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 MARSALISI 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.
More Branford Marsalis Quotes
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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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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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You know, being America, being the land of “number ones”, everyone wants to be a leader before they follow.
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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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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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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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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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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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So much of Jazz doesn’t have an audience other than music students or musicians.
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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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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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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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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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