In September 2006, Hurricane Ernesto was drawing close to Durham, North Carolina. Among other things, this meant that Branford Marsalis wasn’t going to play golf. Around eleven in the morning, he came to the door of his tract mansion in his T-shirt, shorts, and socks. He was alone and preoccupied by the fact that his wife and two of his children were stuck in an airport in Sweden, their flight delayed for five hours because of an unrelated maintenance problem.
A saxophone was out, and the television was on. He had been practicing while watching an action movie. “You know this? Siege? Denzel and Bruce Willis. Terrorist shit.”
He had lived in the house, in a housing complex built next to one of the better golf courses in North Carolina, since 2001. Previously Marsalis had lived in New Rochelle, New York, and Brooklyn, but moved south to remove his family, especially his son Reese, from what he defined as a particularly East Coast sense of entitlement. “I’m in a place now where all I can focus on is bettering myself,” he said. “There’s no distractions. I listen to music all day.” Having heard similar reports, I thought it would be a good time for me to visit and listen to some with him.
Branford is the eldest of the six Marsalis brothers, four of whom are in jazz: himself; his brother Wynton, the trumpeter and majordomo of Jazz at Lincoln Center; Delfeayo, the trombonist and record producer; and Jason, the drummer. He came to be known, initially, as the tenor player alongside Wynton in Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers in 1980, and subsequently as part of Wynton’s band, making records like Think of One and Black Codes from the Underground.
A side benefit of the move to North Carolina was greater concentration on his own work. It has been a generative period, with the establishment of his own record label (Marsalis Music) and an artist-in-residency job for himself and his band at North Carolina Central University, a historically black college in Durham. Since moving south, he and his wife, Nicole, also had two more children, both girls: Peyton and Thaïs.
He also gave up the idea of being part of the pop-culture mainstream, which had been part of his agenda when he entered the Berklee College of Music in 1981, wanting to be a producer after the models of Quincy Jones and George Martin. It was part of his agenda again, after a few years of receiving excessive (and, he believes, thoroughly undeserved) amounts of praise as one of jazz’s “young lions,” when he joined Sting’s band for two years in the mid-1980s; and again when he led the band on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno from 1992 to 1995, thereby becoming a Famous Person.
It is not easy for him to leave this point, his pop-culture apostasy, unexamined. Marsalis is an opinionated sort. Twenty years ago, those opinions could be loud and grating; now there is a more weathered and empathetic feeling about them, but they still arrive about one per sentence, and they have become more idiosyncratic, almost wild. His arts-administrator brother Wynton is a straight talker as well, but Branford represents nobody but himself. Especially in his big, staid house, surrounded by the culture of southern bonhomie and perfect fairways, he is appealingly manic.
One of the most revealing things Marsalis said came at the end of the day. Ever since his days studying saxophone at Berklee, he has been a Coltrane fiend, so I had brought something good I thought he would want to copy, an unissued live Coltrane recording from Chicago in 1961, a blues variously called “Coltrane Blues” or “Vierd Blues” or “John Paul Jones.” It’s Coltrane after “Giant Steps” and his long tunnel of harmonic study, after he gave up his obsession with patterns, when he was just beginning to sound monstrous, and when McCoy Tyner and Elvin Jones had fully settled into his group. The audio quality is passable, but the performance is lethal.
Marsalis listened and cheered by reflex, as if he were at a ball game. “Whoo! Swing, baby. Ohhh!” Then he shook his head, making a complicated face.
“My friends would never understand this. And they shouldn’t. It’s for us to understand and enjoy and love, and the hell with the rest of it. The whole self-aggrandizing stance might get you some attention, but in my mind I’ve checked out on that whole thing. I moved here. I’m done. I just want to play. I don’t want to be in magazines.”
Perhaps as a consequence of this attitude, his own band, the Branford Marsalis Quartet, has improved. In the late 1990s, getting its bearings after the death of Marsalis’s previous pianist, Kenny Kirkland, it had the potential to be one of the best small groups in jazz. But more recently it truly has become that, a bullish, competitive band that acts as a standard-bearer of modern mainstream jazz, its music harder and more truculent—and, at the same time, more detailed—than many listeners think they can reasonably expect from straight-ahead jazz.
