Interview with Branford Marsalis
Branford Marsalis is a saxophonist, band leader, classical soloist, and composer. He has won three Grammys, a citation by the National Endowment for the Arts as a Jazz Master, as well as nominations for EMMY and Tony Awards. He was born in New Orleans.
Talking About Listening
Contents
Max Raskin: You’re one of my favorite people to listen to speak about music. Who are your favorite people to listen to or write about music?
Branford Marsalis: Leonard Bernstein was great to listen to talk about music. It was great hearing my dad talk about music. Parts of that Amiri Baraka book, Blues People, was really good. Some of it is really funny. The part about the blues is spot on, but then when he starts talking about bebop, that isn’t really it at all.
MR: Did you like the Ken Burns jazz documentary? There was a critique of it.
BM: Yeah, I liked it.
MR: When you were talking about how Bird played “Just Friends” — I think that's one of the most spot on observations about how someone can be a genius and also accessible. How do you think about the tension between accessibility and chops?
BM: I didn't have the same social conditions that Charlie Parker had to deal with, so I was lucky in that regard. In a way, though, we grew up very similarly because Charlie Parker grew up listening to dance music. No matter how complicated his music got it was imbued with a dance sensibility, a very strong internal beat, which is why he had a balance to his playing. By all accounts, he was this unbelievably super charismatic person, which came across in his sound and in his playing. I'm not saying that's me, but the idea that there's a relationship between harmonically advanced music and the music that made it possible, that is where I agree with his premise musically.
Playing in the Band
MR: What dance music did you grow up listening to?
BM: I was in a R&B band called The Creators, and we basically played the top-40 music. I was 14-years-old in a band full of men who had jobs and children and they couldn't read music, so I was the one who had the time to learn all the songs that were being played on the radio.
One of my big issues with people who play jazz now is that it is easy for musicians to become completely narcissistic and self-indulgent, they don't understand the concept of what their function is within the context of a group. It’s like having a football team where there is a center who runs and catches like a wide receiver. It's great that you can do that, but we don't need you to do that. We need you to block the people in front, to understand what the defense is trying to do, to guide and direct the offensive line and protect the quarterback. That's what we need you to do.
For example, if you say, "Man, you're a really good center."
And he replies, "Have you seen me catch the ball?"
The response should be "Yeah, well, I don't care. That's not what we need you for."
Similarly, people will come up and say, "Man, have you heard that bass player? He can play like Charlie Parker." Well, he plays bass. We don't need him to do that.
A lot of musicians ask what I mean, because to them, that is the goal. The goal should be a certain kind of technical mastery of one's instrument and an understanding of harmony. You have bass players who can only play solos. But the bass is an instrument. When you listen to a record in the '30s and '40s, the bass had a real physical presence; there's a thump that comes from the bass that you don't hear in modern players because their goal is not really to provide offensive and defensive support for the soloist, instead they are just hanging in there until it's their turn to solo so they can show everybody else that they can play too.
The Grateful Dead
MR: I've read some of the things you've written and said about playing with the Grateful Dead. And I honestly have to say the “Eyes of the World” you played with them from March 29, 1990 at Nassau Coliseum really changed my life.
BM: Everybody understands what their function is in the band.
MR: Did you get that sense from them when you were with them?
BM: Yeah, of course. You can tell as soon as you hear a band what's going on.
MR: Why do you think Deadheads love you so much?
BM: I have no idea. That was the most bizarre thing that ever happened to me. The reaction to me playing with them was absolutely crazy, but Dead fans are different than a lot of other fans.
You take a guy like Sting. You can waste your time trying to deny the fact that he's handsome if that really suits you. But he is handsome and he's talented and he writes these incredible songs. But because of that, you have tiers of people who are there for different reasons. A lot of women were there because they just thought he was hot and they like the songs, but they're not saying, "Oh my God, Sting's a really great bass player,” which he is, but that's not crossing their minds.
The Dead didn't have to deal with any of those pretenses. They started in the ‘60s where that wasn't really happening. Their fans were all big music fans. A lot of the Dead fans, they have a keen sense of when the band is killing it and when they're not. That is a rare trait. I would talk to them, and they would say, "Yeah, you boys are a little off today, but you picked it up." I guess it's tough in many situations to play with the same guys for 30, 35 years. I was like the new sexual partner that showed up and it's like, "Wow, we like this, let's get him in," because I brought a different sound to it. I think that a lot of the guys that played jazz sat in with the Grateful Dead and just played jazz.
MR: Like Ornette Coleman?
BM: Yeah, Ornette's just playing like Ornette but in a different setting.
