As musical dynasties go, it’s tough to top the Marsalis family. Patriarch Ellis Marsalis played with Cannonball Adderley, and taught students like Terrence Blanchard and Harry Connick, Jr. Four of Ellis’s sons became jazz musicians as well — including Pulitzer Prize winner Wynton Marsalis, and Grammy-winner Branford Marsalis.
Branford, a saxophonist, is currently on tour, and he’ll be performing at Scottsdale Center for the Performing Arts tomorrow night. Branford joined The Show between gigs. Marsalis was running late, and he had to duck into an IHOP to take the call.
Full conversation
BRANDFOR MARSALIS: OK, I might have to mute you when the waitress comes over here. But other than that, I'm ready to go.
SAM DINGMAN: OK, sounds good. What are you planning to order?
MARSALIS: I have no idea, a Coca Cola. I'm not even hungry, so don't worry about that. It's just one of these things I got. I got caught out here, and I went ‘oh boy.’
DINGMAN: We'll use the IHOP as a field, a remote-recording studio.
MARSALIS: There you go. Well, nice and authentic.
DINGMAN: Yes, excellent. Branford, I wanted to ask to start, you're from New Orleans, and I was wondering, you know, how do you feel like the New Orleans context informs your point of view on jazz, specifically?
MARSALIS: It informs my view on everything. New Orleans is the greatest Music City in our country. I grew up playing clarinet in a kid's traditional jazz band that was led by Danny Barker, who was the evangelist with Louis Armstrong for 20 years.
DINGMAN: Wow.
MARSALIS: And then I played in an R&B band, played in a church band, I played in a brass band. I was able to do all these things that in the 1970s you just assumed everybody had because we didn't have mobile phones, and we certainly didn't have the internet. So I had no idea what was happening in New York or Boston. So when I did finally leave, I was kind of shocked.
DINGMAN: Oh, that's interesting. That's interesting. So because you came from a place where the musical boundaries were more permeable, you just sort of thought of that as, like, the primary language of the music?
MARSALIS: Primary language of everything. Yeah, you know, I thought everybody had red beans and rice and everybody had crawfish and everybody had gumbo. Everybody said, "How's your mom?" And then everybody said, "Where are you at? What's happening?" Yeah, so I had to learn, like, a different way of speaking, a different way of communicating to people. The music scenes on the East Coast in New York were kind of highly specialized. You decided you wanted to do a thing, and then you became that thing, so much so that when I was in New York, I went to hear David Sam Brown play, because he was a big hero of mine in my teenage years. And Hiram Bullock, who was a great guitar player and was a guitarist every time said, "Hey, man, what are you doing here? You're a jazz guy in New Orleans." No one would ever say that you go to New Orleans. They'd be like, "Hey, bro, what's happening? How's your daddy doing? Come on in." So where I hear the beat is very different than where other people hear the beat. Yeah, I have more in common with a lot of church guys as to where the beat should be, even though I was, you know, I'm a Catholic and I didn't really grow up in the Protestant churches. But the Protestant churches, I used to go there for my musical experiences, because they were, they were swinging. Jazz comes from the Pentecostal church beat in the South, the 1-2-3-4, with the accent on two and four that was in the church first. So you have all of these sounds swirling around and nobody's differentiating. I mean, the church's position, that was jazz. It was the devil's music, and you shouldn't play it, but then the deacon would be in the bar checking it out, yeah, with a drink in his hand. So there's this, there's this duality to it.
DINGMAN: There's a lot of people, I think, who you know, especially when they're newcomers to jazz, they find it to be a little unapproachable, or a little esoteric and kind of scholarly as a form of music, which is obviously at odds with the version of it that you're talking about, which is much more this spirit of instant inclusivity, like you kind of get in where you fit in, and it comes from a much more kind of rooted place, if I'm hearing you correctly?