This particular lineup has stayed intact since 1999, with the pianist Joey Calderazzo, the bassist Eric Revis, and the drummer Jeff “Tain” Watts. Its record Braggtown, released in 2006 just before my visit, ranges from hurtling Coltrane-ish music to mournful and slow ballads, as well as a version of “O Solitude,” a song written by the seventeenth-century English composer Henry Purcell.
Marsalis is fascinated by slow music; he also has recorded an album of crawl-tempo ballads called Eternal. “I’m listening to a lot of lieder right now,” he said, “because I like the idea that you can write songs with a certain amount of emotional content, especially when you don’t know what the lyrics say. From happy to sad to wistful to melancholy.” Most of the music, in fact, that had been beguiling him around this time was classical music—Peter Lieberson’s Neruda Songs, for example—and he was trying to puzzle out a way of bringing some form of melodic craftsmanship into a jazz group without making it seem forced or soigné-stupid. (“I hear it in my head, but I can’t express it yet,” he said later.)
Though he prides himself on the lack of distractions in his new life, he found some anyway during our interview, including the New York Times crossword puzzle—it was a Wednesday—and his e-mail. He tended to them while talking almost nonstop for five hours, occasionally springing up and sliding across the wooden floor in his socks to cue a new piece of music on his CD player or his iPod.
The causes of his excitement tended to be pieces of music that were very long or slow or dense. Marsalis is almost compulsive about sharing knowledge, but he never did what snobs do, which is to claim his enthusiasms as innate. He was always waking up to something big, it seemed, and discovering what he had been missing. This trait may be a midlife cliché, but it’s not a bad one for a musician to have.
First he found a CD called Fun with Bing and Louis, a recording of performances on Bing Crosby’s radio program by Crosby and Louis Armstrong. He mentioned that it contained a piece he’d been playing for his students at North Carolina Central. “I make them listen to nothing but thirties and forties music, which they hate,” he said, grimly. “I say, ‘You guys have to understand American dance culture of the thirties and forties, the pulse of dance music, to understand this music the right way.’ But they all have fake-books”—meaning lead-sheet books, designed to get a musician performing a song quickly, if sometimes without the nuances—“and they all want to play . . .” He searched for the right hard-bop standard to use as a negative example. “ ‘Blues-ette.’ It’s like, no, no, no.”
This was the beginning of Marsalis’s hammer-blow opinions. Like his musician brothers, he believes in standards of quality, and his standards, at least from one day to the next, if not always one year to the next, are fixed. One of his more vociferous tough-love beliefs is that jazz occupies precisely the level of exposure it deserves, given the way it has come to be understood and performed.
“Musicians are always talking about, ‘Why isn’t jazz popular?’ ” he said. “But musicians today”—he was talking specifically about jazz musicians—“are completely devoid of charisma. People never really liked the music in the first place. So now you have musicians who are proficient at playing instruments, and really, really smart, and know a lot of music, and people sit there and it’s just boring to them—because they’re trying to see something, or feel it.”
We listened to a very short version of “Up a Lazy River,” from March 16, 1949, in which Armstrong sings, scatting and trading vocal and instrumental phrases with Jack Teagarden, and then playing a little trumpet at the end. This was one of their practiced numbers, leaking with high musicality and comic flash. At one point, leaning into a phrase, Armstrong sings “oohriver”—not really a joke, but just a kind of counterpoint to himself—and the studio audience cracks up.
“It’s really interesting,” Marsalis said. “Even in parts where Armstrong isn’t doing anything particularly comedic, people start laughing, because of his body language and the way he gets notes out. Americans see everything first and hear it second. The idea that the music they’re listening to could be supergenius is completely second. They’re laughing, while he’s just singing.”
He admired Armstrong’s chromatic run of notes at the end, but he wanted to talk about simpler things. “One of the things I like about all the swing music is the songs that they picked didn’t rely on heavy amounts of harmony,” he said. “What they relied on more was a really strong melodic sense and a certain level of charisma to pull the song off.”
He played the song again and focused on Armstrong’s vocal solo, which starts after the first eight bars. “What he was singing—that’s a solo. If I play that as a solo, people say, ‘That’s bad, where’d you get that from?’ Check it out.” Marsalis sang along to a mellow, linear, melodic part of the improvisation. “Sounds like Lester Young.” He sang along to the more exaggerated, note-smearing part which immediately follows. “If you can play that, man, people will go nuts.”
