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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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"When can you understand that the music you play is very good? It is when people look at you but see no one, no one but the music!"

"As the strings of a lute are apart though they quiver the same music."

"Music is well said to be the speech of angels."

"To understand fully the importance of music, you must try to image a world without music! Such a world would be a world of hopelessness and boredom!"
Explore more quotes by Branford Marsalis

"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."

"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."

"We played it as long as we could play it on that CD and I think it might be 50 minutes, maybe. What you have to do is play a couple of songs and then get off the stage because everything that trails it sounds stupid."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

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