Branford Marsalis

“Pop doesn't really look back. It can't. What makes pop work is simplicity.”

“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.”

“The biggest problem with American music right now, is that kids don't listen. They come by it honestly, Americans don't listen anyway. When people go to concerts, they say I'm going to see... not, I'm going to hear.”

“There's a certain kind of motion and pacing that our music has, and this just doesn't have that. We just kind of rushed to the conclusion of most of the songs. I just would've preferred to done them over.”

“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.”

“If I were like a lot of other people, then it wouldn't be fun; but since I'm like me, it's okay.”

“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?”

“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.”

“It's something that jazz has gotten away from, and it's unfortunate. Players aren't physical anymore.”

“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.”

“I'm not going to play funk licks on a jazz album. That makes no sense.”

“If it's not going to sound like Terrapin Station, what's the point of playing Terrapin Station?”

“A lot of musicians have a tough time hearing what we're doing in a trio format.”

“I gave up my base in popular culture when I left the Tonight Show.”

“I think that one of the problems that jazz has is that it's so incestuous that it's starting to kill itself.”

“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?”

“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.”

“You hear it in your brain. Whatever makes sense. Some songs work well as quartet songs, sometimes they don't.”

“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.”

“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.”