A virtuoso jazz saxophonist with a wry improvisational sense, Branford Marsalis
is a boundary-pushing performer who has explored an array of styles
from post-bop and traditional jazz to classical, funk, hip-hop, and
rock. Initially emerging in the 1980s to widespread acclaim alongside
his brother trumpeter Wynton Marsalis, Marsalis drew early comparisons to idols Wayne Shorter, John Coltrane, and Sonny Rollins. Ever creatively restless, he branched out, playing with Sting, Bela Fleck, Bruce Hornsby, as well as his own genre-bending side-project Buckshot LeFonque.
He brings the same adventurous, exploratory approach to his recordings,
investigating aspects of the blues on 1992's Grammy-winning I Heard You Twice the First Time, leading his harmonically sophisticated quartet on 2000's Grammy-winning Contemporary Jazz, or collaborating with vocalist Kurt Elling for 2016's poetically atmospheric Upward Spiral.
Born in 1969 in Breaux Bridge, Louisiana, Marsalis grew up in a creative musical family the eldest son of pianist and music professor Ellis Marsalis and singer and teacher Dolores.
A naturally gifted musician, he learned to play piano at age four, and
later took up the clarinet. He was around 15 when he decided to switch
over to the saxophone. Although steeped in jazz and classical music in
his youth, he also gravitated toward playing in funk bands, often with
his brother Wynton. After high school, he studied music at Southern University where he mentored under legendary New Orleans clarinetist Alvin Batiste. Under Batiste's
recommendation, he then transferred to Berklee College of Music in
Boston. However, he left Berklee in mid-1980 to tour Europe with a big
band led by drummer Art Blakey. More work followed, including stints with Lionel Hampton and Clark Terry. By 1981, he had become a regular member of Blakey'sJazz Messengers ensemble, playing alongside Wynton. There was also a tour with Herbie Hancock's V.S.O.P. II in 1983 and recordings with Miles Davis, Was (Not Was), and Dizzy Gillespie. In 1984, Marsalis also made his debut as leader with Scenes in the City, playing alongside pianists Mulgrew Miller and Kenny Kirkland, bassists Charnett Moffett and Ron Carter, and drummers Jeff "Tain" Watts and Marvin "Smitty" Smith.
From 1981 to 1985, Marsalis was a member of his brother Wynton Marsalis' quintet, appearing on a handful of influential, Grammy-winning albums, including Black Codes from the Underground, Think of One, and Hot House Flowers, all of which found the siblings building upon the modal and post-bop traditions of artists like Miles Davis, Woody Shaw, and John Coltrane. However, Marsalis left the group in 1985 to play in former Police singer Sting's band, which at the time was heavily influenced by jazz, funk, and fusion. The move brought wider recognition to Marsalis, who appeared on Sting's 1984 album, Dream of the Blue Turtles and 1986 concert film and recording Bring on the Night. The move also brought other opportunities, including a long association with director Spike Lee, beginning with an appearing in 1987's School Daze.
In 1992, Marsalis released I Heard You Twice the First Time, which found him exploring different expressions of the blues. Along with his brother Wynton, the album featured guest appearances from B.B. King, John Lee Hooker, Russell Malone, and Linda Hopkins.
It reached number one Billboard's Top Jazz Albums chart and won the
Grammy Award for Best Jazz Instrumental Performance, Individual or
Group. That same year, the saxophonist gained even wider attention when
he joined Jay Leno's Tonight Show as the musical director. Also during this period, he contributed to the Malcolm X soundtrack, and appeared on albums by Roy Hargrove, Bobby Hutcherson, Terence Blanchard, and others.
After two years with Leno he stepped down from The Tonight Show, handing the band over to guitarist Kevin Eubanks. This led to a period of eclectic guest spots on albums with Youssou N'Dour, Bela Fleck, Everette Harp, and Bruce Hornsby; the latter of which earned Marsalis his second Grammy Award for the Best Pop Instrumental Performance for his work on Hornsby's track "Barcelona Mona." Marsalis returned to his own genre-bending jazz work with the 1996 trio album The Dark Keys. Requiem (his final album with pianist Kirkland, who died several months after the session) arrived in 1999. In 2000, he finished out his Columbia contract with Contemporary Jazz, his first album with pianist Joey Calderazzo. It won the Grammy for Best Jazz Instrumental Performance, Individual or Group.
In 2002, he formed his own label, Marsalis Music.
Intended as a true independent label focused on supporting the
development of musicians, Marsalis Music began issuing albums by a
diverse range of artists including guitarist/vocalist Doug Wamble, pianist/vocalist Harry Connick, Jr., saxophonist Miguel Zenón, and others. Marsalis himself also kept busy releasing a handful of albums on the label including 2002's Footsteps of Our Fathers, which featured his take on the classic John Coltrane composition "A Love Supreme," 2003's Romare Bearden Revealed, 2004's Eternal, 2006's Braggtown, and 2009's Metamorphosen; the latter of which found him paying tribute to the many of his friends and mentors who had passed away, including Alvin Batiste, Michael Brecker, Freddie Hubbard, and others.
Growing up in the rich environment of New
Orleans as the oldest son of pianist and educator Ellis Marsalis,
Branford was drawn to music along with siblings Wynton, Delfeayo and
Jason. His first instrument, the clarinet, gave way to the alto and then
the tenor and soprano saxophones when the teenage Branford began
working in local bands. A growing fascination with jazz as he entered
college gave him the basic tools to obtain his first major jobs, with
trumpet legend Clark Terry and alongside Wynton in Art Blakey’s
legendary Jazz Messengers. When the brothers left to form the Wynton
Marsalis Quintet, the world of uncompromising acoustic jazz was
invigorated. Branford formed his own quartet in 1986 and, with a few
minor interruptions in the early years, has sustained the unit as his
primary means of expression. Known for the telepathic communication
among its uncommonly consistent personnel, its deep book of original
music replete with expressive melodies and provocative forms, and an
unrivaled spirit in both live and recorded performances, the Branford
Marsalis Quartet has long been recognized as the standard to which other
ensembles of its kind must be measured. Its most recent recording, Four
MFs Playin’ Tunes, was named Best Instrumental Jazz Album in 2012 by
iTunes. Branford has not confined his music to the quartet
context. In addition to guest turns with a legion of giants including
Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, Herbie Hancock and Sonny Rollins, he has
excelled in duets with several major pianists, including his boyhood
friend Harry Connick, Jr. and the longtime pianist in his quartet, Joey
Calderazzo. Branford’s first solo concert, at San Francisco’s Grace
Cathedral, is documented on his latest recording, In My Solitude.
Classical music inhabits a growing portion of Branford’s
musical universe. With a repertoire including works by Copland,
Debussy, Glazunov, Ibert, Mahler, Milhaud, Rorem, Vaughan Williams,
Villa‐Lobos and Sally Beamish (who reconceived a work in progress,
“Under the Wing of the Rock,” to feature Branford’s saxophone after
hearing him perform one of her earlier pieces), Branford is frequently
heard with leading symphony orchestras including those in Chicago,
Detroit, Dusseldorf and North Carolina as well as the New York
Philharmonic. He also served as Creative Director for the Cincinnati
Symphony’s Ascent series in 2012‐13. Broadway has also welcomed
Branford’s contributions. His initial effort, original music for a
revival of August Wilson’s Fences, garnered a Drama Desk Award for
Outstanding Music in a Play and a Tony nomination for Best Original
Score Written for the Theater. Branford also provided music for The
Mountaintop, starring Samuel L. Jackson and Angela Bassett, and served
as musical curator for the 2014 revival of A Raisin in the Sun.
Branford’s screen credits include the original music for Mo’ Better
Blues and acting roles in School Daze and Throw Momma from the Train. Branford
formed the Marsalis Music label in 2002, and under his direction it has
documented his own music, talented new stars such as Miguel Zenon, and
un- heralded older masters including one of Branford’s teachers, the
late Alvin Batiste. Branford has also shared his knowledge as an
educator, forming extended teaching relationships at Michigan State, San
Francisco State and North Carolina Central Universities and conducting
workshops at sites throughout the United States and the world. As
for other public stages, Branford spent a period touring with Sting,
collaborated with the Grateful Dead and Bruce Hornsby, served as Musical
Director of The Tonight Show Starring Jay Leno and hosted National
Public Radio’s widely syndicated Jazz Set. The range and quality of
these diverse activities established Branford as a familiar presence
beyond the worlds of jazz and classical music, while his efforts to help
heal and rebuild New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina mark him
as an artist with an uncommonly effective social vision. Together with
Harry Connick, Jr. and New Orleans Habitat for Humanity, Branford
conceived and helped to realize The Musicians Village, a community in
the Upper Ninth Ward that provides homes to the displaced families of
musicians and other local residents. At the heart of The Musicians
Village stands the Ellis Marsalis Center for Music, a community center
dedicated to preserving the rich New Orleans musical legacy containing
state‐of‐the art spaces for performance, instruction and recording. Some
might gauge Branford Marsalis’s success by his numerous awards,
including three Grammys and (together with his father and brothers) his
citation as a Jazz Master by the National Endowment for the Arts. To
Branford, however, these are only way stations along what continues to
be one of the most fascinating and rewarding journeys in the world of
music.
The
acclaimed tenor saxophonist discusses the key to maintaining his
long-running quartet, his hometown, his father, and why he doesn’t
consider Kamasi Washington a jazz player
Branford Marsalis (photo: Eric Ryan Anderson)“I’m ready when you are.”
Branford Marsalis does not waste time. In the handful of minutes
since we shook hands in the lobby of his New York hotel, the saxophonist
has marched into the adjacent restaurant, picked a window table, and
ordered coffee and a pastry. He’s still looking at his cellphone,
scrolling for last-minute messages, when he fires the starting gun for
this interview. What follows is like a flash flood, a 90-minute torrent of strident
judgments, firm challenges, and illustrative anecdotes, delivered with
informed passion in often colorful language. Questions are asked; some
don’t make it to a full sentence before Marsalis fires back. “It was
never really popular,” he declares, cutting short a suggestion that jazz
was a mainstream entertainment in its first decades. “Swing was
popular.” Later, Marsalis corrects an assumption about his own emotional
commitment to jazz. “I play it, I don’t live it,” he explains. “The
music is a reflection of my life. But the guys who say, ‘You can’t play
the blues unless you’ve lived them’—what the fuck does that even mean? I
gotta have my teeth punched out before I can play the blues? Of course
not.” If pianist Ellis Marsalis is the local pillar/patriarch of New
Orleans’ most famous jazz clan, and the second of his four musician
sons, trumpeter Wynton, is the polymath and public educator, the eldest,
Branford, now 58, is the enforcer—a street-savvy dynamo with fiercely
held ideals forged from wide-ranging experience and exploration. Marsalis, who lives in Durham, N.C., is in New York on this snowy
winter day for a club date with his acclaimed Branford Marsalis Quartet.
Founded in 1986, the quartet—currently featuring two players (pianist
Joey Calderazzo and bassist Eric Revis) who’ve played with Marsalis for
more than 20 years and one (drummer Justin Faulkner) who joined a decade
ago—is launching The Secret Between the Shadow and the Soul, its first album since 2016’s Upward Spiral,
a collaboration with vocalist Kurt Elling. Recorded over three days in
May 2017, while the band was in Australia, the new record showcases the
quartet’s twofold might as composers (Revis’ convulsive opener “Dance of
the Evil Toys”; Calderazzo’s delicate conviction in “Cianna”) and a
jubilant performing collective, particularly in the closing version of
Keith Jarrett’s “The Windup.” At one point, Marsalis reveals that he wanted to cover that song’s parent album—1974’s Belonging by
Jarrett’s Scandinavian quartet—“but play it with our sensibility. Then
we did the thing with Kurt. It blew that out of the water.” The
saxophonist also pays tribute to trumpeter Roy Hargrove, who died in
November (“The people with that kind of talent usually play pop because
that’s where the money is”), and compares his ’90s trials as a
bandleader on The Tonight Show with Jon Batiste’s success on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert: “You have to have a certain mentality to do it. Jon gets what it is.” Marsalis prefers his ongoing path with the quartet. “We make records,
we tour a lot—this is what it is,” he says. There is a pause, then a
grin. “Don’t choose some shit that’s unpopular, then be pissed off that
it’s not popular.”
