Apr 8, 2025 1:23 PM
Blue Note Jazz Festival New York Posts 2025 Lineup
Blue Note Entertainment Group has unveiled the lineup for the 14th annual Blue Note Jazz Festival New York, featuring…
“Branford’s playing has steadily improved,” says younger brother Wynton Marsalis. “He’s just gotten more and more serious.”
(Photo: Mark Sheldon)Branford Marsalis was on the road again. Coffee cup in hand, the saxophonist — sporting a gray hoodie and a look of resignation — was waking up to a Zoom screen on a late-winter morning in yet another town: Ann Arbor, Michigan, the latest stop on a rolling tour that this year alone will take him to at least 24 states, seven countries and the District of Columbia.
Extensive as it is, the touring is just one item in Marsalis’ vast portfolio. It is a portfolio he began building as a pop-music-loving prodigy and parlayed into probing — and duly honored — explorations undertaken in a remarkably wide variety of disciplines (from playing, composing and bandleading to acting) and venues (from concert halls to television, the movies and the New York stage).
“He’s one of the most curious people,” said Wynton Marsalis, his younger brother, past bandmate and, as managing and artistic director of Jazz at Lincoln Center, occasional employer.
Branford’s curiosity informs his quartet work, leading him to draw on many aspects of his creative life to feed it. Scoring, for example, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom — the 2020 film of August Wilson’s play set in 1920s Chicago — moved him to try supplementing the quartet’s songbook with vintage tunes like “When I Take My Sugar To Tea,” “There Ain’t No Sweet Man Worth The Salt Of My Tears” and “My Bucket’s Got A Hole In It.” The result is an impressive synthesis in which the players attain a kind of period authenticity while retaining the very modern cast of their collective identity.
Marsalis has tested the quartet’s mettle in all manner of challenging situations, ranging in recent years from a pop-adjacent jazz project featuring singer Kurt Elling to a folk-adjacent classical project featuring seven Hungarian musicians. In a 2003 performance at Amsterdam’s Bimhuis — one predating Faulkner replacing Jeff “Tain” Watts in the drum chair 16 years ago — the band took on the daunting task of covering the John Coltrane Quartet’s A Love Supreme.
But few undertakings have been weightier than Marsalis’ latest album, Belonging. His much-anticipated debut on the Blue Note label is a full cover version of Keith Jarrett’s 1974 recording of the same name. As one master commenting on another’s work, it reveals possibilities in the music that the original — a debut itself, of Jarrett’s European Quartet — doesn’t.
“He shows the breadth of the songs,” said Blue Note president Don Was, adding that he was surprised but thrilled Marsalis had signed on to become his generation’s entry into the pantheon of saxophonists, like Charles Lloyd and Wayne Shorter, who made belated debuts on or returns to the label.
Though Jarrett was known to write with his band members in mind, Marsalis said the quality of the material stood on its own: “The songs are really great. Everybody can learn from listening to them. Every one is singable. You can take the melody home and put it in your pocket, even the avant-garde stuff.”
The melodies, and other basic elements of the songs, remained intact as Marsalis produced charts for the band to work off. “If we’re good at this,” he said, “we don’t need to change Keith Jarrett’s harmony or change meter or turn his songs into bossas or all this corny shit people do. We’re going to play the song as written.”
But unlike the Jarrett original — a brilliant but at times attenuated effort — the Marsalis album, which at 64 minutes runs 18 minutes longer than the original, showcases some epic blowing on all six songs. And when in March of last year the musicians settled into the studio for five days at New Orleans’ Ellis Marsalis Center for Music, a twist or two awaited.
“The first song, ‘Spiral Dance,’ I really lament,” Marsalis said, noting that extra takes were necessary. “I had just moved to New Orleans that January. I wasn’t practicing a lot. It was kind of like, ‘Oh, shit, the record’s here.’ I didn’t really figure out how to play that song until after the recording.”
Such self-criticism is telling. At an age when lesser musicians might coast, he does the opposite: making time to practice the knottiest classical material, sometimes without a specific booking in mind, just to maintain maximum control of his instrument. So even a minor disruption in his practice routine would be noticeable to him, if not to others.
Wynton — who has shared much with Branford, from a music-filled childhood bedroom; to growing pains inflicted by, as he put it, “ignorant people”; to distinction on the global stage — has been so taken with his brother’s continuing dedication to excellence that he recently phoned him just to offer a compliment for achieving the rare feat of getting better after the age of 50.
“Branford’s playing has steadily improved,” Wynton said. “He’s just gotten more and more serious.”
Of course, any perceived improvement in Branford’s playing must be measured against the high level of virtuosity at which he already operated. Whatever his reservations about his own performance on “Spiral Dance,” even a casual hearing makes clear that he and his quartet negotiate the piece — a modal maze packed with tricky intervallic leaps and slick modulations grounded by a B-flat vamp — with aplomb.
To be sure, the Jarrett band’s interaction had an improvisatory quality even when laying down the head. But they did not solo as such on “Spiral Dance,” save for an open bass improvisation by Palle Danielsson. So Marsalis’ musicians were flying somewhat blind on that front.
“I remember talking to Branford,” Calderazzo said. “‘We’ve got to figure out something to play on,’ I told him.” The solution they arrived at was to create a form mirroring that of the song, using the harmonic structure but simplified.