MARSALIS: When you say jazz to musicians, now, the next word out of their mouth is improvisation, but their approach to it is harmony. It's a harmonic approach, not a melodic approach. When you listen to the old guys, you could hear elements of the melody in their solo. They were playing a solo based on the melody, not based on the chord structure. We live in this era, and it's been an era. It's decades of this in jazz. The musicians that play it don't really, didn't really grow up with a populist vent, right? They were marching in the marching band. They went to jazz camp. They're really, really, really smart people. But then there's a social aspect to music, the technical execution is the thing you do to impress your comrades.
DINGMAN: Right.
MARSALIS: Because the people don't care about that.
DINGMAN: Right.
MARSALIS: They have to feel something.
DINGMAN: You're making me think, Brantford. I mean, I fell in love with jazz, I have to admit, partially when I was in high school, as a way of kind of it differentiated me from my peers, a little bit it was not populist. It was a little bit esoteric. And I hadn't thought about that until having this conversation with you, that especially coming out of a New Orleans context where this is the music that is part of what is just filling the streets. It's just like the air that you breathe. That's a very different way into jazz than thinking of it as this kind of, I don't know, almost mystical form that few people understand or ever breathe in.
MARSALIS: The metaphor I use is I'm a really big baseball fan, but the Mets don't require me to feel 200 grounders before I give them my money to go to the stadium. One second, please.
DINGMAN: Yep.
MARSALIS: OK, back. Sorry about that.
DINGMAN: No worries. No worries. Did you get the Coca Cola?
MARSALIS: No, they don't have Coke products, but I got a Dr. Pepper.
DINGMAN: OK, good! The doctor is in.
MARSALIS: Yes, well, yeah, some kind of doctor. People are attracted to sound. People are not attracted to information. The problem isn't what you're playing. The problem is how you deliver it.
DINGMAN: Yeah.
MARSALIS: I was working in a nightclub when I was a kid. The club owner, I sat down with him because he was a friend of my dad, and he was like, "Look, man, the reason we like the music loud is that when the music is loud, people have to talk over it. When people talk over it, they get thirsty, they buy drinks. The reason we want it to be funky is that if it's funky, some people get up and dance, and when they dance, they sweat, and then they'll buy drinks. The whole thing is about buying drinks. It's not about you. You help me sell drinks."
DINGMAN: Right, right.
MARSALIS: So that's the lesson I learned when I was 15 years old.
DINGMAN: I mean, this is sort of a piece with what you were talking about, about jazz in New Orleans being also informed by other styles of music and food and stuff. There's this idea that the music is part of something bigger. It's not just about you.
MARSALIS: And with the modern jazz musician, I know for a fact that is not an esthetic that they appreciate. Why do you think that is no one, no one. I don't know why. I'm from a different place to me, I think that there are a lot of musicians who know more music than they can hear. Everyone plays to their strengths. What I've always tried to do is like, rush headlong into my weaknesses and eliminate them.
DINGMAN: What are some? What are some of the weaknesses you feel like you've had to eliminate?
MARSALIS: Oh, my God, my tone was terrible. Art Blakey yelled on the bandstand once, you know, to get a real sound. And then when I backed away from the mic, he started playing louder, saying, "I can't hear you." And I'm like, "OK man, message received." So I started working on my tone.
DINGMAN: So when you were looking for your own tone. How did you know when you had found it? Was it something that you felt like in your body coming through the horn, or was it something that somebody like Blakey reflected back to you at a certain point?
MARSALIS: No, I went to Blakey and said, you know, ‘what should I do?’ He said, "Listen to people who have a big sound." And I said, "OK, great." So my three guys were Glenn Webster, Sonny Rollins and Coleman Hawkins. And people say, "Well, man, you trying to play like them?" I said, "No, I'm trying to sound like them."
DINGMAN: Yeah.
MARSALIS: And you work on it and work on it and work on it. You listen, you listen, you listen, you listen. For two years, no change. Three years, no change. Four years, no change. And then you give up on it, and two years later it shows up.
DINGMAN: Branford Marsalis is a saxophonist, a composer, a band leader and an educator, and he will be performing at Scottsdale Center for the Performing Arts on March 5. Branford, thank you so much for this conversation.