He found another Armstrong-Teagarden track, “Rockin’ Chair,” a studio recording from 1947, with a slow, comfortable tempo; at the beginning, Teagarden sings, and Armstrong answers each line, vocally. “The singing and the trumpet playing are inextricably bound together,” he said of Armstrong. Then the musicians switched places, with Teagarden answering Armstrong’s lines. “But when the other guy tries to be the interlocutor?” He blew a raspberry. “He’s a good straight man, but he can’t do the other thing. It’s canned.
“See,” he continued, talking about Armstrong, “he has it all in his head. He hears the sound; he hears the things that go against the groove; he drops the flat-fives in there wherever he wants. He can express the song in a conversational way. A lot of other guys, at the time and even now, it’s like they’re giving a speech. It’s prepared. With him, it’s just very conversational.
“But it’s that personality, too. While I was growing up in New Orleans, all the musicians I played with had that personality. When I was younger and first got to New York, you’d meet guys and they just didn’t have that. They’d be, like”—he put on a hippie voice—“ ‘hey, how you doin’, man, how’s it goin’?’ I’d be, like”—sharp, incredulous southern ratatat—“‘What the fuck is wrong wid y’all?’
“And,” he remembered evenly, “they’d say, ‘You’re an asshole.’ I’d just never met people like that. But now . . .” He made an understanding face, raising his index finger to his brain and nodding. “They’re from other places. They’ve got their thing.”
We were listening to “Rockin’ Chair” for the third time now. “That tempo,” he exclaimed, “no longer exists in jazz. Find it. Who plays it? Nobody. That’s the tempo that pulls your drawers down. That’s what Art Blakey used to say.”
That’s the weird thing about going to hear Barry Harris, the old Detroit piano player, lead his band these days, I said. When Harris plays a bebop song with the tempo a little down, it feels so radical; it’s like you’re hearing it for the first time.
Marsalis agreed. Plus, he said, what people usually call the “complexity” of bebop—fast runs of notes in uneven clumps—plays to the strong suit of musicians who don’t necessarily understand what they’re playing. They can play it fast, but they’re not making sense.
He mentioned that he had just been talking about this particular point with Joey Calderazzo, his quartet’s pianist. (After Marsalis’s move to Durham, Calderazzo relocated to Wake Forest, North Carolina, about an hour away. They talk on the phone all the time but don’t see each other much, except when they’re working.) “Joey used to say, ‘I’m working on this bebop line,’ ” Marsalis explained. “He’d play it for me, and I’d say, ‘That’s not bebop.’ He’d say, ‘What do you mean it’s not bebop!’ So he went on this listening campaign for the last year, and he called me a few months ago, and said, ‘A revelation just came to me. Nobody can play bebop. It’s too hard. The stuff I used to call bebop really ain’t bebop.’ When you focus in on the notes—yes, they’re bebop notes. But that’s like saying the key to language is words. The key to language is not words; it’s rhythm. It’s all the little subtle things you can’t teach: rhythm, tone, accents.”
Marsalis talked about playing in an R & B cover band called the Creators as a teenager in New Orleans. “The job was to get people’s booties wiggling,” he explained, “and get them to dance. If it becomes too clinical, they won’t.”
The Creators prided themselves on what they considered brilliant segues: an Earth, Wind and Fire song, leading into the Eumir Deodato arrangement of the Star Trek theme, leading into a highly chromatic version of KC and the Sunshine Band’s “Boogie Man.” It didn’t move the crowd, though. (“People would just sit there, bored as hell.”) Meanwhile, the Creators were noticing another local band called Flashback, which had a drummer named Brick. Brick played with an overgrip, the stick enveloped by the fist, rather than the traditional jazz or drum-corps grip, the stick held like a pencil. And whenever Brick played the opening drumbeat of Stevie Wonder’s “Superstition,” people started dancing.
So the Creators got a new bass player and a new drummer. “And then,” he explained, “we still did all that frilly stuff on the top, but now it was grooving, so people were cool with it. People don’t mind the frilly stuff. They don’t even pay attention to it. That’s more for our personal edification. As long as it’s grooving, everything’s all right.”
He put on a jazz analogue of the same story. It was “How Can You Face Me?” by Fats Waller, from 1934. It’s pretty busy on the upper levels. Clarinet, guitar, and trumpet are adding lots of ornament; as Marsalis rightly pointed out, what they’re doing isn’t that special. Waller, singing and playing piano, pours his personality all over the place. But the rhythm section stays steady; the bass notes (played by Billy Taylor) and the drum grooves (played by Harry Dial) are imposing, thick with volume and presence.
