Branford Marsalis interview: "I have finally figured out how to actually play this shit!"

It’s Branford Marsalis’ sixty-fifth year. It means he has negotiated the chasm between Young Lion and Elder Statesman that has claimed so many promising careers in jazz, whether it be to academia, family life or any of the hundred and one reasons promising performers see their careers slip away in middle age. Jazz is a demanding mistress, yet Branford Marsalis has enhanced his profile at every stage of his career, be it jazz, classical music, pop and rock through no little ability and a happy blending of savoir-faire, an amiable outlook on life and a cultivated intellect.

But even then there’s a missing ingredient, call it the X-factor, so what would he say that was?

“I would say it’s the ability to play the long game,” he answers. “It’s an epic journey, because we are so influenced by pop culture, we often tend to play the short game to try and capitalise on a moment. The rhetoric I have espoused over the last 30 years is paying off for me in my older years, as I have finally figured out how to actually play this shit!

“The temptation is to try and establish some corky new thing that no-one has ever heard of. That will last you about five years. It’s either growth or stagnation, and stagnation is not necessarily a bad thing, it’s just a monotonous status quo, and you can do that too, and succeed. But I like it where I am as an ‘old’ man, playing with a bunch of ‘old’ men and we all know what the hell we’re doing!”

For just over a quarter of a century Marsalis has led a regular quartet, whose 1999 recording Requiem had the great Kenny Kirkland on piano, Eric Revis on bass, and Jeff ‘Tain’ Watts on drums. Kirkland sadly died during the making of the album and was replaced by Joey Calderazzo, and in 2009, Justin Faulkner replaced Watts on drums. Since then, the personnel has remained remarkably stable. Very few working bands today have been together as long, travelled as far or picked up as many plaudits as the Marsalis Quartet.

Branford Marsalis Quartet (photo: Zack Smith)

One of the great live attractions of the contemporary jazz scene, their leader explains: “The conductor Esa-Pekka [Salonen] came to one of our concerts about six years ago, and he gave me the greatest compliment ever. He said, ‘I have to surmise you guys aren’t a jazz band at all, you’re a chamber group.’ And I thought it was helluva compliment, because essentially that’s what we are, we’re a chamber group – all that any audience for any music wants is a great melody and a great accompanying beat. It doesn’t really matter where our journey goes, as long as we keep the dance going.”

While it remains a truism that the reaffirmation of existing knowledge does not lead to progress, it’s especially true in jazz, where there is always a temptation to stick with what works; yet, as Marsalis argues, “It is up to us as musicians to expose ourselves to a wide range of music, because that’s the only path to growth, otherwise you only add more of what you already know, and while that maybe more, it’s not growth.”

He stresses the importance for any young (and not so young) musician to develop big ears, and by that he means listen to as much quality music as possible. It was an important factor behind his latest album Belonging, his debut album on the famous Blue Note label.

There was a time when he freely admits there were certain elements in jazz that failed to offer the kind of thing he was seeking in the music.

“When I first heard Keith Jarrett’s My Song, I was resistant to it,” he says. “Unlike everybody else in the world, I was not particularly fond of the Köln Concert, for whatever reason – there was no intellectual reason, I listened to it and said, ‘this ain’t for me’. So sometime in the mid-1980s, we’re sitting onboard a flight and Kenny [Kirkland] slipped the headphones over my ears, and I said, ‘Oh man!’ and I stopped and I heard this music, and after five minutes he tried to take the headphones back and I put my hands over my ears to stop him, and he just started laughing! ‘I told you, man!’ So that was My Song and I’ve been listening to the music ever since. I loved that band – Jarrett’s European Quartet with Jan Garbarek on tenor saxophone, Palle Danielsson on bass and Jon Christensen on drums – and I loved the way they approached the music. I already knew, after just listening to the music for a while, that because I am from where I’m from, I would have approached that music very differently to the way they did. So, while I appreciated the sound, I knew if I was to play this music, I would play it very differently.”