L to R: Branford Marsalis, Justin Faulkner, Eric Revis, Joey Calderazzo. Photo by: Eric Ryan Anderson)
JT: You’ve made two albums with the quartet over the last decade. How do you define a working group at this point?
BRANFORD MARSALIS: I don’t think of it as a working
group. It’s a band. Jazz has been so fucked for so long that having a
band is a novelty, which spawns hilarious questions: “You’ve had the
same band for 20 years. Don’t you ever want to change it up?” And I say,
“You mean like the Rolling Stones? They can stay together but we
can’t?” We did the thing with Kurt, but the band was intact.
And I change it up more than anybody—in
classical music, popular music, jazz. But my history in music has been
formed around bands, whether it’s the Who, Led Zeppelin, and Earth, Wind
& Fire or Ornette Coleman’s and Miles Davis’ bands. I have always
gravitated toward bands.
Do you decide when to tour or record? Clarence Clemons, Bruce
Springsteen’s saxophonist, once told me that he knew it was time for
the road when he got a phone call: “Big Man, it’s Boss time.”
It’s a different context. We don’t take two years off. We do it
perpetually. We will not sell enough records or make enough money on
tours to not tour. So we go all over the place, all corners of
the world. And when nobody’s buying records, which will be soon, we keep
touring. With non-popular music, that’s the reality. We’re all
entertainers. When jazz musicians understand that, they might change
their outlook on things.
Jazz was certainly dance music in the beginning, in New Orleans.
I can’t dance worth shit. But I can tap my foot, shake my booty in my
seat. Charlie Parker understood that. Coleman Hawkins understood that.
The next generation, right after Parker, ceased to be enamored with
whether a song was good or bad. They fell in love with structure.
Parker’s music bounced. The next guys fell in love with complication.
Everybody wanted to play the break in “Night in Tunisia” as fast as
possible. The trick is to write hard shit but make it sound simple. When regular people listen to Stravinsky, they don’t think Petrushkais
hard—they don’t have to play it. In jazz, we’ve gone the other way:
“Y’all gotta be smart to deal with what we’re doing.” That’s not a
winning formula. You have to accept that people hear music with their
eyes first. That’s why the operative verb is “see” when you go to a
concert, not “hear.”
How would you define the entertainment at your quartet’s concerts?
All of the guys are incredibly charismatic. When people come
backstage, they don’t say, “Oh, man, what was the structure on that
tune?” They say, “It’s great to watch guys who enjoy each other, who
look at each other when they’re playing.” And we always play a song from
the ’30s or like that, which has a melody everybody knows.
We played a gig at a jazz festival in Washington, D.C. last week.
There were a lot of older people. We played our stuff, and they’re just
staring at us. Then we played “On the Sunny Side of the Street.” A man
comes up later: “You played the hell out of that song. Why don’t you
play more of that and less of the crazy shit?” [Laughs] But we gave him one song he could identify with. So he likes what we do, instead of being confused by it.
How did you decide what to record for the new album? The band
is named after you but most of the original pieces are by Joey and
Eric.
I’m more the way Miles operated. He never told you what to do. He told you what not to
do. That leaves a lot of leeway. We talk about the songs—and we argue.
On my piece, “Life Filtering from the Water Flowers,” I didn’t want Joey
to play solo piano: “Just do it the way I set it.” But we played it and
the more I heard it, the more I thought, “He might be right.” I am the leader, but I’m not the one with all the good ideas. It’s a
dialogue among all the guys. Each song has a unique color. We didn’t
have a song like [Andrew Hill’s] “Snake Hip Waltz.” Revis brought it in,
and I’m like, “We can use a happy song.” Joey’s “Cianna” is more like a
cute love song. I was struck by his “Conversation Among the Ruins.” Joey writes melancholy music with beautiful, long melodies. He was
going through some personal turmoil when he wrote that song, and it
captures that. I don’t read a lot of poetry, but when I’m starting
records, I read stuff to find apt titles. And I thought that was a good
one [from the 1956 sonnet by Sylvia Plath].
How did Eric’s “Dance of the Evil Toys” first hit you?
Nuts. Eric’s own group is an avant-garde band. We’re way inside
compared to that. So he’s in both worlds. But in the second break, the
last note in Eric’s ostinato bass line is also the first note of the
melody. So rather than have him play that note, then have me play it, I
decided I would play the note as he ends, so the ending and beginning
start in the same place.
Did you lead your first quartet [with pianist Kenny Kirkland, bassist Robert Hurst and drummer Jeff “Tain” Watts] the same way?
Yeah. We were funny as shit on stage. And we were serious. Tain calls
me one day and says, “Hey, man, you gotta get down to Bradley’s [the
fabled Greenwich Village club, which closed in 1996].” It was a band
with Walter Davis Jr. on piano, Ben Riley on drums, and I think [Ahmed]
Abdul-Malik on bass—as close as we were ever gonna get to how bebop
really sounded.
It was amazing to see how they looked at each other as they played,
how much they talked to each other. Walter would play something, and Ben
would say, “Oh, so it’s gonna be like that!” I was like, “We need to
start doing this, let our personalities come out.” It wasn’t like we
were shy, reticent actors who had to learn how to be axe murderers. We
were already like that: “Let’s go kill people.”
Was that something instilled in you as you grew up in New Orleans?
It is a very charismatic city. There’s a lot of competition. But it
isn’t insecurity. We take on all comers. It’s not “We gotta keep them
away, they might take our gig.” When I got to New York, I saw the jam
sessions—guys inviting people on stage and calling songs in keys they
know people don’t know. It’s like the ultimate inside joke. Somebody did
it to me—I walked off the stage. He said, “Go home and practice.” I
said, “Why would I spend weeks of my life learning to play a song in a
stupid key so I can trick somebody up on a bandstand?” Life’s too short.
Branford Marsalis (photo by: Eric Ryan Anderson)How do you now see your father’s impact on jazz—as a player
and teacher, creating a family aesthetic? He never sought the limelight
beyond New Orleans.
He regrets not moving to New York. But if he had moved to New York,
none of us would exist. People say jazz isn’t popular but should be. My
dad’s philosophy is, “Jazz isn’t popular. Let’s play jazz.” When Wynton
and I were playing in R&B bands, doing cover tunes, we were making
way more money than he was. Wynton was like, “Doesn’t that bother you?”
“No, I chose this.” That was the end of it.
I moved to New York with that attitude. I went off and played with
Sting [in the ’80s], a great guy and fantastic songwriter. But there was
this assumption: I’ll be going back to this other music I was doing.
Sting understood that.
What did you learn from your time with Sting about supporting a singer?
I learned that in New Orleans. There’s a scene in that Charlie Parker movie [Clint Eastwood’s 1988 film Bird] where he’s playing all this shit and the woman singer turns around and curses him out. I went through that scene [smiles].
My dad burst out laughing when I told him: “The singer is the most
important person on the stage. And if you don’t understand that, don’t
play with singers.”
What did you carry over from your experience with Sting to your collaboration with Kurt Elling?
There is no concrete way to say, “These are the five things I learned
with Sting.” When I was playing with Sting, I wasn’t reflecting on what
we played. It was happening, and we were trying to get better at what
was happening.
The funny thing with Kurt is that he has this absolutely gorgeous
voice, but he’d rather be a saxophone player. On tour, we would come out
and play a song, and the audience would just stare at us. We’d announce
Kurt, and they’d get this shit-eating grin on their faces. He would
sing, move to the side, and people would keep looking at him, so happy
to see a singer. And he’s like, “These guys are soloing, and I’m just
standing here.”
But it wasn’t singer-with-backing band. It was more like the Branford
Marsalis Quintet. He was completely integrated with the band, and we
had a good time out there.
Your two albums in the ’90s with the band Buckshot
LeFonque—mixing jazz, pop, and DJ culture—got a mixed reception. What’s
your take on artists like Robert Glasper and Kamasi Washington, who are
now working at the crossroads of jazz and hip-hop? Robert Glasper has a limited jazz vocabulary, and that’s not anything
he would say is not true. I think it’s in his best interest to do that.
Kamasi’s not a jazz player either. He’s a sax player. But his
vocabulary is not jazz. It’s some jazz. This is not something I want to go to war with. But I can listen to a
Lester Young record, a Dexter Gordon or Wayne Shorter record, and ask,
“Do you hear that lineage in his playing?” If you don’t, what makes it
jazz? Improv? We’re back to that illusion again. The success that Kamasi
has had—it’s awesome. But the people defending him as a jazz player are
not jazz players. They have their own idea of what jazz is, and they
are entitled to that. But so am I. One interesting thing about Kamasi’s rise is the way he has
connected on the jam-band and rock-festival circuit. But you first did
that in 1990 when you played with the Grateful Dead at Nassau Coliseum
in New York.
That was different. I was playing in their band. Buckshot played with
[the jam band] String Cheese Incident for a while. We could have been
in that. But at no time would I have accepted the notion that this was
jazz. We had influences from jazz, from rock. It was a hybrid thing.
But you fit into the Dead’s aesthetic so well they invited you to join them at later gigs.
The first time, some of the guys were like, “Oh, no, another jazz
guy.” Because they had David Murray and Ornette come in, and they just
did their David Murray and Ornette thing on the tunes. But I never
bought into the genius thing. The modern definition of genius is not
about adaptability—it’s about a singular idea that you thrust and bogart
on every situation. If I’m going to play with the Grateful Dead, I’m
going to play with them, not on top of them.
You reunited with some of the surviving members—the offshoot
Dead and Company—at the Lockn’ Festival last year. What was it like
going back to that music—and with another guitarist, John Mayer, in
Jerry Garcia’s spot?
It’s a different band now. John doesn’t have the same sonic
vocabulary that Jerry had. Jerry came from bluegrass and folk, a little
jazz. John’s thing is more Delta blues, and he goes to that lane. It
doesn’t have the same feeling as when Jerry was there. But there’s this
other thing, and it’s cool.
What’s next for you, with or outside the quartet? Are there other concepts you want to pursue? We’re gonna play. We just hit, and an idea will develop or it won’t.
And we’ll keep playing until it does. I’m not part of the concept crowd,
this idea that musicians have to come up with a new concept on every
record. When Einstein came up with the theory of relativity, he didn’t
come back two years later and say, “I need some new shit.” It took him
forever to get to that one. And it was a discovery, not an invention,
because the data was pre-existing. He stared at the same forest as the
other physicists, but the trees made sense only to him.
That’s a great metaphor for music. You hear all these sounds, and
then you hear the things that other guys don’t hear. So many players are
about knowing things, not hearing them. My marker is listening to great
musicians and saying, “Am I in that camp? Am I learning everything they
left out here?” That’s the only thing that matters when you decide to
do this.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
David Fricke has written about music for more than four decades for publications including Rolling Stone, MOJO, the late great British weekly Melody Maker and now JazzTimes.
He is a DJ at Sirius XM Radio, a Grammy-nominated writer of album liner
notes and a three-time winner of the ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award for
excellence in music journalism.
Saxophonist Marsalis has been leading a quartet for the last 20 years, with only one personnel change; their new album, The Secret Between the Shadow and the Soul, shows they're still going strong.
TERRY GROSS, HOST:
This is FRESH AIR. Saxophonist Branford Marsalis has been leading
a quartet for the past 20 years with only one personnel change. Jazz
critic Kevin Whitehead says the Marsalis Quartet's new album shows
they're still going strong. (SOUNDBITE OF BRANFORD MARSALIS QUARTET'S "LIFE FILTERING FROM THE WATER FLOWERS") KEVIN WHITEHEAD, BYLINE: Branford Marsalis showing off his
burnished tenor saxophone sound, which his other career playing
classical music hasn't heard any. Marsalis isn't interested in breaking
new ground. As he hears it - and he's not totally wrong - whatever fancy
new wrinkle jazz musicians devise, someone else has already done. He's
happy with jazz's ageless challenges, like improvising a graceful solo
over shifting chords and lively rhythm, being creative while coloring
within the lines. (SOUNDBITE OF BRANFORD MARSALIS QUARTET'S "CIANNA") WHITEHEAD: That's "Cianna" by pianist Joey Calderazzo, who wrote a
couple of tunes for the Branford Marsalis Quartet's album "The Secret
Between The Shadow And The Soul." A more playful side emerges on "Dance
Of The Evil Toys" by band bassist Eric Revis, who elsewhere mixes with
musicians who do seek out new wrinkles. The tune makes some sudden
moves. The music gets out there a little but only in passing and almost
tongue in cheek. (SOUNDBITE OF BRANFORD MARSALIS QUARTET'S "DANCE OF THE EVIL TOYS") WHITEHEAD: Branford Marsalis displaying some other saxophone
colors. In the past, he's spoken of the 1970s as a low point for jazz.