“Shit is swinging. Chick-chick-chick-chick . . .” He made a steady bouncing motion with his hand. “That’s where the dance beat comes in. It’s all about that. The other people just start launching off, but they just sit there and keep the beat.” After Waller’s opening piano solo, he starts to bust out over the other lukewarm soloists, yelling at the song’s imaginary object: “Yass! Don’t you talk back to me! Sheddup!” Marsalis beamed at that and started giggling. “As long as it’s swinging, you can do that. I just love the fact that he’s so exuberant, and so foolish.”
Marsalis next wanted to talk about what he called authenticity. He meant the baseline truths of jazz: the cultural aspects of jazz—how it operated within a community of people, where they danced and in what patterns, how church and sex and money and race figured into a musician’s life. (Though he took on parts of Coltrane’s technical style early on, he says now that he didn’t understand Coltrane very well until he was into his forties.) He finds himself listening to the basics of jazz very closely, the groove and the pulse and the aesthetic slang, rather than the speed and the harmonic acuity. Most of the jazz pieces he chose to listen to with me, in fact, had very slow tempos.
He put on Bessie Smith’s “Need a Little Sugar in My Bowl,” from 1931, where Smith is accompanied only by the pianist Clarence Williams. She sings it with concentration and force, almost simply. It’s a sex song, and it is not coy. Only once does she put a little English on a note, and between that and her connotations, it’s as if a little bomb were going off in slow motion.
I need a little sugar in my bowl,
I need a little hot dog be-twee-ee-een my roll.
“Whoo! Watch out, girl!” he whooped.
When Marsalis plays that song for students, he explained, “they’re, like, ‘Where’s the music?’ ” He picked up an alto saxophone, which he uses for practicing but never for performing, and played the melody line very straight, with no swing. “No authenticity,” he said. “I tell them, ‘Man, you gotta growl, you gotta bend the notes.’ ” He played it again with slurs and buzzes. “The way most musicians are taught now relies on what they see, first, and what they hear, second. They hear, but they don’t hear. I want them to learn this music and listen to it again and again. I’m forcing them to turn their ears on.”
A few weeks before we talked, Marsalis had been visiting with his wife’s parents, outside of Malmö, Sweden. While he was there, he heard some local swing musicians playing standards at a bar, and he loved the fact that there appeared to be rules in their presentation. It was strictly 1930s and ’40s repertory; the bass player slapped the bass on every beat, dang-dang-dang-dang; and to solo for more than one chorus was a sign of poor taste. (“I was just, like, wow,” he said, honestly impressed.) He asked to sit in, and they played “Up a Lazy River,” “Wabash Blues,” and other songs he knew but doesn’t ever get to play. They asked Marsalis who he was, and he told them. One of them recognized the name and said: “You play modern jazz. I wouldn’t have suspected you knew how to play this stuff.”
He felt his generation was accurately sized up, and it made him regretful.
“Authenticity is out,” he said. “I mean, look at this house, man. There’s a hundred just like it. No. There’s a million just like it, all over the country. When I first got to New York, it was clear to anybody that had been in New Orleans that I was from New Orleans, and it wasn’t just from how I talked; it was from how I dressed. You know, dudes from Philly used to wear pointy shoes. They had pants with pleats, and they were kind of baggy. Now, man, everybody dresses the same.”
His obsession with lieder has to do with the strength and cultural weight of the melodies—their authenticity, if you like. Another point in his long list of What’s Wrong with Jazz Today is that young players tilt toward the standards with the most chord changes, which he believes often have the worst melodies. Recently a musician was arguing with him about the merits of modern big bands. Marsalis was saying that the new big bands don’t have good enough melody; the other guy was saying that modern music has bigger fish to fry. “So I said, ‘Modern music can’t have melody?’ ” he recounted. “I said, ‘Let me play you this.’ ”
He clicked on his copy of Stravinsky’s Ebony Concerto, from 1946, as performed by the Ensemble Intercontemporain, conducted by Pierre Boulez. He has been wanting to record a new version of it, he said, with Larry Combs, the principal clarinetist in the Chicago Symphony who played a lot of jazz in an earlier life.