Fast forward to 2019, when the Marsalis Quartet were recording The Secret Between the Shadow and the Soul, and bassist Eric Revis had a light-bulb moment. They had just recorded ‘The Windup’, the penultimate track on the Keith Jarrett album Belonging, recorded in April 1974 with his European Quartet.

As Marsalis explains: “When we recorded ‘Windup’, we were finished with the song and Eric Revis said, ‘We should record this whole record, bro,’ and I said, ‘Man, that’s a great idea!’ and then the pandemic came, and said, ‘We don’t care if it’s a great idea, you’re not doing anything.’

“So, for a year and a half, we did nothing. And then when we came back together recording has never been a really big priority for me in the last 20 years; when I was a kid it was, ‘We’re going to make a record!!’ but that was then. Now we go on the road, we don’t make many records, we don’t sell millions of copies and take two years off hanging out on our estates – we don’t have that. We’re just players, so we play concerts, and we go around the world and we play, and that was my focus. I didn’t really notice we hadn’t made a record until my manager said, ‘You haven’t made a record in five years! What do you want to do?’ I said, ‘We’ve got this record right here,’ she said, ‘Great, let’s go with that.’ So we were going to do this Keith Jarrett record Belonging and I wrote out the tunes, and we started playing some of them in concerts, and finally we said, ‘We’re ready!’”

Marsalis is quick to point out that their approach is neither to imitate Jarrett’s European Quartet, or deconstruct it: “In a way, there’s nothing new, but there’s new ways to approach old things. We choose new ways with the old thing in mind, not at the expense of the old thing. We have 50 years of information that Keith’s band didn’t have, plus our ability to process that shared experience and we’re not afraid of someone saying, ‘You guys sound like – whoever.’ I say, ‘Yes of course, I’ve been working on it, it should sound like him.’ But I’ll always sound like me.

“It’s our job to take the song and develop it and expand it, we don’t have to do this radical transformation and run away from our identity. We’re in this weird era when everybody thinks they must make everything sound ‘original’, they change the songs the composer originally wrote, or they change the meter, or they change things like that, whereas it’s my belief that if you just listen to a lot of music that sounds great you don’t have to worry about changing the way Keith wrote his songs to make it different, it’ll just be different.”

Marsalis uses all six songs Jarrett composed for the European Quartet in the order they were structured on the original ECM album produced by Manfred Eicher.

“The most impressive thing about Belonging for me is how it all fits together,” says Marsalis. Selecting the running order on ECM albums is an area of production where Eicher excels, creating a musical arc that draws the listener sublimely into the music, where each composition logically relates to the one before and after it, creating a coherent musical narrative that has been dubbed ‘the album effect’.

On Marsalis’ version of Belonging, like their approach to songs by the Modern Jazz Quartet, John Coltrane, and others, the musicians discover more about themselves and their skillsets as they place their collective imprimatur on the music at hand: “In ‘Belonging,’ Keith has this thing where he plays minor to major, real quick,” says Marsalis, “But they don’t solo on the record, it’s just a composition, they just play the melody three times and that’s it. But I take a solo and I told Joey, ‘Hey man you can’t do that, you gotta pick major or minor, you can’t go from minor to major when I’m soloing,’ and he said, ‘Well Keith did,’ and I said, ‘It doesn’t matter what Keith did, they didn’t solo on the record, I’m telling you can’t do that while I’m soloing,’ and he said, ‘That’s cheating,’ and I said, ‘Man do whatever you want, fuck it!’ And he came back the next day and said, ‘Man, that doesn’t really work!’ and I said, ‘Boy you’re a genius! Whatever made you come to that conclusion?’

“The appropriate key should be minor, and when I played the melody, he played the Keith thing, and when he played that minor/major thing it was just clashing, and it was only a blip, but every time I heard it I would flinch and it would throw me off, so we were mindful of that – I guess my philosophy on this is play the songs the way we think of songs. For example, when we were playing ‘Blossom,’ Joey says, ‘When we play these ballads we just kick off soft and it gets louder, can we just play soft and keep to there?’ I said, ‘It’s a great idea,’ so that’s what we did with that. I spent a lot of years learning to play like Ben Webster and when we started playing ‘Blossom’ it was clear (even though the setting is not the same harmonically), that it’s a Webster thing, so you learn all these things, and when it’s appropriate the brain just says, ‘Here, use that.’”

