Delfeayo Marsalis Is A Merchant Of Joy

News, From the Magazine, Delfeayo Marsalis, Ellis Marsalis

By Ted Panken I Apr. 17, 2020

“We don’t travel as much as we’d like yet,” Delfeayo Marsalis said. “But the guys in the band are committed to what we’re doing, and it’s taken a while for the concept to evolve.”
(Photo: Erika Goldring)

“We started off doing head charts, which we still do; New Orleans brass bands play nothing but head charts. The only difference is, I’ve got eight or 10 extra guys to do it with. I’m proud that we can jump up on a brass band, which you’ve got to be serious to do, because them brothers play like their life depends on it. But we can get on the jazz orchestras, too. Now, with Jazz Party we’re adding more sounds that the youngsters are doing. Whatever the situation, we’re able to represent.”

Marsalis briefly referenced his eminent older brothers, Wynton and Branford, and their father, pianist Ellis. “If someone had asked, ‘What’s a great New Orleans-sounding group?’ I would not have said myself and my family,” he said.

“If you want to know about quintessential New Orleans, it’s always the funky sound—Fats Domino, the Neville Brothers, Professor Longhair, Allen Toussaint. Now, it’s probably Trombone Shorty. The rhythm is what makes people feel good. My concept is that almost anything is good if you know how to put it in the proper perspective. The new jazz musician has to play everything, but it has to be grooving. The people have to enjoy it. I’m not interested in this attempt at highbrow [art]. Everybody can’t come out playing this complicated music.”

That Marsalis is fully comfortable with complexity is evident from his 1992 debut, Pontius Pilate’s Decision, on which he piggybacked off of the heady music created by his brothers in the Wynton Marsalis from 1981 to 1985.

For the recording sessions, he assembled an all-star cast—including his brothers and their bandmates Kirkland, Riley, Marcus Roberts, Robert Hurst, Reginald Veal and Jeff “Tain” Watts, as well as then-obscure tenor saxophonists Joshua Redman and Mark Turner—to perform compositions informed by stories found in the New Testament.

Taking the approach that these tales offer narrative wisdom, not sacred revelation, Marsalis conveyed them by refracting various strains of the Wynton Marsalis Quintet’s vocabulary—the challenging structures, the chromatic approach to melodic construction, the brain-twisting rhythmic interplay—as well as the blues-and-roots aesthetic that the trumpeter developed in the late ’80s.

Furthermore, by the time Pontius Pilate’s Decision hit the shelves, Delfeayo, who majored in production at Berklee School of Music, already had assembled an impressive resume as an audio engineer. At 12, he generated Wynton’s audition tape for The Juilliard School of Music, concocting an ad hoc setup in the Marsalis family bathroom; at 17, he produced an album for his father. As the ’80s and ’90s progressed, Delfeayo went on to oversee more than 75 major label dates, including numerous projects by his brothers, Roberts and Harry Connick Jr.

In the liner notes to one of those albums, Branford’s Renaissance (1987), he introduced to the jazz lexicon the term “dreaded bass direct,” referencing the then-common practice of running the bass through an amplifier instead of miking it directly.

Marsalis acknowledged that, while his brothers were rising like Icarus in the jazz firmament, he was marinating at a sous-vide pace. “I’m a late bloomer as an improviser and soloist,” he said. During his formative years, he elaborated, “My mother was very protective. Branford and Wynton were more like rebels, playing gigs out in the streets. We had stricter regulation. It wasn’t until later that I played with some traditional New Orleans guys. In high school, I studied mostly orchestral music. Jazz and swing started when I showed up at Berklee.”

He traced his more recent focus on functional imperatives to the aftermath of the devastation wrought upon his hometown by Hurricane Katrina in 2005: “An influx of musicians arrived who weren’t as concerned with New Orleans music as with having a place to play. I realized I needed to embrace these youngsters in a way similar to how Danny Barker, the great guitarist, taught brass band music at Fairview Baptist Church to all the third generation of musicians after jazz started.”

By 2005, Marsalis, whose parents were both educators, already had founded Uptown Music Theater, a kid-oriented nonprofit organization from which UJO emerged. A week after speaking with DownBeat, UMT headed to the iTheatrics’ Junior Theater Festival in Atlanta (a musical theater competition whose Outstanding Production Award UMT has won six times since 2011), where they would perform excerpts from The Lion King. Over the years, Marsalis himself has written more than a dozen children’s musicals, which he describes as “80 percent jazz-based,” in the process developing strategies to present musical narrative.

“I wrote a children’s book called No Cell Phone Day, and went to schools where the kids would read it, and I’d act it out or do something silly—and I’d have my horn,” he said. “One time, I did this in Chicago, and we went into [the theme from] ‘The Flintstones’—fast. The kids started clapping on 2 and 4. They could just hear where it was. I do a music dictation thing where I play two notes and the girls have to sing the top note while the boys sing the bottom, and they’re singing flat-nines and other stuff. They just hear it.