen anyway.
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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?
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What is jazz? It, It’s almost like asking, What is French? Jazz is a musical language. It’s a musical dialect that actually embodies the spirit of America.
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My job is to write songs that have emotional meaning to me.
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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.
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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.
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What you have to do is play a couple of songs and then get off the stage because everything that trails it sounds stupid.
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