Mention of the great tenor saxophonist Ben Webster – who wrote himself into the history books with his great solo on ‘Cottontail’ with the 1940 Duke Ellington Orchestra – reminds us that in the pre-bebop days, each musician had a unique sound signature; you just hear one note and that’s, say, Johnny Hodges, or Charlie Holmes, or Benny Carter, or Willie Smith or Russell Procope, and that kind of individuality has been lost in jazz, yet there’s a huge ‘database’ that is now deemed old fashioned, since for many jazz begins in 1945 with Charlie Parker.

So what are Marsalis’ thoughts on this conundrum?

“When I started working on the movie soundtrack for Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, I started listening to 1930s music, and that was 2019. I haven’t stopped since. One of the reasons I love it is because all that shit sounds happy, bro. It all sounds happy, I don’t care who you pick, McKinney’s Cotton Pickers, Duke Ellington’s Band, Paul Whiteman’s Band, the California Ramblers, the Casa Loma Orchestra – you can go on and on and on, and I have done this with my students. I’ve said, ‘What is the one thing all this music has in common,’ and they’re thinking harmony. I say, ‘No, no. it all sounds happy! Look at the people you like, when does their music ever sound happy?’

“Man, it’s just never, a lot of the musicians who choose to play jazz today in the United States tend to be a little bit introverted, really smart, often very smart, but introverted, but jazz as a people’s music. It’s hard to be a people’s music when the people playing it aren’t people people.

“It took me a while to realise that when Bach was writing, he had no rules. The way I understand it, Bach wrote, he did great things, he died, and he was forgotten, and then Schumann found all of his music and started incorporating his stuff in his writing, and people were saying this is revolutionary, where are you getting it from? He said from a church in Leipzig, it’s just sitting there, so these people go to the church and say, ‘The Father of classical music is Johann Sebastian Bach!’ There’s natural reality in the music – there’s all that sophisticated, complicated shit, but it should sound simple. That’s why people like it. Stravinsky is very complicated, but sounds very simple. You can sing everything he ever wrote, so a person doesn’t have to know meter, doesn’t have to know harmony, they can just whistle the melody if they want, ‘This is great, I like this!’

“But we get this thing now, where musicians are obsessed with complexity, you can go on YouTube and see ‘Happy Birthday’ in the style of Shostakovich, for example. That’s great as an academic exercise, but it should just be ‘Happy Birthday.’ We seem to have an aversion to the obvious, it’s not ‘hip’ enough, but then you have these other musicians who do it right and it succeeds by stating the obvious, because this is where people are and always will be.

“So, as a musician playing instrumental music, you have to write music in a way that people can understand it emotionally, but this demand they should ‘understand it intellectually’ is a recipe for failure and neglect.”

It’s worth thinking hard on Marsalis’ words. He is, after all, a musician who has excelled in jazz, in pop and rock, playing for four years with Sting (check out Bring on the Night), has often guested with the Grateful Dead (listen to Wake Up To Find Out), written music for Broadway productions, film soundtracks and performed with some of the world’s leading symphony orchestras and greatest jazz musicians.

Throughout he has remained thoroughly grounded, as much at home bantering with his University students (which he loves to do, “They need us, and we need them, that’s the beauty of the whole thing for me”) as adjunct Professor at North Carolina Central University as performing works by Brazilian composer Heitor Villa-Lobos arranged for solo saxophone with some of the great symphony orchestras of the world.

Reflecting on his work with symphony orchestras he says: “The material can be very, very challenging sometimes, that’s the great thing about it. If I were the kind of person who talked about how great I am, this would remind you very quickly that you are not as good as you think you are!”

The Branford Marsalis Quartet play Love Supreme Jazz Festival on Sunday 6 July – and their album Belonging is out now on Blue Note Records