MR: But it feels like you plugged into them so well.
BM: I grew up playing popular music. And while nobody actually discussed this with me, the most important thing was having a couple of singers in New Orleans yell at me for overplaying. I started to very gradually understand what my function was in that setting.
MR: What do you think about the ego? How do you think about your own ego?
BM: My ego's pretty healthy, which is why I don't need to be noticed. It's mostly insecure people that need that kind of attention. But if you're playing in a horn section, you're invisible. Recently we were playing a gig at a college in Macon, Georgia and the music professors were hanging out and we were all just chatting. One of them was a huge music fan, a variety of stuff, and they were asking me that similar question.
I said, “Man, when you play the horn section, you’re invisible.”
Then somebody said, “Oh, you’re being humble.”
I replied "No, I'm really not. You guys have any Chicago records? Name one guy in the horn section,”
One woman named one guy.
I said, "All that affirms is your weirdness, not that I'm wrong. Notice you're the only person at this table. All these bands, Earth, Wind & Fire and others, had great horn sections, but who knows the horn section?"
MR: No one knows who they are.
BM: Nobody. It's like Ernie Watts played with the Rolling Stones. You think Rolling Stones fans remember that?
MR: I was listening to “Zanzibar” by Billy Joel and was thinking how much I loved the horn and it turns out it was Freddie Hubbard.
BM: Yeah.
MR: I just knew it was good, but it didn't necessarily sound like him.
BM: But all those guys from that era grew up understanding what their function is in the group. You can't just play whatever you feel like. You think about the rhetorical myth about jazz, it's, "Jazz is great. You can just get on stage and play whatever you want," and that is such crap. It is so not true, but you have musicians who buy into that and do that.
MR: Well, I think you said once not every solo is unique.
BM: No, they’re not. Some solos are quite pedestrian. Some people think it's like instant composition. But it's not like instant composition. If you're standing on the corner talking with your friends, is everything you say an instant classic novel? No, it's not composition.
We all grow up with regional dialects and some guys never really outgrow their regional colloquialisms. That's why Saturday Night Live can do funny bits with dialects, they put a Boston guy on, talking in a Boston accent about the Sox, and everybody thinks that's hilarious. But there are a lot of people from Boston who have become professors and realize they can't bring their South Boston colloquialisms to a convention in Berlin, so they have to change their dialect to fit where they are. I think that's what music is to me. I have to learn…I didn't have to learn…I chose to learn a tremendous amount of different dialects, and I use those dialects depending on the musical situation.
To Miss New Orleans
MR: What is your core identity though?
BM: New Orleans. Even my ex used to say that as soon as the plane lands on the soil and I walk out the door, she doesn’t know who that person is.
We land and all of a sudden I'm like [speaking in really cool New Orleans accent], "Yeah, what's happening, bruh? Yeah, I'm just hanging in there, little daddy."
She's like, "Who are you? Who is this person?"
MR: This is a stupid question, but did zydeco have an influence on you?
BM: All of that stuff had a musical influence, but I didn't grow up in North Louisiana, so I don't have a Cajun accent.
MR: Phil Schaap was a real mentor and important person in my life. I interviewed him before he died. His obsession about jazz — did you ever get obsessive about any band or individual recordings?
BM: No, no, I'm not a historian. I had a different function. I use history, because I think context is always important in any discussion. But when I'm listening to music, what I'm trying to capture is the sound of the music. I have a big record collection. I listen to all kinds of stuff, but I'm not the guy who says, "I have over 5,000 jazz records." That's great. How many of them have you actually listened to?
MR: Phil really did listen.
BM: But Phil had a specialty. Bird was his specialty. The 1940s were his specialty, and the 1930s even were his specialty. He checked out all of that stuff. But if you want to talk about Albert Niland, then he isn’t the guy to talk to. If you want to talk about Coltrane in the '60s, he isn’t the guy to talk to about that. He had a specialty. For me, I never really wanted to have a specialty. I always thought it was important as a musician to know a little about a lot of things, rather than to know a lot about one thing.
MR: What record in your life, either album or single song, do you think you've listened to the most?
BM: No, I don't listen like that. I listen intensely when I'm in the moment. In a recent conversation, I said I listened to a Wayne Shorter record. Something came up and I started singing and someone asked, "When was the last time you listened to that record?" I said, “35 years ago.” But the way I listen, I just listen, and I don't try to study it. I don't try to analyze it. I just listen and I play it again and again and again and again and again and again. Then I can hear things in it. Then I can hear the sound. Once that happens, I'm going to move on to the next record. Music is not the background to my life, music's the foreground.