But apparently, it wasn't a total loss. Here he plays two tunes from
that decade, including Andrew Hill's "Snake Hip Waltz." Its nattering
repetitions make a good bird-call fit with Branford's piercing tone on
soprano sax. And it's a good launchpad for a soloist finally freed from
the maddening repeats. (SOUNDBITE OF BRANFORD MARSALIS QUARTET'S "SNAKE HIP WALTZ") WHITEHEAD: Justin Faulkner on drums, the band's new guy who
joined a decade ago. It's always good to hear a group existing for 20
years that brings so much enthusiasm. Branford Marsalis and company all
sound into it and on the same page, as on Keith Jarrett's 1974 earworm
"The Windup." There, Marsalis toys with a riff from "Broadway Blues" by
Ornette Coleman, a big influence on Jarrett, before restating Jarrett's
melody. It's a good way to wind up the album - Branford Marsalis making a
knowing connection and whooping it up at the same time. (SOUNDBITE OF BRANFORD MARSALIS QUARTET'S "THE WINDUP") GROSS: Kevin Whitehead writes for Point of Departure and The
Audio Beat. He reviewed "The Secret Between The Shadow And The Soul,"
the new CD by the Branford Marsalis Quartet. Coming up, David Bianculli
tells us about the live TV broadcast tonight recreating episodes of "All
In The Family" and "The Jeffersons." That's after a break. This is
FRESH AIR. (SOUNDBITE OF ALLEN TOUSSAINT'S "BRIGHT MISSISSIPPI")
The Braford Marsalis Quartet’s latest album, The Secret Between The Shadow And The Soul,
features compositions by the bandleader, pianist Joey Calderazzo and
bassist Eric Revis. Drummer Justin Faulkner rounds out the ensemble. (Photo: Scott Chernis)
Whether riffing on his new quartet album, his recent work
with singer Kurt Elling, his dynastic jazz family, his formative
experiences in Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers, his teaching experiences
(at institutions such as North Carolina Central University), his
interest in science or his love of sports, Branford Marsalis speaks his
truth. “We’re all music listeners,” the saxophonist said of his quartet with pianist Joey Calderazzo
and bassist Eric Revis—who have been with him for nearly 20 years—and
drummer Justin Faulkner, who joined the fold 10 years ago, filling the
chair formerly occupied by Jeff “Tain” Watts. “If you see us on a plane,
every guy in the band has headphones on.” The quartet’s new album, The Secret Between The Shadow And The Soul
(OKeh/Sony Masterworks), is as immediately intimate as it is infinitely
expansive, reflecting a deep interconnectedness among players. Marsalis
contributed just one composition to the set, the gloriously moody “Life
Filtering From The Water Flowers.” Revis wrote the album’s more
adventuresome pieces: the exuberant opener “Dance Of The Evil Toys” and
the more somber “Nilaste.” Calderazzo brought in “Cianna” and
“Conversation Among The Ruins,” two songs he’d been performing with his
trio between road gigs with the Marsalis quartet and Elling. All of the song selections mutually were agreed upon by the
quartet, including the reanimations of Keith Jarrett’s “The Windup” and
Andrew Hill’s “Snake Hip Waltz.” The album serves as a snapshot of where the quartet currently
stands: at the top of its game. The same can be said for the band’s
onstage presentation, as evidenced by a Jan. 20 concert during an SFJAZZ
residency in San Francisco. The quartet worked collaboratively,
respectfully and intuitively, and the trust between the musicians was
palpable. Marsalis led, but didn’t dominate, giving his bandmates plenty
of space to shine. During the past four decades, Marsalis has traversed vast musical
territories. Whether leading his own groups on stages and in studios
across the globe; playing alongside artists as diverse as Public Enemy,
Tina Turner and the Grateful Dead; appearing on Broadway, in films and
on TV; and pursuing a classical music career, his ability to shape-shift
and improvise remains central to not only who he is, but who he’s
becoming. DownBeat caught up with Marsalis over breakfast on the third day of
his recent residency. Below are edited excerpts from the conversation. You’ve performed in San Francisco many times. How would you characterize the city and its audience for jazz? You know, in all places there are several audiences. I remember
when I moved to New York, they’d say, “There’s not a lot of jazz fans.”
And then they’d say, “There’s not a lot of blacks who like jazz.” Then
we did a free concert and there were black people, white people, tall
people, short people—everybody, and they were enthusiastic. When we were younger we were here a lot. It’s changed. There are
several San Franciscos, never more than now. I remember when we were
playing The Great American Music Hall, and it was packed. The cover was
10 to 15 bucks. That’s not what it is anymore. There’s always going to
be a situation where there are audiences more apt to afford it and less
likely to enjoy it. It’s the same in sports: The most expensive seats in
the stadium sit empty more often than not. The average fan is priced
out of the reality. People have always had to decide what they can and
can’t spend their money on. I was a Mets season ticket holder. I
remember when they were in old raggedy-ass Shea Stadium. You could go to
a professional baseball game for $25. Now, that’s the price of popcorn
and a Coke. So who is jazz for? Music is for everybody, but there are
market realities. There were some guys in New York that had a jazz meeting, and they
were [reminiscing] about 52nd Street: “We need to get back to that, gigs
for everybody.” I was talking to Blakey about all sorts of things, I
talked to Roy Haynes, and Benny Golson, and all these guys were like,
“We need to bring back 52nd Street.” It’s really easy, I said. All we have to do is sign a pact and say
we will agree to play from 9 p.m. till 4 a.m. every night—45 minutes on,
45 minutes off, and agree to play for 40 bucks. There will be clubs as
far as the eye can see. That was 52nd Street. You talk to the old guys
about it, and they say the music part was great. Every other aspect of
it sucked. One advantage I think I have over a lot of people I meet is I’m not
a fan of anything, except New Orleans sports teams: I cheer for the
Saints. I want them to win. Notice I don’t say I want us to win. I want them
to win. I love those guys. I used to sell programs in the stadium just
to watch the games. But my father helped me understand that “we”
benefits the team, but it doesn’t really benefit you since you don’t
receive any of the largesse of their success. So you need to create a
line that delineates what you support from what you actually are. Is your team the jazz lineage—the musical tradition that will carry on after you’re gone? Despite all of the prognostications to the contrary, yes, it shall
carry on. But I’m not working for that team. I love jazz. I love music.
And I’ve learned how to play all styles of music. I don’t take a
one-sound-fits-all approach, learn five unique licks that are mine and
impose them on everything. I avoid that way of thinking. We get caught
up in all this useless crap. The word “innovation” in jazz is a joke.
None of this shit is innovative. The only thing that can be innovative
in music, anyway, is sound. Wynton said something once in a discussion that knocked me out,
talking about innovation in jazz. Jazz didn’t invent harmony: All the
harmony jazz guys use has been used in one iteration or another in
classical music in the last 100 years. True. The two things that jazz
contributed to the world were consistent use of the flatted third and
the flatted seventh in the melodic context and the swing beat. That’s
it. Now, you think about modern music, and they employ neither
technique. So, they bandy this word “innovation” around, and the
innovation is based on structure. It’s all been done! So, then to make
it unique, a lot of modern music is ostinato bass lines on odd meters. And songs are no longer called songs; they’re called vehicles for
improvisation—as though improvisation is the provenance of jazz. Every
culture has improvised over the last 5,000 years. You can hear
improvisation in klezmer music, in Balinese music, Indian music, in
bluegrass music, in the blues. And the irony is that most of the people
who are called improvisers aren’t really improvisers. They’re just
regurgitating. And at the same time, with a straight face, they say, “I
wonder why no one likes jazz anymore.” [laughs] Could you talk about the new way you’ve pulled from classical, New Orleans and jazz and put it together in new way? Think about it this way: If the goal of playing jazz is to be new,
and new means you’re playing things that no one’s ever heard before,
then if you were really interested in being new, it’d be in your benefit
to learn no jazz at all. Because then anything you play will sound new
because it is disconnected from any semblance to tradition. ... I just
want to be good. I want to be in a musical situation where, if our band
fell into a time machine, people would say, “I don’t know what that shit
is, but they’re really good at it.” The goal is good; I don’t really care about new. Sometimes that stuff winds up being new, but that’s to be decided later. Think about how John Coltrane plays “Impressions,” and you read
all these reviews where they’re saying, “This is new, this is new, this
is new,” when the whole piece was composed chapter-and-verse by a guy
named Morton Gould in 1939. I don’t know any good music that isn’t
borrowed from somewhere else. It has nothing to do with where the data
comes from; it’s about how the data sounds. And, yes, he took
“Impressions” from American Symphonette No. 2: “Pavane.” It sure don’t
sound like American Symphonette No. 2: “Pavanne” when he plays it. And
that’s all that really matters. So, I’ve been stealing since I joined
Blakey’s band and understood the interconnectivity of all these guys
when they start talking about who they listen to, and how they grew up,
and what their influences were. You’ve been playing the songs on the new album for a couple of years live; how did you winnow it down to the seven on the album? Those are the songs I like. Those are the songs the guys in the band like. Was “The Windup” something you’d been doing in the set? We played it two years ago. And then we started playing with Kurt
[Elling], so we switched into that gear. I’d been wanting to play the
song for years. I went through a lazy period where I was listening and
practicing a lot of saxophone, but what I hadn’t done in a long time was
sit down with a set of headphones and listen to a song and just write
the song out. I’m not a fan of fakebooks, except in emergency
situations, because every time I commit to writing a song down, that
makes me better. It doesn’t make me better to download it. I wrote down
“The Windup” chart and said, “Here you go, let’s do this tonight.” And
they all said yea! Because we all know the record. We’ve heard the
record a million times. When you teach, can students keep up with your ideas about sound, listening and learning? No. Because they’re not old like us. They’re 19. Most of my
students come in with a completely separate idea of what jazz actually
is. And what is that? That it’s learning how to play certain kind of repetitive licks and patterns over chord structure. I say two things to the students: “Why are you here?” They don’t
have an answer. Then, “Play a C scale two octaves up and down.” They
play it. [I ask,] “What does that sound like?” They have no idea. So,
we’ve established, in less than a minute, you have no idea why you’re
here and you have no idea what you sound like. The lesson’s pretty much
over. “When you figure out one of those, come back and we can start.”
Some of them tell me, “Go screw yourself,” and they don’t come back.
Which is a win for me. The majority of them come back, and from that
point forward, we’re about to have real lessons about what it means to
play music. People want to go to school and hear they’re good. They
should want to go and hear they suck. They don’t go for information;
they go for affirmation. You mentioned posting scientific and other articles on Twitter.
Do you find that reading about a variety of subjects helps to rest or
work your brain differently than music does? I don’t know. Most musicians I know tend not to be that way. When
you go to music sites, they just post about music. It’s not for me.
There’s a one-dimensionality to it that’s not to my liking. My dad and I
didn’t agree on that, but I’ve always had that kind of holistic
thinking. We were forced to live in multiple worlds. We were living in a
predominantly black neighborhood at that time and I was going to
predominantly white schools. So, especially growing up post-segregation,
which meant it was still there although not in law but in mindset, you
had to negotiate these worlds. One of the things my dad said that was
really helpful: “You don’t allow other people to define you. Because if
you don’t believe what they say, then what they say really doesn’t
matter.” That really helped me when I moved to New York. People were joining all these music camps, people saying what is
and isn’t possible, what’s good and not good based on absolutely nothing
other than their personal opinion. I started listening to music for
hours and hours and hours. And I started hearing things in music that I
didn’t hear before. And then you say something like, “It’s really
interesting when you listen to the [1967] Miles Davis record Sorcerer.
