My job is to write songs that have emotional meaning to me.
BRANFORD MARSALISYou hear it in your brain. Whatever makes sense. Some songs work well as quartet songs, sometimes they don’t.
More Branford Marsalis Quotes
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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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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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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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You know, being America, being the land of “number ones”, everyone wants to be a leader before they follow.
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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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If it’s not going to sound like Terrapin Station, what’s the point of playing Terrapin Station?
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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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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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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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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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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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