MR: In law school my criminal law professor was Kim Taylor-Thompson, who was Billy Taylor's daughter.
BM: Wow, that's cool.
MR: He wrote “I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel To Be Free” about her. So after class, I bugged her a bunch trying to talk about Billy Taylor. She said something that really stuck with me, she said, "He didn't listen to music in the car, he couldn't. He couldn't listen to the music in the background. He just couldn't do it. It was not a distraction for him. He had to only listen to it in the foreground."
MR: What's the last music you listened to?
BM: I'm listening to Richard Strauss right now. Metamorphosen.
Golf
MR: I read that you golf. When did to start?
BM: Golf, I play really poorly, but I do enjoy playing. I started when I was 36. I'm 62 now. I'm not very good, because golf is one of those sports, like any sport really, if you're seriously trying to play golf, you have to give it an hour a day. A round of golf is four-and-a-half hours, but you have to hit balls and work on shots and do all of this stuff, and I have to spend that time playing the saxophone and listening to music. I don't have time.
MR: What made you take up golf?
BM: One of the Buckshot LeFonque records was making a little noise in Minnesota, and the record company told me I had to go to this celebrity golf tournament. That was it. I took a swing, missed the ball and said, "This is great," so I started playing.
MR: What do you think it is that you like about it?
BM: If I'm playing basketball and I stop near the basket abruptly and the other guy falls down, I'm going to make the shot. So sometimes the other team can make mistakes that benefit you. In golf, the other person might make a mistake, but then you have to turn around and still make the difficult shot. It's just on you. If the ball's two inches away from the cup, that's one thing. But other than that, you can't get all engrossed in people missing shots because you're going to be missing shots too. I enjoy the process.
MR: Do you do anything else for exercise?
BM: I go to the gym.
MR: Do you lift? Do you do cardio?
BM: More lifting than cardio. I have a bad knee, but I walk for cardio.
MR: Do you walk a lot each day?
BM: I try to, yeah.
MR: How long?
BM: Walk until I'm done. Three miles.
MR: Do you talk on the phone when you walk? Do you listen to music?
BM: Sometimes I talk on the phone, sometimes I listen to music. You keep looking for a routine. I keep telling you I don't have one, and you don't seem to believe me, I don't have a routine.
MR: No routine whatsoever?
BM: No. I get up and I say, "I'll go to the gym today." Once I'm in the gym I have a routine. I do chest, back and legs on one day, and bicep, tricep, and shoulders on the other day.
MR: So that is a routine.
BM: Yeah. But then you're saying, "Do you talk on the phone? Do you listen to music?" Sure, I do both. Sometimes I listen to NBA radio. Sometimes I listen to news shows. Sometimes I listen to MSNBC. It depends.
MR: Some people I interview won’t talk on the phone or listen to music when they walk. It is quiet time. They will do nothing on that walk.
BM: Good for them.
Sax Player and Musician
MR: But it’s interesting because on the one hand to be a great musician like you are, you have to have an intense, intense discipline. But then you also have to have a space for creativity.
BM: Being a good musician is different than being a good sax player. Those are two separate things.
MR: But you're a great sax player and a great musician.
BM: I’m not really a great sax player. I'm a functional sax player. I know great sax players. I'm not one of them.
MR: Really? You wouldn't call yourself a great sax player?
BM: No, I wouldn't. I know a lot of guys that play saxophone better than me, but I play music better than them, so I win.
MR: That's great. That's awesome. That's great. Where do you think you learned to formulate ideas so concisely and clearly?
BM: My dad. That's the way his brain used to work.
MR: How would he give life lessons?
BM: Conversation. It was never, "Sit down, son. Let me give you a life lesson." He would just say, "Notice this." One time there was a guy who came to town from New York, and he made me out as a mark. He was a dance instructor and he said he needed to write a check for 600 bucks. He asked if I would cash it, and then his bank would cover the funds. My mother forbade me from doing it. I'm arguing with her. My dad said, "It's his money. Let him do what he wants."
My dad said, "I'm telling you now, the check will bounce."
I replied, "You don't know."
He said, "We'll find out, but the check will bounce."
Of course, the check bounced.
I came home and I said, "The check bounced."
He goes, "Yeah. Now you know."
I said, "Man, that's $600."
He said, "$600 is nothing. People get fleeced for thousands and thousands as adults. They get fleeced out of their homes, over scams like this. You're 16-years-old. Now you know, so the next time you’ll see a guy coming, it's actually a cheap lesson."
And he's right.