On the first song, “Prince Of Darkness,” Miles gets lost in the middle
of the solo and he’s a half beat off about the entire second half of the
solo.” And everyone says, “Man, that’s bullshit.” No, it’s not, really.
I heard it. You can hear the band bring him back to where the beat is;
you can hear Tony Williams banging out the tempo. And in the end, they
just go where Miles goes. Because he is Miles. As you get older, you
realize, Miles was an old man, born in the ’20s, grew up listening to
Louis Armstrong, trying to stay modern. It’s not like he could hear all
that stuff they were playing. What he did was masterful. Wayne Shorter
starts creating all these complex structures, Miles can’t hear the
structures, so he just tells Herbie to stroll. Herbie doesn’t play the
chords, so anything Miles plays sounds right. And what he mostly plays
are a couple of chromatic scales and a couple of phrases and things he’d
done in his prior musical lifetime. And I’ve been there, and I use that
technique sometimes [laughs]. When you talk to other people: “Miles had the vision and the forward
thinking and he hired these guys and he taught them.” He didn’t teach
them anything. Nothing. Because he didn’t know it. So, to say that,
people go, “This is heresy!” It’s really not. It’s on the record. It’s
right there. You can check it out if you’re listening. Most people think
that I’m a contrarian because I don’t agree. I don’t agree not because
it’s cool to not agree. I put on this record: It doesn’t matter how many
hundreds of you can’t hear it. I hear what this shit is. I’m saying
it’s this because it is that. Not because I want to make a name for
myself by going against the grain. Hell, in modern jazz, aural
scholarship is against the grain. You start talking about hearing and
they start talking about knowing. How is the Musicians’ Village in New Orleans doing?
It’s doing great. Harry [Connick Jr.] and I did two fundraisers.
All across the country, when it comes to poor neighborhoods, they’ve got
basketball programs and all these other things—which is good for
basketball and football teams because they’re always looking for talent.
It’s great for us to be able to get the kids who aren’t physically
gifted but intellectually gifted and have them do something other than
watch cartoons until their parents get home from work. One year in, the parents asked us, “How come y’all don’t teach
adults?” So, the parents forced us to start adult classes, and now
you’ve got parents and kids playing together. It doesn’t matter if they
become musicians or not. New Orleans proved that. Musicians become
musicians. You don’t have to get a school to create musicians. They just
show up. It’s just a matter of giving them information that can make
them better. The whole idea is to teach a kid to self-correct, identify
problems, solve it though logic. When you tour outside of the U.S., do you have a sense of being
regarded as representative of jazz, America and African Americans? I don’t think they put that much thought in it. Why should they? I
got off a plane: There are some musicians from Dresden with traditional
instruments playing Bach’s St. John Passion. I sat in the audience and I fucking loved it. And not one time did I
think they are representing the German people; they are representing
Dresden. It’s either good or it’s not. They either like it or they
don’t. I was thinking of the State Department’s jazz diplomacy campaigns. Back then? Yeah, they did that. It was mostly in Communist and
African countries. Louis Armstrong going to Africa. It was done to
improve the image of the United States, which was starting to be known
around the world as a racist place. The Soviets were more than willing
to exploit Jim Crow for their own purposes. But there was no fervent
belief in the United States that we had to represent African Americans
in a better light in 1952. It was to create a valuable counter-narrative
to what the Soviets were putting out. And it was pretty easy to do:
Just grab films of Bull Conner spraying pregnant women with water hoses,
dogs biting people, and beating them with truncheons. The State
Department’s idea wasn’t pure, but it was awesome. Politically, it makes
perfect sense. Musically, it makes sense. We did State Department tours. The gig is on YouTube. It’s Wynton
in Warsaw, 1983. They didn’t want the musicians to fraternize with us.
We met these musicians and stayed up almost all night and we talked
about music in America and they talked about music in Poland. They said,
“We can’t get records here. Can you send us tapes?” The list was so
long it took us weeks to buy these TDK cassette tapes and record all
this music, put it in a box, and send it to these guys. The State
Department didn’t plan on that. [Calderazzo and Revis approach Marsalis, and the bandmates exchange greetings.] Sleepy, huh? I’ve been up since 6. I went and washed clothes.
I was going to ask you about the earliness of the hour.
They don’t get up. I do. My son was born in 1985, and that was it
for me. I was up at 6. “But you’re a jazz musician, you must sleep in
late.” No. My entire life is a series of stereotypes. Sure, I’ll be up
at 6, but you come around at noon, so you can feel better about your
stereotypes. I got into it with a jazz writer a couple of days ago. We
were talking about styles of music, and I kept talking about [how] you
have to find a way to communicate with people in the music you play.
Modern musicians are more interested in communicating with other
musicians, which is useless. And he said, “A lot of people don’t agree
with you.” People respond to sound. It’s just that simple. If you play a
ballad and somebody’s affected by it, they’re not going to come to you
and say, “When you just played that super lydian scale, I just lost it.”
It’s never going to happen. If it’s real, it’s unexplained, it’s just a
sound.
What pieces take you there?
“A Love Supreme” does it. The Billie Holiday record Lady In Satin. The Sinatra record Only The Lonely.
Mahler’s Ninth. Glenn Gould, Brahms’ Intermezzo In A Major. I heard
that once, and Glenn Gould plays it so exceptionally well that when they
went back to the recapitulation, I was driving with my wife and I just
started crying and she said, “What happened?” And I said, “Didn’t you
hear it? It’s so beautiful.” Peter Lieberson and his wife, Lorraine Hunt
Lieberson, Neruda Songs [2006]. She was dying of cancer, and he
wrote these songs, and she sang them with the Boston Symphony just
before she died. You can hear the joy in her voice amidst the pathos,
very similar to what Neruda writes about, anyway. The duality. It’s
never one or the other. It’s not happy or sad. It’s like the blues: Yes,
it has a flatted third and, yes, it has a flatted seventh, but it is
not a minor sound. You have to make the minor sound major. And that’s
the trick. It’s a mixolydian scale, I think they call it. The sound of the blues is happy. Louis Armstrong sits on the
flatted third and it makes you want to jump up in church and scream from
the mountain. Tchaikovsky did this really funny thing where he would
write things in a major [key] and make you want to slit your wrist. It’s
about how it sounds. If you listen to Carnival Of The Animals by Camille
Saint-Saëns, he names all the pieces after animals. ... It sounds like
... animals. Then he does this one called “Aquarium,” and it sounds like
somebody swimming. It sounds aquatic. That’s the power of sound. How
are you going to talk about that technically, to get that to happen? You
have to have a great musical imagination to make that happen. What do you think is going to happen to jazz in the future? Look, I’ve got three dudes in my band. I only need three. I don’t
need a 100; I don’t need 300. The world doesn’t need 300. Those kinds of
discussions are silly—not with you, because you listen to jazz. I’m
being interviewed perpetually by people who don’t listen to jazz, who
are asking me if jazz is going to survive. What kind of question is
that? [They say,] “Fewer and fewer people like jazz. ... Jazz is dying;
people aren’t listening.” Yet it still exists. We are still here. There
will always be one-half of a percent of the country that will like it.
And one-half of a percent of the country is like 1.5 million people.
We’re good. We’ll be all right. We don’t need 300 guys. We just need
five really, really good ones. DB
In addition to playing with giants like Art Blakey and
Miles Davis, he's spent years touring with solo-era Sting, performed
with Harry Connick Jr. and the Grateful Dead, and fronted the
jazz-rock-funk mash-up Buckshot LeFonque. He also acted in movies and on TV and led "The Tonight Show" band in
the early Jay Leno years. But saxophonist Branford Marsalis's
four-decade-and-counting career colors far outside the lines of the jazz
tradition he embodies and defends. His eclectic genre-transgressing career was in sharp contrast to his
slightly younger, equally virtuosic but more conservative brother
Wynton. But if Wynton was more of a household name, Branford was always
cooler and edgier, the Rolling Stones to his brother's Beatles, or at
least the Lennon to his McCartney. The onetime young lion is now 58, leading a quartet that has mostly
been together since the turn of the century. The newest member, drummer
Justin Faulkner, joined in 2009. Its most recent recording is "Upward
Spiral," a 2016 collaboration with premier jazz singer Kurt Elling. On
March 1, it is releasing "The Secret Between the Shadow and the Soul,"
its first all-instrumental recording in seven years. Style spoke by phone with Marsalis, who is performing at the
University of Richmond on Feb. 15. There is an extended portion of the
interview following the article. Style Weekly:The new album title is from Pablo Neruda's "Sonnet XVII." How does it relate to the music? Branford Marsalis: I just like the way it sounds. I
play instrumental music, so it doesn't have to have any meaning. All of
the songs on the record are about emotions, they are not about data. The
first song is angry and aggressive. The second song is melancholy. The
third song is happy. I can't remember what the fourth song is. I read a
lot of poetry for enjoyment. Certain things jump out at me. I don't
question it, I just know it. I thought it was a really cool-ass phrase.
When people talk about love they always talk about it sophomorically.
It requires a certain amount of depth of thought to use words to talk
about the unknown things. It takes a really talented person to use words
to describe what words can't describe. You have to have a super-vivid
imagination, which he clearly did. The writing is quite beautiful, in a
way that is surprising. You've said that working with singers like Kurt Elling has made your own playing more concise. Well, we got better is all. Playing with Kurt was great for the
group. I had been in singing bands before, the rest of the guys hadn't.
You have to suddenly play a solo that gets to the point and gets out.
You can't play too long, or you kill the momentum.
We focus on emotion. The music system is limited … like having a
language that only has 12 syllables. You only have 12 notes. You can put
them in all these combinations, but it is still the same 12 notes.
There are languages without a tremendous number of syllables. They are
complicated to understand. What a word means is based on where it is put
and how it is said. The change in your band is a continuous process?
If you have the right musicians, yes. … A lot of players learn a
particular style and then force it on every situation. You need to have
people who are musically curious enough and disciplined enough to allow
whatever you are doing to change the way they perceive sound. I am lucky
that Eric, Joey and Justin are fantastic players, but on top of that
fantastic musicians. They were happy to do this for a while. There is an
inflection point, then you can't wait to get out and play again.
Everything is changed.
How do you keep the audience engaged?
My dad told me when I was 15 and playing in an R&B band, that
most audiences are the same, they hear with their eyes. It was
entertainment. It was the '80s, so we had costumes and I had to learn
dance steps. That is something I am not good at. I always tried to hide
behind the better dancers.
It's the same now. After a show people come up and say that they
didn't understand what we played, but they loved seeing us have so much
fun playing it.
They could tell there was information flying back and forth. But they
can't tell you what the information is, but my argument is that they
shouldn't have to. It may always be a challenging listen, but we will
always play a couple of songs that everyone can totally relate to.
The Branford Marsalis Quartet plays the Modlin Center on Feb. 15
at 7:30 p.m. Tickets cost $45, with discounts for seniors, groups and
students. Extended interview: How did you choose the covers that are included on the CD?
Branford Marsalis: The song, the way it sounds and what it
represents.
The Andrew Hill song [“Snake Hip Waltz”] is a happy song. It is quirky
because it is in ¾ and what he tried to do is write a series of
three-bar phrases in a society where we write four-bar phrases for
everything. He couldn’t get all the way to the end without writing a
four-bar phrase, but the trying was really cool. We needed a song that
had that happy go-lucky emotion. And “Windup,” the Keith Jarrett composition from his European band? Eight years ago when my daughter was ten, she was sitting at the
kitchen table and I was playing “Well You Needn’t” from the album
“Monk’s Music.” I was listening to it, trying to come up with this
serious idea about Monk’s music. She’s not a jazz kid, but she said
“Who’s that? I like this song. It sounds happy.” It had never occurred to me to apply emotion to the data I’d been
studying. The more I listened I was like, shit, it is happy. If you
listen to modern jazz, it’s anything but happy, it’s cynical. That one
interaction made me listen differently. I can hear that the song is
happy. I think [Keith Jarrett’s] group was more interested in playing it
in the Ornette Coleman style. Keith spent a lot of time listening to
Ornette. There are a couple of YouTube videos of him playing saxophone
that are interesting. He is a hell of a good saxophone player. They were
trying to play a style that they hadn’t listened to or studied a lot.
