Saturday, May 30, 2020

Branford Marsalis (b. August 26, 1960): Legendary, iconic, and innovative musician, composer, arranger, ensemble leader, producer, and teacher

 

SOUND PROJECTIONS

 



AN ONLINE QUARTERLY MUSIC MAGAZINE

 



EDITOR:  KOFI NATAMBU

 



SPRING, 2020

 

 

VOLUME EIGHT  NUMBER THREE

 
HERBIE HANCOCK


Featuring the Musics and Aesthetic Visions of:



GIGI GRYCE
(May 16-22)


CLARK TERRY
(May 23-29)


BRANFORD MARSALIS
(May 30-June 5)


ART FARMER
(June 6-12)


FATS NAVARRO
(June 13-19)


BILLY HIGGINS
(June 20-26)


HANK MOBLEY
(June 27-July 3)


RAPHAEL SAADIQ
(July 4-10)


INDIA.ARIE
(July 11-17)


JOHN CLAYTON
(July 18-24)


MARCUS MILLER
(July 25-31)


JAMES P. JOHNSON
(August 1-7)


https://www.allmusic.com/artist/branford-marsalis-mn0000045379/biography


Branford Marsalis 

(b. August 26, 1960) 

Artist Biography by


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's Jazz 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.
While he enjoyed playing with Sting, the saxophonist was back to leading his own group by 1986, which primarily featured pianist Kirkland, bassist Bob Hurst, and drummer Watts. Signed to Columbia, he issued inventive albums like 1986's Grammy-nominated Royal Garden Blues, 1988's Grammy-nominated Trio Jeepy, and 1991's The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born. He also experimented with mixing hip-hop, funk and acid-jazz in his Buckshot LeFonque project, and continued his work with Spike Lee, contributing to 1988's Music from Do the Right Thing and 1990's Music from 'Mo Better Blues.
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.
In 2011, Marsalis and Calderazzo paired down to a duo for Songs of Mirth and Melancholy. In the spring of 2012, the saxophonist's quartet, featuring Calderazzo, bassist Eric Revis, and drummer Justin Faulkner, released Four MF's Playin Tunes. Also in 2012, Marsalis gave a solo saxophone concert at San Francisco's Grace Cathedral. Two years later, it was released as In My Solitude: Live at Grace Cathedral by Okeh. In 2016, Marsalis collaborated with vocalist Kurt Elling on the expansive Upward Spiral. He then returned to his quartet for 2019's The Secret Between the Shadow and the Soul, which peaked at number three on the Billboard Jazz Albums chart.
https://www.allmusic.com/artist/branford-marsalis-mn0000045379/biography





Branford Marsalis Branford Marsalis


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. 

https://jazztimes.com/features/interviews/branford-marsalis-secret/ 

Home > Features > Branford Marsalis’ Secret



Branford Marsalis’ Secret

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
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.
https://www.npr.org/2019/05/22/725697470/branford-marsalis-revels-in-jazzs-timeless-challenges-on-new-album

Review

Music Reviews


Branford Marsalis Revels In Jazz's Timeless Challenges On New Album










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")


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Branford Marsalis Discusses the Genre, Teaching Music and Getting Up Early



    




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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

https://www.styleweekly.com/richmond/interview-jazz-saxophonist-branford-marsalis-talks-about-focusing-on-emotion/Content?oid=13815113


INTERVIEW: Jazz saxophonist Branford Marsalis talks about focusing on emotion 

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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. 

https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/entertainment/music/sd-et-music-branford-marsalis-20170123-story.html

Branford Marsalis talks golf, jazz, funk, Elton John and Cheech & Chong



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..
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

When: 8 p.m. Feb. 10
Where: Balboa Theatre, 868 Fourth Ave., downtown

https://www.newsobserver.com/entertainment/article218478010.html


Music

Branford Marsalis talks golf, jazz, funk, Elton John and Cheech & Chong



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..
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

When: 8 p.m. Feb. 10
Where: Balboa Theatre, 868 Fourth Ave., downtown
Tickets: $25-$75
Phone: (858) 459-3728
Online: ljms.org
Twitter @georgevarga

https://www.capitalbop.com/interview-branford-marsalis-fearless-lieder






Interview | Branford Marsalis: Fearless lieder



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’t just 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.





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

Here's Branford


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."