You don’t know what you like, you like what you know. In order to know what you like, you have to know everything.
BRANFORD MARSALISMy job is to write songs that have emotional meaning to me.
More Branford Marsalis Quotes
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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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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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So much of Jazz doesn’t have an audience other than music students or musicians.
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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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My job is to write songs that have emotional meaning to me.
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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 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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Pop doesn’t really look back. It can’t. What makes pop work is simplicity.
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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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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.
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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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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.
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I’m not going to play funk licks on a jazz album. That makes no sense.
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If it’s not going to sound like Terrapin Station, what’s the point of playing Terrapin Station?
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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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