They were playing to not make mistakes, very defensively. I always said this was one of those great songs I would like to
play. I was listening to the record one day on the plane [and] I took
out my pencil and sketched it out. Filled it in when I got to the piano
at the gig, and said we are playing this tomorrow night. Everyone knows
it already, it is a refresher course, we have all heard it enough times.
Justin put this New Orleans beat on it. He was living in New Orleans,
working on a film that is probably never going to come out. But he met
some of the great drummers who were there. They taught him this New
Orleans beat. It was great, do your thing. The arrangements happen
organically with us. We play songs, you have to allow things to happen. I
am happy doing that. The guys are creative. I learned a lot listening to Jan [Garbarek]. Particularly that
melancholy shit. The tone is a little sharp for my ear, but the stuff he
is playing. It is some happy-ass music. The good thing about emotion:
We are playing some crazy shit, but we play it happily, so it sounds
happy. We are a big listening band. Our sound vocabulary is huge. Modern
players rely more on harmonic vocabulary than sound vocabulary. We have
a lot of sonic references we can draw from. As a result, we can take a
song and make it sound really big, or really small. We have a lot of
sonic options that [the Keith Jarrett band] didn’t have. They existed in
one particular space, even if it was a really cool-ass space. [Our
quartet] can occupy lots of different space. Why was there such a long break between Quartet albums?
We have been working steadily, but it is foolish to send a lot of
jazz records out there. Jazz records don’t sell a lot anyway. Throwing
them out eight months apart really cripples your chances of selling
anything. So we did the “Four MFs Playin’ Tunes” record, and then a solo
record, that I never expected to come out. We switched distributors,
they wanted something new and that was the only product we had. I didn’t
even know if it was good or not. That wasn’t a musical choice, it was a
political necessity. After that came the Kurt Elling record. It wasn’t a deliberate
thing, but we had to give come air between releases. Ironically as a
band we needed some time anyway. When you do a project like the Kurt
record it completely changed the DNA of the band. When we started
playing the tunes, we were trying to play them like it was 2015, but it
was 2017. We couldn’t go back. We had to give the music some time to
figure out our new sound. Does that kind of experience always reshape the band concept?
If you have the right musicians, yes. [Maybe not] if you don’t. A
lot of players learn a particular style and then force it on every
situation. You need to have people who are musically curious enough and
disciplined enough to allow whatever you are doing to change the way
they perceive sound. I am lucky that Eric [Revis], Joey [Calderazzo],
and Justin [Faulkner] are fantastic players, but on top of that, they
are fantastic musicians. They were happy to [work on the new approach]
for a while. There is an inflection point, then you can’t wait to get
out and play again. Everything is changed. A lot of guys, their version of change is not through jazz. They
move to New York to play jazz. He plays in clubs and makes a jazz
record. The first record doesn’t sell. He makes a second record. Second
record doesn’t sell. The third record is a funk record, which will not
sell because he is not a funk player. But there is this thing that jazz
guys believe, that anything with a backbeat sells. There are literally
millions of records over the last 45 years that verify that everything
with a backbeat does not sell, but there is this weird mindset that
people who have gone from jazz to playing popular sounds, while never
having done that in their lives, and are not connected to it in anyway,
that music has no choice but to come across as cynical. It is not an
earnest decision. Having grown up playing classical music first, popular music
second, and jazz music third, I thought that any kind of change in the
band must come through jazz. Not playing another style of music and
calling it jazz. Funk is the new swing?
Everybody has to do it the way they need to do it. I think there is an
established sound to jazz that has existed for 100 years. Now you have a
bunch of people who don’t like jazz, but like the idea of liking jazz.
So they will like jazz as long as it has improv and a beat they are
familiar with. There are people who do that and do quite well for
themselves. Bravo to them .... When Herbie Hancock did “Headhunters,”
that is not a jazz record. For a lot of my friends it was. There was no
way to explain to them why it was not a jazz record. Then I have to sit
down and make them listen for months to music they can’t stand. Then
they come to the realization that “maybe this is not a jazz record, but I
like this better.” Which is fine. I am not saying everyone should like
the music. But there is a this whole pattern that has existed since I was a
kid. They like calling jazz a big tent, but one of the key tenets of the
big tent is that the thing that is actually called jazz they know
nothing about. They think it should be jazz because they like it. It’s not a war you can win. Not a war [I'm] interested in
winning. I am just interested in getting with my guys and playing. How I
feel about it is expressed in our records and how we play on the gigs
... When my pipes go bad, I call the plumber. They don’t ask me how
to do it. We need to lay this music. It is our job to communicate to
them. They pay us money, they go home happy.
But there are a lot of musicians that somehow believe that their
music is so sophisticated that it is above the heads of most people, and
it is incumbent on people to rise up to where they are. That is the
most unsuccessful formula I have ever heard. You can read articles about
the musicians that jazz writers say are really great, go to the
concerts and they are half empty. Because if a musician really is a genius- and I hate that word-
they will find their way to get their point across, no matter how
complicated- to people, regular people.
That is the challenge, not developing some system that no one can
decipher. The attention in jazz tends to go to that nerdy way of
thinking. So, the music writ large is put in this position where people
say they hate jazz, but it is not jazz they hate but the way people play
it. It may always be a challenging listen, but we will always play a
couple of songs that everyone can totally relate to. We are here to play
for you. We will give you some of our thoughts, but we will also play
things you can completely identify with. We do both. Back in the day, Wynton was the approachable Beatles and you were the edgier Rolling Stones.
Right. Although I like the Beatles better than the Rolling Stones. But I hear you.
It took me a while to get to the Stones. I am there now, I get
it. If you sit around and study music all day long, and study structure.
What is the [complex] song structure of a Beatles tune in comparison to
the Rolling Stones’ most simple structure? The irony was that when I
was a kid, I was playing R&B and rock and roll, all simple
structures. When I was in school, I was learning all this other stuff. We all come around, or we should. Most of the times I use the Rolling Stones in my music class, rather than the Beatles. Who thinks Keith Richards is a great guitar player? No one.
Suppose you say I have a song that is almost good, and I need a lick
that is so infectious that it will take it right over the top? Who do
you get? The better guitar player? No, you get Keith Richards. That’s
what the music is about. Steve Vai is certainly a better guitar player, but most people would want to be Keith Richards.
Saxophone
star Branford Marsalis has stood out whether leading his own bands,
serving as music director on “The Tonight Show with Jay Leno” or playing
with such varied artists as Miles Davis, Sting, the Grateful Dead, Public Enemy, Dizzy Gillespie, Tina Turner and Harry Connick, Jr. What this multiple Grammy Award winner does not play well, despite years of effort, is golf. “I
play all the time — I just suck!” said the New Orleans native, who
performs in San Diego Feb. 10 at the Balboa Theatre with his quartet and
guest singer Kurt Elling, under the auspices of the La Jolla Music
Society.
“I have kids and I have to prioritize my time. When I
get home, I have two to three hours to myself and I spend that time
playing sax. Sometimes, I’ll get sick of (hearing) myself and then
I’ll play golf. I don’t have the amount of time required to improve, but
I keep trying. Maybe, one day, I’ll improve. I enjoy it.” Is the allure of golf for the 60-year-old Marsalis because it is so unlike music? “No,
the allure for me is — first of all — I’m old, so I’m more
interested in playing sports where I’m least likely to walk away with an
injury that requires surgery, having had several surgeries,” he said,
speaking Tuesday from a concert tour stop in St. Louis. “I
also like the fact you get to interact with people in ways you don’t
with other sports. If you play pick-up football, you don’t know anything
about the other guys. You shake hands after the game and go home. Same
with pick-up basketball; you run, you shoot, and — if you win — you keep
playing. “Golf is one of those sports where, within two holes,
you know if you like the guys you’re playing with, or hate them. And
I like the thought process. Your entire success prospects are solely
contingent on you, and you’re away from everything.”
‘Like an itch you can’t scratch’
Are there parallels for Marsalis between playing golf and saxophone? “It’s tricky,” he replied. “There
are people who are really successful, commercially successful, as
saxophone players that could never make it as golfers, as bad as they
play the instrument. And then there are people who play the instrument
incredibly well, but their approach to the instrument is more
technical than musical. So, despite how well they play, it’s like an
itch you can’t scratch. They play really well, but their music does not
communicate on an emotional level.” Like his younger brother, Pulitzer Prize-winning jazz trumpet star Wynton Marsalis, Branford was an avid basketball player growing up and continued playing as an adult. He cites Tiger Woods — who came to San Diego this week to play in
the Farmers Insurance Open — as a game-changing athlete whose impact is
comparable to that of jazz saxophone icon Charlie Parker. “The one
thing Tiger proved is, if you play really well and have charisma, you
can generate a level of excitement beyond true golf fans,” Marsalis
said. “And that’s kind of where golf and jazz, or instrumental music,
can be similar. “Because, if you can develop a way of playing
music where people get the sense that they’ll never hear that from
anybody but you and your band, then you can have longevity. But if the
focus is perpetually about playing chord sequences and playing really
fast, well, a lot of people can do that. But normal people, which is
85 to 90 percent of the audience at every concert, they react to sound,
not data. “If you’re a musician and try to learn Charlie
Parker’s licks, chances are you will not succeed. The thing that made
his music magic was his sound, not the notes. Because he played the same
12 notes that Mozart played. Everyone whose opinion I respect — dead
or alive — who saw Parker perform, they never talk about what he played, but about how it sounded, and about Parker’s presence when he walked in a room.”
Elton John and Cheech & Chong
Making a sound that
grabs listeners is essential to Marsalis, who cites Elton John’s “Honky
Chateau” and Cheech & Chong’s “Big Bambu” as the first two albums he
bought when he was 10. He can still recite much of Cheech & Chong’s “Waiting for Dave” from memory. “In
my early career in New Orleans, I played R&B and rock ’n’ roll, and
all that was about sound,” Marsalis said. “Elton was the exception.
Because Elton’s songs — in the aggregate — are much harder to play than
they sound. ‘Burn Down the Mission’ is very hard to play; “Bennie and
The Jets’ is not. “That’s why, if you hear a cover band in a bar,
there’s only a certain amount of Elton songs they play. Because even a
song like ‘Daniel’ is hard. So I spent time listening to those records
and emulating them.” Marsalis laughed as he recalled buying his first Elton John and Cheech & Chong albums. “I did not have any conception of what that big-ass rolling paper was
on the Cheech & Chong ‘Big Bambu’ album cover,” he said. “I’m
pretty sure my father knew, but he kept his mouth closed. It was like a
scene in a movie — I pulled it out, and said: ‘What is this for?’ I was
10!
Saxophonist Branford Marsalis and singer
Kurt Elling are nominated for a 2017 Grammy Award for Best Jazz Vocal
Album. They perform Feb. 10 at San Diego’s Balboa Theatre, under the
auspices of the La Jolla Music Society. (Photo by Zach Smiths)
“My mother was completely oblivious. I knew she wouldn’t know the
name of the rolling paper on the album cover; I certainly didn’t. I just
knew I wanted the album because I’d heard ‘Sister Mary Elephant’ on the
Dr. Demento radio show.” The son of seminal New Orleans pianist
and composer Ellis Marsalis, Branford is a graduate of Boston’s
prestigious Berklee College of Music. He rose to prominence in the early
1980s playing in the bands of such legends as trumpeter Clark Terry,
vibraphonist Lionel Hampton and drum dynamo Art Blakey, whose fabled
band — The Jazz Messengers — also featured brother Wynton on trumpet. With Wynton as the leader, the two Marsalis brothers soon formed
their own quintet, which quickly earned international acclaim. The group
spearheaded the much-publicized “young lions” movement, which in the
early 1980s championed a sharp turn away from the heavily amplified
fusion approach then in vogue to a straight-ahead, acoustic jazz style,
steeped in bebop and post-bop traditions.
In 1985, Branford joined
Sting’s first post-Police band. A year later, the saxophonist formed
his own group. He has led it, with varying lineups, ever since. He has
also has success recording classical-music albums and performing at
chamber music festivals, including twice at La Jolla Music Society’s
SummerFest.
‘Make normal people excited’
Then and now,
Marsalis has sought to strike a balance. He creates sophisticated,
carefully considered music that appeals equally to discerning listeners
and those who may not be versed in the nuances and intricacies of jazz,
but are attracted by strong melodies, rhythmic propulsion and the deep
feeling Marsalis seeks to convey with each note he plays.