“See,” he said, setting it up, “Aaron Copland writes a clarinet concerto for Woody Herman, and a couple of his guys studied with Stravinsky. So they said, ‘Man, let’s get Stravinsky to write something for Woody that would be a counter to it.’ Stravinsky wrote it, and Woody’s like, ‘I can’t play this shit.’ So they used Woody’s band, but they hired an outside clarinet player to play it. ’Cause that part is sick.”
Ellington-influenced, and using a full saxophone section, Ebony Concerto has the order of melody Marsalis is looking for: not jazz-ballad melody, but something more relentlessly creative. (“It’s modern as hell, and there’s melody all through it,” he said. “You can sing it all. That, to me, is what jazz at its best should be like.”) More, it has one great idea after another for arrangement and instrumentation: acoustic guitar used beautifully, giant tonal shifts, passages that suggest Gil Evans’s work fifteen years later. After one bit with muted trumpet and flutes—“Sketches of Spain! ” he crowed—and then a long held note before a new section, Marsalis cheered. “Igor!”
What other classical pieces does your band have in its repertoire? I asked.
“None,” he said, sounding impatient, as if he wished the answer were otherwise. “I wrote an arrangement of a Mahler piece that we haven’t tackled yet. It’s a piece from the Kindertotenlieder. It would be great, but it’s on Joey to learn it. It’s hard work, and he’s doing other things, so I’m not blaming him.”
Marsalis is so convinced that jazz has ignored classical music’s resources that he sometimes sounds similar to those jazz players who are fighting the same battle on behalf of pop. But he believes that he’s been through pop, and its riches can’t compare. His ambitions, at least when we got together, were running miles ahead of the practical capabilities of his band—which says more about his ambitions than about what will certainly be seen as one of the best jazz groups of its time.
We spent a few minutes pinpointing parts of classical works that jazz composers may have stolen from. He mentioned Charlie Parker quoting Stravinsky—the opening bassoon line from Rite of Spring, which Parker used quite a bit—as well as a Sonny Rollins bootleg where Rollins quotes Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherezade. And though it might have been a stretch, he was fascinated by the occurrence of John Coltrane’s “Giant Steps” changes in Richard Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier.
This was all leading up to the fact that part of one of his pieces on Braggtown—a ballad called “Fate”—is borrowed from Götterdämmerung. “Straight-up Wagner, dude,” he said. “I’m a student. I don’t think of myself as this great inventor, so I don’t mind giving up the truth.”
It is a motif—usually called the “fate” motif—from right after the opera’s overture; we listened to the version played by the Berlin Philharmonic and conducted by Herbert von Karajan. It is a slow, tense series of contrary-motion chords, played by woodwinds going up and brass going down. In Marsalis’s tune, it becomes the first four notes of the opening theme; he plays it again right before Calderazzo’s piano solo. “Once I realized where I got the melody from, I was like, who am I trying to fool?”
We listened to a long section, leading up to the theme in question. “I’ve never heard Götterdämmerung in concert,” he said. “Siegfried and Die Walküre, yes, but this one’s just so luscious. He used so many strings. Oh, man, it must be amazing, the sound of it.”
Wagner-deficient, I was wondering if I’d missed it. I told him that he was going to have to signal me when the theme came in.
“I will,” he promised. “I wouldn’t do that to you, man.” He chuckled.
A few minutes later he pointed to the crucial passage, about twelve seconds long. “Right there, that was it. When I was doing Leno’s show, I’d come home and I’d listen to this every night, from beginning to end. I was by myself, so there wasn’t nobody to talk to. I’d lay on the floor, because I didn’t have a sofa. If there was a game on, I’d put it on and turn the volume down and listen to this.
“People thought I was strange,” he remembered. “I might be.”
Set List
Louis Armstrong, “Up a Lazy River,” from Fun with Bing and Louis (Jasmine), recorded 1949.
Louis Armstrong, “Rockin’ Chair,” from The Complete RCA Victor Recordings (BMG/RCA), recorded 1947.
Fats Waller, “How Can You Face Me?” from If You Got to Ask, You Ain’t Got It! (Bluebird/Legacy), recorded 1934.
Bessie Smith, “Need a Little Sugar in My Bowl,” from The Essential Bessie Smith (Sony Legacy), recorded 1931.
Igor Stravinsky, Ebony Concerto, performed by the Ensemble Intercontemporain with Michel Arrignon, conducted by Pierre Boulez (Deutsche Grammophon), recorded 1981.
Richard Wagner, Götterdämmerung, conducted by Herbert von Karajan (Polygram), recorded 1969–70.