70 Quotes by Branford Marsalis

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

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?

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

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

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

Jazz fans love Miles and I love him for a myriad of reasons, but the overviews are always too simplistic.

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?

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

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.