My job is to write songs that have emotional meaning to me.
BRANFORD MARSALISOne 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.
More Branford Marsalis Quotes
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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.
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So much of Jazz doesn’t have an audience other than music students or musicians.
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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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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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Walter Beasley is an anomaly: a successful performing musician who possesses the rare skill of understanding the musical process beyond the intuitive. T
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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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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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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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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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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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Pop doesn’t really look back. It can’t. What makes pop work is simplicity.
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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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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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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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