“The Creators, the New Orleans R&B band Wynton and I were in, would play elements of ‘Roundabout’ by Yes
and some Gino Vannelli and Eumir Deodatto things, too. As long as the
music was grooving, the audience never paid attention, but our fellow
players did. They would say: ‘Damn! What was that?’
“And we stuck in Weather Report things. A lot of guys playing R&B would only
listen to R&B, which is logical. But we’d do wacky things, with two
or three song melded together, and a lot of guys in other bands would
come check us out. It’s kind of a model I began using when I started
playing jazz. “You have to have an emotional sensibility that will make normal people feel excited — and
you throw in little wrinkles other musicians will get. But a lot of
bands focus on one or the other. They play completely for audiences, or
for musicians. If you play completely for audiences, you can develop a
level of success. If you play for musicians, it’s very unlikely... We
are mindful of the audience, but we are not obsequious; we don’t defer
to them.” That aesthetic informs “Upward Spiral,” the Branford Marsalis Quartet’s often sublime album with singer Kurt Elling. Recently
nominated for a Grammy Award in the Best Jazz Vocal Album category,
“Spiral” mixes original songs by Marsalis and Elling with gems by
everyone from Sting (“Practical Arrangement”) and Sonny Rollins (“Doxy)
to Antonio Carlos Jobim (“Só Tinha De Ser Com Você”) and George &
Ira Gershwin (“There’s a Boat Dat’s Leaving Soon for New York”). “I never spent much time trying to learn lyrics; I spent time
trying to figure out how to capture the emotion of a given song,”
Marsalis noted. “And that’s one of the things Kurt does really
well, which is why he appeals to me. His voice has way more colors to it
than the normal non-classical singer. He does that thing Billie
Holiday did, where she could change the colors in her voice to
change the emotional content. “A lot of jazz singers, even the
famous ones, have the same approach to every song. Kurt has great
musical instincts, so he can stretch with us while still maintaining the
integrity of the songs.” Exactly how are the songs from the
“Upward Spiral” album evolving on stage? Marsalis’ carefully considered
answer provided a fascinating look into his aesthetic approach. “Well, the thing our band does — in general — is we try to understand
the music and we try to learn a song from the foundation on up,” he
said. “And it is through the repetition that you learn the songs,
cognitively, which then allows you to employ a certain level of
intuition. “So, when I listen to Coleman Hawkins, or Lester
Young, or Charlie Parker, or John Coltrane, I have a very different
listening experience than a lot of people. I don’t hear quantum physical
explosions. What I hear are fundamentally sound musicians, who have
thoroughly understood the traditions of the music and pushed at the
edges. And the pushing at the edges creates the innovation “It is not deconstruction, it’s re-construction. So we
learn the songs. And as we get to know them, we can push at the edges
and the songs expand. It’s not like we revolutionize them. You take the
basis of what it is and push it outward — then there’s a lot of wiggle
room in that simple expansion, so the songs stretch.”
La Jolla Music Society presents the Branford Marsalis Quartet with special guest Kurt Elling
Saxophone
star Branford Marsalis has stood out whether leading his own bands,
serving as music director on “The Tonight Show with Jay Leno” or playing
with such varied artists as Miles Davis, Sting, the Grateful Dead, Public Enemy, Dizzy Gillespie, Tina Turner and Harry Connick, Jr. What this multiple Grammy Award winner does not play well, despite years of effort, is golf.
“I
play all the time — I just suck!” said the New Orleans native, who
performs in San Diego Feb. 10 at the Balboa Theatre with his quartet and
guest singer Kurt Elling, under the auspices of the La Jolla Music
Society.
“I have kids and I have to prioritize my time. When I
get home, I have two to three hours to myself and I spend that time
playing sax. Sometimes, I’ll get sick of (hearing) myself and then
I’ll play golf. I don’t have the amount of time required to improve, but
I keep trying. Maybe, one day, I’ll improve. I enjoy it.”
Is the allure of golf for the 60-year-old Marsalis because it is so unlike music? “No,
the allure for me is — first of all — I’m old, so I’m more
interested in playing sports where I’m least likely to walk away with an
injury that requires surgery, having had several surgeries,” he said,
speaking Tuesday from a concert tour stop in St. Louis. “I
also like the fact you get to interact with people in ways you don’t
with other sports. If you play pick-up football, you don’t know anything
about the other guys. You shake hands after the game and go home. Same
with pick-up basketball; you run, you shoot, and — if you win — you keep
playing. “Golf is one of those sports where, within two holes,
you know if you like the guys you’re playing with, or hate them. And
I like the thought process. Your entire success prospects are solely
contingent on you, and you’re away from everything.”
‘Like an itch you can’t scratch’
Are there parallels for Marsalis between playing golf and saxophone? “It’s tricky,” he replied. “There
are people who are really successful, commercially successful, as
saxophone players that could never make it as golfers, as bad as they
play the instrument. And then there are people who play the instrument
incredibly well, but their approach to the instrument is more
technical than musical. So, despite how well they play, it’s like an
itch you can’t scratch. They play really well, but their music does not
communicate on an emotional level.” Like his younger brother, Pulitzer Prize-winning jazz trumpet star Wynton Marsalis, Branford was an avid basketball player growing up and continued playing as an adult. He cites Tiger Woods — who came to San Diego this week to play in
the Farmers Insurance Open — as a game-changing athlete whose impact is
comparable to that of jazz saxophone icon Charlie Parker. “The one
thing Tiger proved is, if you play really well and have charisma, you
can generate a level of excitement beyond true golf fans,” Marsalis
said. “And that’s kind of where golf and jazz, or instrumental music,
can be similar. “Because, if you can develop a way of playing
music where people get the sense that they’ll never hear that from
anybody but you and your band, then you can have longevity. But if the
focus is perpetually about playing chord sequences and playing really
fast, well, a lot of people can do that. But normal people, which is
85 to 90 percent of the audience at every concert, they react to sound,
not data. “If you’re a musician and try to learn Charlie
Parker’s licks, chances are you will not succeed. The thing that made
his music magic was his sound, not the notes. Because he played the same
12 notes that Mozart played. Everyone whose opinion I respect — dead
or alive — who saw Parker perform, they never talk about what he played, but about how it sounded, and about Parker’s presence when he walked in a room.”
Elton John and Cheech & Chong
Making a sound that
grabs listeners is essential to Marsalis, who cites Elton John’s “Honky
Chateau” and Cheech & Chong’s “Big Bambu” as the first two albums he
bought when he was 10. He can still recite much of Cheech & Chong’s “Waiting for Dave” from memory. “In
my early career in New Orleans, I played R&B and rock ’n’ roll, and
all that was about sound,” Marsalis said. “Elton was the exception.
Because Elton’s songs — in the aggregate — are much harder to play than
they sound. ‘Burn Down the Mission’ is very hard to play; “Bennie and
The Jets’ is not. “That’s why, if you hear a cover band in a bar,
there’s only a certain amount of Elton songs they play. Because even a
song like ‘Daniel’ is hard. So I spent time listening to those records
and emulating them.” Marsalis laughed as he recalled buying his first Elton John and Cheech & Chong albums. “I did not have any conception of what that big-ass rolling paper was
on the Cheech & Chong ‘Big Bambu’ album cover,” he said. “I’m
pretty sure my father knew, but he kept his mouth closed. It was like a
scene in a movie — I pulled it out, and said: ‘What is this for?’ I was
10!
Saxophonist Branford Marsalis and singer
Kurt Elling are nominated for a 2017 Grammy Award for Best Jazz Vocal
Album. They perform Feb. 10 at San Diego’s Balboa Theatre, under the
auspices of the La Jolla Music Society. (Photo by Zach Smiths)
“My mother was completely oblivious. I knew she wouldn’t know the
name of the rolling paper on the album cover; I certainly didn’t. I just
knew I wanted the album because I’d heard ‘Sister Mary Elephant’ on the
Dr. Demento radio show.” The son of seminal New Orleans pianist
and composer Ellis Marsalis, Branford is a graduate of Boston’s
prestigious Berklee College of Music. He rose to prominence in the early
1980s playing in the bands of such legends as trumpeter Clark Terry,
vibraphonist Lionel Hampton and drum dynamo Art Blakey, whose fabled
band — The Jazz Messengers — also featured brother Wynton on trumpet. With Wynton as the leader, the two Marsalis brothers soon formed
their own quintet, which quickly earned international acclaim. The group
spearheaded the much-publicized “young lions” movement, which in the
early 1980s championed a sharp turn away from the heavily amplified
fusion approach then in vogue to a straight-ahead, acoustic jazz style,
steeped in bebop and post-bop traditions. In 1985, Branford joined
Sting’s first post-Police band. A year later, the saxophonist formed
his own group. He has led it, with varying lineups, ever since. He has
also has success recording classical-music albums and performing at
chamber music festivals, including twice at La Jolla Music Society’s
SummerFest.
‘Make normal people excited’
Then and now,
Marsalis has sought to strike a balance. He creates sophisticated,
carefully considered music that appeals equally to discerning listeners
and those who may not be versed in the nuances and intricacies of jazz,
but are attracted by strong melodies, rhythmic propulsion and the deep
feeling Marsalis seeks to convey with each note he plays. “The Creators, the New Orleans R&B band Wynton and I were in, would play elements of ‘Roundabout’ by Yes
and some Gino Vannelli and Eumir Deodatto things, too. As long as the
music was grooving, the audience never paid attention, but our fellow
players did. They would say: ‘Damn! What was that?’ “And we stuck in Weather Report things. A lot of guys playing R&B would only
listen to R&B, which is logical. But we’d do wacky things, with two
or three song melded together, and a lot of guys in other bands would
come check us out. It’s kind of a model I began using when I started
playing jazz. “You have to have an emotional sensibility that will make normal people feel excited — and
you throw in little wrinkles other musicians will get. But a lot of
bands focus on one or the other. They play completely for audiences, or
for musicians. If you play completely for audiences, you can develop a
level of success. If you play for musicians, it’s very unlikely... We
are mindful of the audience, but we are not obsequious; we don’t defer
to them.”
That aesthetic informs “Upward Spiral,” the Branford Marsalis Quartet’s often sublime album with singer Kurt Elling. Recently
nominated for a Grammy Award in the Best Jazz Vocal Album category,
“Spiral” mixes original songs by Marsalis and Elling with gems by
everyone from Sting (“Practical Arrangement”) and Sonny Rollins (“Doxy)
to Antonio Carlos Jobim (“Só Tinha De Ser Com Você”) and George &
Ira Gershwin (“There’s a Boat Dat’s Leaving Soon for New York”). “I never spent much time trying to learn lyrics; I spent time
trying to figure out how to capture the emotion of a given song,”
Marsalis noted. “And that’s one of the things Kurt does really
well, which is why he appeals to me. His voice has way more colors to it
than the normal non-classical singer. He does that thing Billie
Holiday did, where she could change the colors in her voice to
change the emotional content. “A lot of jazz singers, even the
famous ones, have the same approach to every song. Kurt has great
musical instincts, so he can stretch with us while still maintaining the
integrity of the songs.” Exactly how are the songs from the
“Upward Spiral” album evolving on stage? Marsalis’ carefully considered
answer provided a fascinating look into his aesthetic approach.
“Well, the thing our band does — in general — is we try to understand
the music and we try to learn a song from the foundation on up,” he
said. “And it is through the repetition that you learn the songs,
cognitively, which then allows you to employ a certain level of
intuition. “So, when I listen to Coleman Hawkins, or Lester
Young, or Charlie Parker, or John Coltrane, I have a very different
listening experience than a lot of people. I don’t hear quantum physical
explosions. What I hear are fundamentally sound musicians, who have
thoroughly understood the traditions of the music and pushed at the
edges. And the pushing at the edges creates the innovation “It is not deconstruction, it’s re-construction. So we
learn the songs. And as we get to know them, we can push at the edges
and the songs expand. It’s not like we revolutionize them. You take the
basis of what it is and push it outward — then there’s a lot of wiggle
room in that simple expansion, so the songs stretch.”
