Success Quote by Branford Marsalis

Marsalis is doing two things at once: calling out a listening habit and defending a lineage. The jab lands because it’s aimed less at ignorance than at a kind of curated innocence - the listener who “accidentally” skips everything pre-1960 because the canon has been repackaged for them as sleek, post-bop modernity. He’s not romanticizing the past; he’s diagnosing how taste gets built when history is treated like optional DLC.

The date is the tell. 1960 isn’t just a calendar cut; it’s a cultural firewall. For many contemporary fans, jazz becomes legible at the moment it looks like “serious art” with sharper edges and a cleaner narrative: Coltrane, Miles’ second great reinvention, the avant-garde’s mythos. Marsalis points out the quiet absurdity of that: the very musicians held up as the sixties’ revolutionaries were steeped in earlier language - blues, swing, Ellington, Parker, the whole grammar. You can’t understand what broke if you refuse to learn what was built.

The subtext is also about gatekeeping, but not the lazy “kids these days” kind. It’s a critique of modern cultural consumption: playlists and algorithms reward eras as vibes, not as conversations. By framing avoidance as “intentional or accidental,” he implicates both the snob who thinks pre-1960 is corny and the passive listener whose feeds simply never serve it. His intent is blunt: if you want the thrill of innovation, you have to honor the continuity it innovated against.