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.
BRANFORD MARSALISHumans 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.
More Branford Marsalis Quotes
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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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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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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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You hear it in your brain. Whatever makes sense. Some songs work well as quartet songs, sometimes they don’t.
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Everybody talks about finding your voice. Do your homework and your voice will find you.
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My job is to write songs that have emotional meaning to me.
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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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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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When people go to concerts, they say I’m going to see… not, I’m going to hear.
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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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I’m not going to play funk licks on a jazz album. That makes no sense.
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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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Pop doesn’t really look back. It can’t. What makes pop work is simplicity.
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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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