La Jolla Music Society presents the Branford Marsalis Quartet with special guest Kurt Elling
Branford Marsalis performs this weekend at George Mason University.
by Giovanni Russonello Editor-in-chief Branford Marsalis conveys his thoughts in
conversation much as he does as a saxophonist. New ideas emerge with
steady self-assurance, boldly and unceasingly. When he pauses he does it
for emphasis – not because he has lost his train of thought or needs to
reorient himself. If the tabloids could be bothered to expound on the
scandals of the jazz world, Marsalis might be their go-to guy for
headline-grabbing quotes. He’s called avant-garde legend Cecil Taylor’s demands on his audience “self-indulgent bullshit;” opined that “students today are completely full of shit,” overly coddled and under-criticized; and recently said of contemporary jazz,
“There’s so little of it that’s actually good that when it’s good, it
shocks me.” Marsalis’ hard-nosed perspective comes from decades spent as
one of the most respected jazz saxophonists around, but it’s colored by
his 10 years in the soap opera of American popular culture, first as a
star in Sting’s touring band, then as musical director of the Tonight Show. For more than 15 years now, Marsalis has focused once again on jazz,
releasing a bevy of stellar post-bop albums and founding his own label,
Marsalis Music. His latest record, Songs of Mirth and Melancholy, a duet with pianist and longtime accomplice Joey Calderazzo, explores the alternately disconsolate and ecstatic world of German classical folk music, or lieder. The album’s nine songs – all originals except for one piece by Brahms and another by Wayne Shorter
– brood, sway and banter. Mostly, they sound like the unfolding of a
story, one built of human joy and frailty. At the George Mason
University Center for the Arts this Saturday, Marsalis will appear with
his quartet, featuring Calderazzo, and the music will be decidedly more
jazz-oriented. Below, the outspoken saxman and I discuss his outlook on
contemporary jazz, his duo project with Calderazzo and his work as a
record label exec. Branford Marsalis and Joey Calderazzo, “Precious”
[audio:https://www.capitalbop.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/08-Precious.mp3|titles=Precious]
CapitalBop: I’m sure you’re tired
of talking about this topic, but you’re someone who feels that jazz’s
lack of popularity isn’t necessarily the fault of the media or the fact
that audiences have short attention spans. You say it’s probably the
result of a lot of jazz today being kind of unexciting, spiritually and
emotionally speaking. What do you think that jazz musicians can do
specifically to speak to a wider audience? Branford Marsalis: I don’t believe in the wider audience theory, I believe in getting better as musicians. Because listeners do
have short attention spans, but there’s nothing that we can do to
change that. I think that there’s a small percentage of the American
record-buying, concert-going audience that has the intellectual capacity
to embrace instrumental music. For most people, music for lyrics is
going to be what it is, and I don’t believe we can sway them. Separately, I just think that the musicianship is so bad right now,
while instrumentalism is at an absolute high. Guys can play their
instruments probably better than they ever could…. The thing that jazz musicians don’t really talk about or want to talk
about is that the majority of time when people go to concerts, people
are going to see the music. That’s what we do in our culture.
In Germany, they go to hear the music, in America they go to see it. If
you take the average American person – and this is something that I know
from my time with Sting and with Jay [Leno] – people who are going to
concerts say, “I’m looking forward to seeing you.” Okay, then you gotta
give them something to see! And one of the easy things to give them to
see is the fact that you actually like what you’re doing. Most of the time, when laypeople come to my concerts, they say they
just love watching the way we interact with each other in the band. If
you go to a lot of jazz concerts now, guys aren’t even interacting with
each other. CB: You and Joey Calderazzo, whom you’ve been working with for a long time, share a love of lieder,
and your new album is very influenced by the songs of the German
Romantic era. You seem to be getting at something with the horn that
most people approach with the voice, because lieder is played with piano and vocals. BM: I’ve felt for a long time that all instrumentalists are just trying to imitate the human voice, since the voice was first. CB: It makes me think of Louis Armstrong. His personality on his horn and on his voice were so intertwined. BM: If Miles Davis could have sung, it would have been the same thing. You know, Sidney Bechet sang when he played, Charlie Parker sang
when he played. That’s why I love that music. A lot of the modern jazz
is more about really fast, brilliant execution. But for me it’s about
singing. Joey and I both got to a place within our musical maturity that
we could make a record like this. The main goal was to do a duo record
where we weren’tjust playing the way we play in quartets
except the other guys aren’t there. The goal wasn’t to just play a bunch
of bebop tunes and bebop licks while he walks bass lines in the left
hand, and all that boring shit that is often on those records. So you
make the record and then jazz guys say, “You know, I don’t know if this
is a jazz record … because all the other duo records I have sound
exactly the same, and that’s my comfort level. What is this? What
category should it be in?” To me, that’s a really cool question, because I never bought into the
categories thing anyway. I just listen to music. So that’s been cool. CB: You’re selective about which artists you sign to the Marsalis Records label, but Miguel Zenón is one of the few. What made you fall in love with his music? BM: He has passion. I went to a concert not long ago
where he was with another band, and some of the songs were sung. When
he wasn’t playing, he was the only guy in the horn section moving from
side to side, singing along with the song. The rest of them were just
counting bars…. There were 18 guys on the stage, and they were all
staring at the floor or at the music, counting the bars. And Miguel was
sitting there, singing along with the song. He has a lot of that nerdy
jazz thing in him, but I’m not opposed to the nerdy jazz thing as long
as it’s coupled with the musical jazz thing. That’s [John] Coltrane’s thing. You have all these
people who talk about his mathematical approach to music, and I’m not
opposed to that on the face of it, as long as it is accompanied with
musicianship and an understanding of the blues – soul – and an ability
to play that. CB: You’ve also got entire books written about his spirituality. BM: Yeah. Well, a lot of that stuff is hyperbole. Spirituality is a personal question. CB: But it is one that he put into his
music. He infused a lot of his music with a conscious pursuit of
something substantive in that realm, right? BM: Yeah, he was a spiritual guy. He was also a
cutthroat, too. We like to try to make everything oversimplified, like
cutthroats are cutthroats and spiritual guys are spiritual. Well, you
know, he practiced “Giant Steps” for three or four months, he knew it
was hard; so why didn’t he give it to the musicians to let them play a
couple weeks before he called it on the session? CB: That’s how “Moment’s Notice” got its name – Curtis Fuller told Coltrane, “Man, you give us a moment’s notice to learn this stuff.” BM: Yeah, that don’t sound spiritual to me. But that
doesn’t mean that he’s not a spiritual guy. I think you have a lot of
complex elements that make Coltrane’s music what it is, and we often try
and simplify it. The question is, how come you have the stuff Coltrane
plays and you have all these other people who have studied it, and he
sounds so good but they sound so bad? People will say, “Oh, it’s his
spirituality.” It’s a little more than that…. All of the Coltrane modernists, they reject the old school. The
biggest problem that I have with my students is that they’re all
zero-sum game guys. It’s hard to get them to understand that failure’s
the gateway to success. In addition, it’s the gateway to modernity. But
those that want to self-identify as modernists would reject that idea
because they’re modern, and they don’t want to take the time to learn
the traditional stuff. Or as [saxophonist] Andrew Speight said
to me brilliantly, “There was a time in jazz when the guys who had the
core values kept the fringe in check and they informed one another. But
now the fringe has become the core.”
The Branford Marsalis Quartet performs at the George Mason University Center for the Arts at 8 p.m. on Saturday.
Branford Marsalis talks classical vs. jazz and Donald Trump
by Peter Hum
March 1, 2018
Ottawa Citizen
Saxophonist Branford Marsalis returns to the National Arts Centre on March 1 and 2 to perform with the NAC Orchestra.Roger Thomas / Postmedia
Speaking on the phone a few weeks ago from his home in North
Carolina, Branford Marsalis was looking ahead to a short run of
classical concerts and the practising that he needed to do to be
performance-ready. The week before the interview, the renowned
saxophonist had performed in Memphis. Ahead, Marsalis had a recital in
Philadelphia, and after that, concerts in Baltimore and finally, Ottawa.eces in rotation, which really
does kind of cheapen your ability to focus in, in the way that you like
to,” Marsalis confessed.
After Memphis, two pieces fell off his
practice list. After Philadelphia, five more pieces would be eliminated.
“I’ll have more time and space to focus,” he said. Concerts at
Southam Hall Thursday and Friday night with the NAC Orchestra will
feature Marsalis returning to a lynchpin of his classical repertoire,
Alexander Glazunov’s Concerto for Alto Saxophone and String Orchestra.
On Sunday afternoon, at his sold-out chamber concert at the National
Gallery of Canada, Adolph Busch’s Quintet for Alto Saxophone and String Quartet will be on the program.
Marsalis
says he has a long history with the Glazunov work, a 14-minute piece
written in 1934 by a Paris-based Russian-born composer. “The
Glazunov is one of the first pieces I ever tried to play when I was in
high school,” says Marsalis, 57. “I didn’t have really good
instructions. It was just me kind of stumbling around, listening to a
recording by Eugene Rousseau and trying to emulate that. It was not
really one of my favourite pieces.” However, in the 2000s,
Marsalis had his eyes and ears opened about the piece, after he
performed it with an orchestra under the baton of Russian conductor
Andrey Boreyko, who will also be conducting NACO this week.
“Andrey Boreyko completely changed my mindset on how to approach the piece emotionally,” Marsalis says. “He
understands a lot of the melodies have Russian meaning, and he told me
the story of Glazunov longing to return home after leaving to avoid
after the Communist takeover,” said Marsalis. “The entire piece is a
longing to return to Russia.” Marsalis added that over the years,
he’s improved at his renditions of the Glazunov. “I play it better. I
play it with more confidence. I’m a better saxophone player,” he said.
“I have a better musical understanding of what I’m doing and fewer
technical obstacles to get in the way.”
When
Marsalis was in Ottawa at the 2014 Music and Beyond Festival, he also
played the Glazunov at Dominion-Chalmers United Church, but with a
smaller string orchestra conducted by Alain Trudel. The following
summer, Marsalis — whose star first rose when he played jazz in the
early 1980s with his equally prodigious younger brother, Wynton, before
his stints backing up Sting and then Jay Leno on The Tonight Show —
brought his quartet to the 2015 TD Ottawa International Jazz Festival. Marsalis
said that he gets the same kind of satisfaction from playing classical
and jazz, even if the two kinds of music present different challenges.
“The
hardest part about playing jazz for me was actually learning to play
jazz. That took decades,” said Marsalis, who will return to touring with
his quartet a few weeks after his Ottawa concerts. “Now I have
my band, we share a common language now, we all know how to make a song
sound happy, how to make a song sound sad, how to make a song sound
angry, and we can do it with our own personal tools. “What makes
classical music hard is you have to create all of those emotional
expressions with somebody else’s tools,” Marsalis continued. “It’s
almost like acting in a way. Most of my funny friends are hilarious
when they are allowed to use the words that they use to make things
funny, but it all changes when you have to use someone else’s words and
make them funny or make them sad.
“It requires a different skill set. It’s almost like you have to become another person,” Marsalis said. “That’s the thing that I find challenging about it. I am no longer allowed to rely on my own personal tastes.” Thursday’s
concert will be preceded by a public conversation at 7 p.m. between
Marsalis and Maclean’s senior writer, political pundit and music lover
Paul Wells. Their chat should be a lively one, as Marsalis is a blunt
but articulate and well-informed speaker. A frequent poster on
Twitter of articles that analyze or criticize U.S. President Donald
Trump, Marsalis said: “I think that Trump’s election was a great thing,”
before making clear that he’s no fan of Trump, whom he calls “not the
worst president we’ve ever had.”
What
Marsalis does welcome is America coming to terms with its divided self
and conflicting views. “We have to decide as a nation what we want to be
… and a guy like him brings a sense of urgency,” he said. Citing a longer view of history, Marsalis said that he’s optimistic America will ultimately choose correctly. “When
you think about it, the Catholic Church owned slaves. Baptist preachers
owned slaves. The justices of the Supreme Court ruled (in) Plessy
versus Ferguson (which upheld racial segregation in 1896), by saying
that blacks are inferior to whites and always will be, and here we are.
And here we are.”
