One collateral bonus of the city’s annual Southern Heritage Classic football match, this year pitting Alcorn State University against the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff, is the build up to the actual event with world class entertainment. This year, that runs the gamut from comedian Bruce Bruce to a battle of the bands to the legendary parade through historic Orange Mound. But the capstone event, to these ears, will be hearing the Branford Marsalis Quartet at the Orpheum Theatre this Friday, September 26th.
Hailing from the musical New Orleans family of Dolores and Ellis Louis Marsalis Jr. (a pianist and music professor), with his younger brothers Jason, Wynton, and Delfeayo also accomplished practitioners of jazz, Branford Marsalis has always distinguished himself as a musical risk-taker. And he’s reaped much acclaim for the eclectic music he’s created along the way, from joining Sting’s band in his early years to leading the Tonight Show band in the ’90s to a Broadway project and classical performances in more recent years. All the while, he’s kept a consistently edgy tone to his work, with even his most “pop” music having some real teeth, avoiding the trite or anodyne. So it’s no surprise that Memphis jazz fans are hotly anticipating an appearance by his quartet. As one such fan, I reached out to Marsalis to hear his thoughts on the state of jazz today, Memphis players he’s known, and his quartet’s new album, Belonging, which reinterprets the 1974 Keith Jarrett quartet album of the same name.
Memphis Flyer: Will your group’s set at the Orpheum be pretty focused on the Belonging album?
Branford Marsalis: No, we don’t do the whole thing. There are very few jazz fans in the world. We’re lucky enough to have a lot of people that come our concerts, and they come in and want to have a good time.That’s kind of what our focus is. We don’t really adhere to a specific concept, as it were, and I’m really mindful to make sure that every song that we played does not sound like the song we just finished playing, that we can keep the audience engaged. We generally kind of appeal to an audience across the board. Some of it’s modern, some of it’s trad, you know, ballads, fun things.
In Ben Ratliff’s 2008 book, The Jazz Ear: Conversations Over Music, you were critical of myopic jazz players who are too focused on tunes with a ton of chords and playing fast, saying they’re losing audiences by not focusing on melody and bringing a certain charisma to those melodies. Do you still feel that way?
People like songs. People don’t like solos. So you you can be delusional enough to believe that your intellect is so advanced and your music is so important that you just have to play for audiences, and once they hear it, they’ll be blown away. If you suffer from that delusion, that’s one thing. And then there’s a group of people who are kind of introverted, and they struggle communicating with people. And I see that sometimes, even in all aspects of the entertainment business. I’m like, “Why would you choose the entertainment business if you don’t like people that much?” It’s really interesting.
There’s a lot of people who come to New York and invent a system and they have an audience. New York is a place where they’ll have an audience. That’s fine. I’m not here to rescue people. This is what you want to do, this is what you should do.
But with my band, I mean, everybody in the band has played in an R&B band or a rock and roll band. And the same philosophy applies, even though we’re not playing that style music anymore. You know, we can’t just go up there and, like, play completely complicated things that we’ve fallen in love with. You can do that once a night, but you can’t sit there and do that for an hour, and expect people to show up and listen to it.
At the time I said this, other people disagreed with me completely about that argument. But I don’t hear much pushback about that argument 20, 30 years later. We’re still here doing it.
That seems like an appropriate attitude when you’re about to play on Beale Street and Main. It’s a very Memphis philosophy.
Bruh, I know. I’m not casting aspersions, but I’m glad to be playing in Memphis. Because we usually play in Germantown, and I’m not mad at Germantown. I’m just glad to be playing in Memphis.
Speaking of that, I was wondering if there were any great Memphis jazz players that you felt a particular kinship with. I’m thinking foremost of Charles Lloyd, who has always worked with more pop oriented groups like the Beach Boys, even while having massive hits on the jazz charts — not unlike your own eclecticism.
I know, he played with Ray Charles and other people. Charles played with a lot of those. But he lived in California when I moved to New York in 1982. I didn’t really see him. But I did see George Coleman, and I did see Frank Strozier, and James Williams and Mulgrew Miller. I saw them with regularity. Those are an old Memphis contingency, all these Memphis dudes. And James and Donald Brown were very close friends. James is no longer with us. Donald Brown is still a great friend. He lives in Knoxville now. So those are the Memphis guys that I had more of a kinship with.
In terms of your playing, was there much of an influence from George Coleman?
There was some but, you know, I was more of a Sonny Rollins or Ornette Coleman guy. I do listen to George a lot.
Those cats also tended to straddle genres, and you’ve even gone into the classical world, obviously. But even working in the pop field here and there, you’ve really kept a sense of integrity as an artist.
It’s an old discussion. I don’t find people who play popular music lacking in integrity. I’ve always felt that the whole integrity argument was stupid, you know? Yeah, George Benson played jazz, and he started singing, and he became really successful. I didn’t find his music lacking in integrity because I did not believe jazz to be the superior ethos. I think one of the things that our current political environment can show you is, like, the riskiness of joining clubs. I don’t want to say “dangerous,” because I don’t find it to be dangerous, but it’s fascinating, and I just don’t join clubs like that. I just like playing music.
I like playing music that makes me a better musician, and I was generally selective with the people in popular music that I did play with, and they made me better. Like playing with Sting made me a better player, and that was one of the things that I learned from that. If your standard for playing is how fast you can play “Giant Steps,” it clearly it did not make me a better player, if that is your objective, right? But that’s never really been my objective.
I guess it’s not “integrity” so much as, you haven’t abandoned your edge. I was struck by Ben Ratliff’s comment in The Jazz Ear that the quartet sounds downright “truculent” at times.
I can understand that the music felt like that to him, given the styles of music that he did like. I mean, the music he preferred was, by his own writing, not by my opinion, far more cerebral in nature and softer in tone, right?
He’s a big fan of that style of playing. And, you know, I grew up in Southern United States, in New Orleans. Joey [Calderazzo] grew up in New York. Eric Revis grew up in L.A. or, you know, Fresno. And Justin grew up in Philadelphia. Jeff “Tain” Watts grew up in Pittsburgh. So, you know, man, whether it’s in church or in a club, you get used to people coming in and blowing the fricking doors off the place.
One thing that my father impressed upon me as a kid was that the majority of the people in the world hear music with their eyes. When I got older,I realized: What’s the operative verb for concert-going? It’s not hear, it’s see. So people are coming to see us. What are they going to see? A guy with black T-shirt on, whispering into a microphone and playing solos and not acknowledging them and saying funny things that the audience feels excluded from? You know, nobody wants to see that. So we go on stage and we wear nice stuff, and we talk a lot of ish to one another, and the audience seems to enjoy that. We certainly enjoy it!