MR: He sounds incredible.
Rock & Rollins
MR: Are there any writers that you read that have shaped how you think about rhetoric? Do you have any either favorite writers or books?
BM: I don't really have favorite writers, but I went through a Shakespeare phase and a Faulkner phase in my 30s. I read Aristotle’s Rhetoric. I have to read it again. I don't think that I was in the right frame of mind to get the value out of it. The writings of Rainer Maria Rilke are great.
MR: I don't want to hark on your routines or stuff like that, but you have, just the way you…
BM: …I have a non-linear brain in a sea of linear people. That's all it really is. My dad was a linear thinker. Wynton's a linear thinker. I'm a non-linear thinker.
MR: What do you mean by that?
BM: Everybody likes to say, A+B=C, and I'm saying it can be whatever, as long as eventually you get to C. You might go from A to M to Z and then back, which gets you to C. So when I read things, I'm not saying there's a direct correlation between what I'm reading and how I play. It's all part of a certain intellectual and emotional evolution that one must have if they really want to be a serious musician.
MR: Do you think Sonny Rollins was like that?
BM: I don't know. I know he listened to a lot of music. I never asked him what he was reading. He was great to talk to. I learned a lot from talking to him especially about improvisation.
He read this thing that I wrote where I said, "An improvisation needs to be spontaneous, so guys learning a bunch of licks and regurgitating them, how is that spontaneous? You're supposed to wipe the slate clean and allow the moment to happen to you." Then he wrote me after that, saying "That's exactly it."
In that same conversation, I asked him how many songs he knew. He said, "The funny thing is that if you learn a lot of songs, most people you work with don't learn a lot of songs. So, if you quote something from a song, they'll think it's your idea because they don't know." I went, "Yeah, that sucks, but it's true."
So I asked, "How many songs do you think you know?"
He says, "Oh, about 10,000."
I replied, "How'd you learn them?"
He says, "Well, in the '30s, I would have my horn just sitting on the stand next to the radio. Whenever there was a song that I liked, I would pick my horn up and start playing along with it."
I said, "You'd learn it like that?"
He replied, "Well, if it's a hit song, they're going to play it three or four times a day. So by the end of the day I'll know the song. I just did that all of my teenage years."
The more songs you know — I mean really know — the better you are. A lot of jazz knowledge is so harmonic based, but the songs always go to the same place when you have harmony people playing, because harmony doesn't know happiness or sadness or anger. Great songs evoke certain emotions. But if you don't understand the power of sound and its relationship to emotion, then your songs will be based on data. Everything will be correct, but it won't necessarily evoke anything for a listener.
Learning History
MR: How do you get in that zone of openness?
BM: It's not a zone. It's a way of thinking and you step on stage and you're in that.
MR: I think there's a big sickness in our society that I don't think a lot of people can do what you're talking about.
BM: It's always been that way. You read anecdotal stories about how audiences and peers reacted to people like Beethoven. You have this giant, and they're like, "He's breaking all the rules. What's wrong with this guy?"
MR: Like Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring”?
BM: There was a fight that broke out between the people who liked it and the people who hated it. That worked out better for Stravinsky than anybody would've thought.
But Stravinsky's music was an extension of traditional Western harmony. That's the part that I think a lot of linear thinkers would struggle with because they like to believe that, "Well, Stravinsky did this, this, this, and this." But the obsession with newness and the obsession with innovation is actually a detriment. Innovation and all those things are an outgrowth of a certain baseline understanding of whatever you're trying to do in the traditional sense of the word.
In Stravinsky's book, he says he was writing these pieces and he wanted to study with the great Russian composer Rimsky-Korsakoff. Rimsky looked at the music and said, "Some of this stuff is really good, but you clearly don't know what you're doing. So I'm going to send you to my student, and you need to learn basic principles of Western harmony. Once you learn that, and he gives me the okay, then you can come and study with me." So Stravinsky went to Rimsky's student, and by the time he learned western harmony he realized that is what he needed and he didn't need to study with Rimsky.
You learn from the bottom of it, but we all tend to want to learn from the top of it, and that includes me and it includes Wynton. We started out at the top.
MR: What do you mean by that?
BM: We were modernists. We believed the history of music started in 1950. The people who were alive then said, "You guys suck because you don't know anything from the 1930s." We could have dismissed them as being haters, like people do to us now, but both of us took them to heart, and we started learning more traditional music. We started learning jazz from the bottom of the history up to the top, not from the middle.
MR: Do you have anything you're curious about right now that you're in a rabbit hole on?
BM: Yes, Strauss.
MR: Really?