Trumpism “might appeal to some people, particularly people who never
thought that they might be on the bottom end of the spectrum, that there
would always be a group of people that are beneath them,” Marsalis
continued. “Obama’s election ruined that fantasy for them, and
they’re pretty pissed off about it and they want to return to the status
quo. But that status quo is gone, I can see that, whether they can see
it or not.” Classical Marsalis NAC Orchestra with Branford Marsalis
When: Thursday, March 1, 8 p.m. and Friday, March 2, 7 p.m.
Where: National Arts Centre, Southam Hall Tickets: starting at $25 at nac-cna.ca, NAC box office
Also:
Marsalis in conversation with Paul Wells, March 1, 7 p.m., NAC City
Room, free admission; The March 2 concert is part of an NAC Casual
Friday event, preceded by pre-concert tapas and cocktails at 5:30 p.m.
and a post-concert party
Note: An afternoon concert on March 4 by Marsalis and members of the NAC Orchestra at the National Gallery of Canada is sold out
The
Saxophonist Branford Marsalis and the "60 Minutes" reporter Ed Bradley
are sitting in the back of a limousine, on their way to a screening of
the "The Mambo Kings" in Manhattan. They are friends, casual together,
and Bradley asks Marsalis what he did all day.
Marsalis: "Interviews, man, for hours. It was terrible."
Bradley: "Yeah, it's amazing how dumb people can be."
Marsalis:
"The first thing they say is, 'Branson, what instrument do you play?'
Then they'll say, 'Is Winston your brother?' and 'What is this jazz
thing?' "
Bradley laughs.
Traffic
is backed up, the flashing lights of the city at night alternating with
eddies of darkness. The men get out of the car half a block away from
the screening, navigate through the celebrity-watchers, causing no
appreciable buzz. Inside, they're hustled down an aisle of paparazzi,
who, seeing Marsalis shooting by them, start yelling, "Wynton, Wynton,
turn around for second." In the theater, Marsalis's eyebrows rise.
"Wynton?" He has heard it before.
It
may be the last time anything like that happens to the 31-year-old
Branford Marsalis. His identity crisis is about to end. On May 25, he
and Jay Leno will be on hand to unveil, to an audience of 8 million to
10 million television viewers, "The Tonight Show With Jay Leno," taking
over from Johnny Carson. Marsalis, who has signed a five-year contract,
is the leader of the band, the new Doc Severinsen.
Many
things separate Marsalis from Severinsen, but the main issues are
apparent: Marsalis is black, he is a major jazz talent and he has a
forceful and immensely attractive stage personality. How these qualities
will play themselves out is unclear, but one thing is sure: Marsalis
has stepped out of the small-time, late-night jazz life into the
big-time, late-night center of American television culture.
"He's
incredibly charismatic," says Leno. "The first time I met this guy, I
realized he was somebody who could say in 4 words what most people took
25 or 30 words to say. Most people new to TV, maybe they stick their
face in the camera, you have to pry them away. But Branford, you want to
put his face in front of the camera. We decided, 'Let's push Branford,
let's make him an important part of the show.' "
Though
no actual Leno-Marsalis formula has been devised, Marsalis expects his
group to be playing a lot more than the "Tonight" band now does. He'll
move from jazz to pop with ease. It's a chance to "regularly present the
best music ever in the history of television," says Marsalis, who has
also written a new theme song for the show.
"We
don't really know each other," Marsalis says of working with Leno.
"We're going to find out about each other on the show. It's going to be
interesting to see a relationship develop on air."
NBC
is betting on good chemistry between the men. "It's a very good fit,"
says Helen Gorman Kushnick, executive producer of the show. "I had them
appear together just last week for the studio, and the reaction was
incredible. They were together for 10 minutes and they just blew
everybody away. So we're just going to let them improvise. You can't
script that stuff anyway."
MARSALIS
HAS THE LUCK -- GOOD OR bad -- to be a precedent, both as a black
person and as a jazz musician. In taking that step, he's turning his
back on the jazz culture that weaned him. That wouldn't matter much if
done by a no-talent, but Marsalis is the finest tenor saxophonist of his
generation, a star in the jazz world and an icon in the making. His
moves have significance.
"The
Tonight Show" is the current apogee of a 10-year cycle of success for
Marsalis. Branford and his younger brother, the trumpeter Wynton, were
the spearhead of a family musical movement that includes their father,
Ellis, a pianist, and two younger brothers, Delfeayo, a trombonist and
producer, and Jason, a drummer. Branford and Wynton first broke on the
jazz scene as members of Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers band in the early
1980's. (Wynton joined in 1979; Branford, who was studying at the
Berklee College of Music in Boston, joined in 1981.)
The
repercussions of that event rumbled around so profoundly that they
haven't stopped yet. Finally jazz had a youth movement interested in
learning how to play the music, instead of playing at it, or using it to
veer into other music. The brothers, working in one of jazz's most
important bands, led by a jazz patriarch, had been given the seal of
approval, following behind other Blakey alumni Clifford Brown, Lee
Morgan, Freddie Hubbard, Wayne Shorter, Cedar Walton and legions more.
When
the brothers left Blakey's band in 1982 to start their own group, the
world changed radically for them. Wynton released his first album,
"Wynton Marsalis," with Branford as sideman, that same year. By
mid-1983, after releasing both classical (Hummel, Haydn and Leopold
Mozart trumpet concertos) and jazz albums ("Think of One"), Wynton
became, along with Dizzy Gillespie and Miles Davis, a top-level jazz
ambassador; he began winning Grammys, and suddenly the band was
commanding fees unheard of then for young jazz musicians, because there
were virtually none around.
The
current jazz renaissance can be laid directly at their feet. The
cultural conditions were ripe, but the brothers, articulate verbally and
musically, rewrote the possibilities for young jazz musicians. They
attracted jazz's mythic larger audience in two different ways. Wynton,
the serious one, became the spokesman for the new sobriety in jazz,
hitting the talk shows spieling about tradition. Branford was the loose
one, self-deprecating, funny, the one with the smile and the willingness
to engage on a less serious level. And both were capable of stunning,
virtuosic improvisations that were within a comfortable jazz context.
They were an avant-garde that didn't offend, but instead caused people
to marvel at their invention and achievement.
Then
in 1985, the rock musician Sting ruined everything, according to the
anti-Sting line in the jazz world. He asked Branford to join the band he
put together after the breakup of the Police. Marsalis, who liked the
Police, took the offer (taking Wynton's pianist, Kenny Kirkland, into
Sting's band as well), and effectively put an end to Wynton's band, and
an era. Not only did it cause a lot of people in the jazz world to shake
their heads in anger and dismay over lost potential, but the breakup
produced rumors that the brothers no longer spoke to each other.
Branford's first foray into the pop world was laden with problems.
"Everybody
wanted to hear that Cain and Abel stuff," Branford says. "It was
acrimonious at times. There weren't death threats, but at times it was a
painful thing."
For Wynton, at least now, Branford's move into pop music doesn't seem much of a threat.
"He
has always wanted to play pop music," Wynton says. "He loved the funk
gigs we used to do as kids. And he's good at playing it. I used to think
that that was all a waste of time, but now I realize that different
types of music have different functions."
Outside
the jazz world, the implications of accepting "Tonight" look good. But
within it, the story gets more complicated. For the past 70 or so years,
since jazz turned into an international commodity, money has been a
lure to jazz musicians, whose ability, inventiveness and sheer force of
personality have been sought for a variety of commercial purposes. The
list of the seduced stretches from Louis Armstrong to any number of
young jazz musicians flirting with popular music or wondering about
careers in recording studios. Armstrong slowly moved away from jazz
toward a mixture of jazz and entertainment, and the debate over his
fidelity to his culture rages on today. To take the bait has been viewed
as cultural treason: walking away from the obligations of tradition is
sellout writ bold, a 20th-century identity crisis inscribed in the blood
of race relations.
It's not something that the brothers have much patience with.
"What
I don't understand is why Branford should get questioned for doing what
he's doing," Wynton says. "If XYZ pop star makes trashy music, nobody
complains about his decision. But if Branford makes pop music, he's
compared to Coltrane, and told that he's wasting his talent, which is
obviously a double standard. Look, I'm glad that there are people like
him and Harry Connick who can articulate different types of music. They
serve a good purpose."
IT'S
EASY TO FIND OUT WHY Leno and NBC made a play for Marsalis: go to one
of his shows, if you can still find one after he vanishes into the daily
workout for "Tonight." Marsalis performed in March at the College of
DuPage, situated in an upper-middle-class suburb of Chicago. The
capacity crowd -- a sprinkling of twenty-somethings, but basically
affluent and largely forty-to-sixty-somethings -- was there as part of a
subscription series, the week's evening of culture.
Thirty
seconds after arriving on stage, Marsalis charmed them; just his body
language says nice guy. Thirty seconds after that, he was leading them
down a road they probably didn't want to travel. The music, played by
Marsalis, his longtime bassist, Bob Hurst, and his drummer, Jeff Watts,
at times went deep into abstraction, avoiding the obvious signposts of
melody or even constant rhythm. The emotional immediacy of the music, at
times furiously intense, with congested and convoluted phrases piling
up on each other, at times heart-rendingly gentle, seemed out of place
in the clinical atmosphere of a college auditorium. When were people
going to walk out?
But
Marsalis's affinity for verbal play and general fooling showed up; with
a few jokes and a couple of sly introductions, he presented himself as a
trustworthy guide, somebody who knew exactly what he was doing. After
muffing an arrangement of "April in Paris," he announced the tune as
"April Embarrassed." Before playing "Stars Fell on Alabama," he
introduced it as "an old ballad that goes clink, clink, clink -- those
are the stars falling," the "clink clink clink" part referring to a
repeating drum figure in the tune's arrangement. When Watts played it,
Marsalis eyeballed the ceiling, turning the tune into a comedy routine.
It's the sort of sensibility that allowed Dizzy Gillespie, one of jazz's
great comics, to turn be-bop into jazz's mainstream language, to
connect art and entertainment without condescending to either.
Afterward, a hallway of admirers clamored for autographs.
Some
of the audience for Marsalis's show probably saw a bit of themselves in
him. A product of a middle-class background -- his mother was a
homemaker, his father a teacher and professional pianist -- and white
Catholic schools in and around New Orleans, he's verbal and funny
without pretension. Tall, easy to smile, and with the air of an amateur
athlete inching toward seed, he moves easily between white and black
cultures, understanding the mi nute details of signficance in speech and
dress and actions of each; he makes people feel as if he wants to hear
about them.
Branford,
one of six brothers, grew up listening to Led Zeppelin and Aretha
Franklin, Elton John and Parliament-Funkadelic, dreaming about playing
the electric guitar, something his father never let him do. After
spending a year in college in Louisiana, he moved up north to Berklee
College of Music in Boston, and has spent his adult years in New York.
In a country where the middle class rules, he's middle class.
For
Leno, the decision to hire Marsalis was simple -- everybody the company
polled for advice suggested him. And it was a decision made with
careful attention to its political meaning.
"Ten
years ago, when Arsenio and I were close friends, we both wanted to do
the same thing, to be like Johnny Carson," Leno says of Arsenio Hall.
"We'd laugh about it, because it seemed impossible that an Italian guy
and a black guy would ever get to that point. So hiring Branford is just
a way of showing what the country is, it's realistic. It's good to have
a black presence."
Given
that the competition between Arsenio Hall and Leno is just beginning to
heat up, the two shows vying for the same hip and younger audience, the
same sponsors and the same guests, was the move a concession to
competition?
"That's
a dumb question," says Kushnick, sounding apoplectic. "It's an insult
to his talent. That never occurred to me. This show isn't put together
by picking one person from Column A, one from Column B and one from
Column C. Branford is mesmerizing on stage, and he's a marvelous
musician. At what point do we stop asking these questions, what
generation do we have to get to before it's all irrelevant?"
Marsalis,
who moves like a gust of wind from general optimism to paint-peeling
cynicism, sees it a bit more pragmatically. "The show sees me as a
likable black guy," he says a bit fliply. "I'm not a threatening black
person to them. You know, 'He's affable, he's charming, he knows
something about our culture.' That's probably why I got hired. And I
have charisma. God gave it to me, I didn't ask for it. The one thing I
have had to do is work at music. . . . Not as hard as some, but I did."
Branford Marsalis 
