Branford Marsalis Quotations

Jazz is so incestuous that it's starting to kill itself.

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.

Everybody talks about finding your voice. Do your homework and your voice will find you.

We all played bad before we played good.

There's not one Tin Pan Alley song on my record.

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.

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.

If youre going to use standards as criteria for signing musicians, you can sign thousands. If youre going to use some sort of conceptual interpretation thats based on the tradition of those standards, but is trying to move away from it, youre down to about 10 people or so.

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

So much of Jazz doesn't have an audience other than music students or musicians.