BM: Yeah, Capriccio. I want to understand how to hear music like he heard it. If I really wanted to know technically what he did, I'd just buy the score. But that's not what I want, because knowing words doesn't make you a great writer. Knowing words makes you a good wordsmith, but it doesn’t make you a good writer. I've listened to Capriccio three or four times a day.
MR: How do you think about practicing? Do you try to get in a certain number of hours each day?
BM: No, I try to set goals and I try to reach those goals. It's better as a musician to practice a half-an-hour a day every day than four hours on the weekend because you're training your brain to do a task, and the brain is very uncooperative. You don't want to learn any of this stuff, so that's what repetition is for. You repeat, you repeat, you repeat.
I'm recording a piece next week with my old sax teacher, it's Vivaldi’s Concerto Grosso. There’s a couple of notes on the soprano where my brain wants to do one thing and it’s not the right thing, so I have to practice, to force the brain to stop doing that. If you practice on Thursday and the concert is on Saturday, you’re almost always not going to get it right. So for the last six weeks I've been practicing this piece, being very mindful of the technical flaws that my brain is comfortable with and forcing myself to not do that. Listening to music is practice too. If I'm trying to figure out what somebody is accomplishing sonically, I have to listen. I listen again and again and again, and then I start to get a sense of it.
Holding Discrete Ideas
MR: Being able to hold two discrete ideas in your head at once and approach music the way you do…that seems to be on the outs.
BM: But I don't care about that. So what if it's on the outs? Jazz has always been on the outs. Who cares?
I'm lucky enough to live in a time where I'm not persecuted as a Black person to the degree that my grandfather was. I'm allowed to make a living playing an obscure music. I'm grateful. I'm not sitting here watching pop people saying, "Those guys aren't as good as us and they're making all this money." I could probably do what most of them do. That's just not what I want to do. I can play with the Dave Matthews Band and love it because they're a great band or play with the Dead, they're a great band, I love Sting to death and his music is fantastic, but I'm doing the music I want to do. It's a very proactive way.
It's a very Martin Luther King kind of way to go about your business. Malcolm X, whom I love, tended to be a bit reactive; he would rhetorically say, "If they do this to you, then you do this to them." Wynton brought this to my attention many years ago. Martin Luther King said, ‘We're going to do this, regardless of what they do to us, we're going to march down the street. If they throw things at us, we're going to continue to march down the street.” It was really great reading Let The Trumpet Sound to start to develop the idea that what I do with my life will not be subject to the opinions of other people. It's not that I'm intolerant toward other people, but their beliefs about what I should be doing will not sway me in the end, only my belief in what I should be doing. That way, I have no animus towards them.
MR: Did you have a feeling towards Marcus Garvey? Where do you think he falls along that spectrum?
BM: I don't know, I wasn't around back then. He was all about Black independence and that's fine, but if he really wanted that Black independence, then he could always move to Kenya. Well, why didn't he do that? Why was he in America telling people to move to Africa? Jackie Robinson's son moved to Tanzania, got married, he's a coffee farmer. He did the thing. When you choose to stay in the United States and spend all of your time saying don’t stay in the United States, there's an incongruity there.
I was in a barbershop in a Black neighborhood in London, I'm getting my haircut, and there was a Muslim guy, he can tell I'm American. He went on this whole rant about the Iraq War. Then I said, "Well, man, I didn't agree with the Iraq War, so I don't know why you're bringing this to me, but okay, sure." Then he said this funny thing. He says, "You Americans and Westerners need to understand, you love to live and we Muslims love to die, so don't fuck with us." I said, "So why are you alive?" He says, "What?" I said, “The war's going on right now. If you love death so much, hop a plane, go get shot. Why are you sitting in here, bothering me in a barbershop?" He stormed out. The West Indian guys were like, "Man, I don't know how you thought of that, but he comes in here every day and thank you for saying that."
MR: Wow.
BM: Are there problems in the United States? Yes. But if I start saying, "I'd rather live in France" then I'm going to move to France. All of the stuff that James Baldwin said about America was spot on for America at the time, and he chose to live in Paris. But if I felt as strongly as some of these guys do, yeah I'd be on the first plane…Ghana, here I come.
MR: If you had to live somewhere outside of the U.S. where would it be?
BM: London. I like London, Germany, maybe even Ghana for a little while, but I'm American and I'm an expansive outward looking American, I'm not a xenophobe at all. I love this country it's given me great opportunities. I look at the progress that's been made from the time that my dad had to sit in the back of a bus with a screen in front of him saying Colored Only, we've come a long way.