When people go to concerts, they say I’m going to see… not, I’m going to hear.
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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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.
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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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If I were like a lot of other people, then it wouldn’t be fun; but since I’m like me, it’s okay.
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My job is to write songs that have emotional meaning to me.
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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?
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So much of Jazz doesn’t have an audience other than music students or musicians.
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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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The way to learn the language is to rip off other players. As Benny Golson told me, “We all start off sounding like other cats.
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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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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.
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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 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.
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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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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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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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