Devising a rhythmic strategy was no less a task, one that fell largely on Faulkner. He said he studied the Jarrett drummer Jon Christensen’s beat placement “in an effort to honor where he heard the groove.” Then he “married” Christensen’s approach — “very clearly rooted in an appreciation for Jon’s upbringing” in Norway — with his approach, honed in his hometown of Philadelphia.
“I grew up listening to funk and playing in the church, so backbeat has a different relationship for me,” he said. The marriage yielded “a groove which is reminiscent of Keith’s but also has our spin on it” — one working in tandem with the song’s “cyclical nature that would hopefully allow it to flow.”
No issues with flow surfaced on the album’s second tune, the ballad “Blossom.” The languid pace was established and the improvisatory framework outlined by Jarrett and saxophonist Jan Garbarek. And Marsalis’ familiarity with the tune on a cellular level was not in question. He began absorbing it in the late 1980s, when, during downtime from his job playing an onscreen role in director Spike Lee’s film School Daze, he got hooked on the tune. Repeated listening planted the seed that would, well, blossom in the current album.
“The other actors were asking, ‘Hey, man, what’s that song? I think it’s beautiful,’” he recalled. “I’d say, ‘It’s a song by this guy Keith Jarrett.’ By the end of the first month, they were knocking on my door. ‘Come on, man, play my jam for me.’ I was thinking, ‘Man, we got to start playing this way.’ At that point, your brain goes, ‘OK, let’s start writing the code for that.’”
In writing the code, Marsalis has clearly been internalizing the lessons he learned from his part in School Daze and others he has played in movies like Throw Momma From The Train and on TV programs like The Fresh Prince Of Bel-Air. Ever curious, he has sought — and drawn — the connection between making words in a script and notes in a score come alive.
“Instrumental music to me is kind of like a play,” he said. “Nobody’s going to a play because the words are good or because the actors can read well. You have to convince an audience that these words you’re saying are the character’s words, not the writer’s words.
“In music, when you play someone else’s song, you have to interpret the song so that you become a character in a play. You have to make that melody believable. That’s what great singers do. They know how to control the room with sound.”
Seeking the sound best suited to “Blossom,” he listened closely to Garbarek. But for Marsalis, born and raised in the hothouse of the Big Easy, the chilly passion of the Norwegian proved less of a reference point than the cozy embrace of Ben Webster (“probably the most beautiful ballad player I ever heard”) and Charlie Parker (whose lush record with strings is “one of the greatest album sounds I’ve ever heard in my life”). Miles Davis, Wayne Shorter and Ornette Coleman (whose ballad playing is “a mashup of all these people”) also received nods as influences on what emerged as the singularly warm, witty and — when called for — deeply down-home ballad voice he employs.
“You listen to these people — and I mean listen — and you start to develop the sound in your head,” Marsalis said.
Just as Marsalis found his own path forward on “Blossom,” so did Calderazzo. “There was a chord in the tune that sounded different the way I was playing it from the way Keith was playing it,” Calderazzo recalled. “When I learned the chord, it was absolutely amazing. I remember thinking, ‘Man, I’m fucked. It’s his music. He’s killing it.’ So I didn’t listen; it just would have gotten in my head.”
Preparing for the new Marsalis album, Calderazzo was listening to his past self — specifically on “The Windup,” a version of which Marsalis included on the quartet’s Grammy-nominated album from 2019, The Secret Between The Shadow And The Soul. On it, Calderazzo delivered a fiercely compelling lead-in to Marsalis’ equally urgent improvisation. Anchored by the Revis-Faulkner subunit, the take constituted a model of cooperative music-making so persuasive that recording the entire Jarrett album became a no-brainer.
“Revis said, ‘We should just record this whole record, the whole thing’s killing,’” Marsalis recalled. “I said, ‘Yeah, we should.’” Truth be told, he added, “‘Let’s do the Keith record’ was a conclusion, not a discovery.”
The pandemic intervened. But when it came time to record the tune on the new album, Marsalis’ marching orders seemed inevitable: Just wing it. “We knew ‘The Windup’ really well,” Marsalis explained. “I said, ‘Whatever happens in this take, it stands. Don’t be worried about mistakes, let’s just charge at it.’”
Heeding that call, Calderazzo said he “made it a point to try to approach the song differently.” In doing so, he cut a distinctly sharper edge that ushered in a freewheeling Marsalis moment exceptional in its ferocity, especially for this most urbane of artists. Bracketed by passages of deep-pocket punch, the moment marks the take as a fitting windup to the album.
“It was pretty raucous,” Marsalis said. “It went to places I didn’t expect.”
When Marsalis’ music goes to unexpected places, Calderazzo said, that reflects in no small measure his ability to listen as he leads: “We’re always pushing one another. And he’s unlike a lot of the horn players I’ve played with. He’s at his best when you’re throwing things at him.”
Marsalis likened the interaction of his band to that of an empathetic string quartet: “The musicians are in contact through their eyes and ears — constant, subtle cues about who has the melody here, who has the melody there. That’s kind of how we operate in the group.”
But it’s a balancing act. As in the string quartet, basic responsibilities are defined. “For everybody in the band,” Calderazzo said, “the main objective is to make sure the role we play is taken care of, at the very least.”
Calderazzo, who met Marsalis at a jam session at Berklee College of Music in 1979 and joined the quartet in 1998 after Kenny Kirkland died, enjoys perhaps the least circumscribed role. It is, he said, “that of an accompanist, but a lot of times what I do is lead.” Marsalis neatly summarized it with a sobriquet: “The Rover.”
The role of Faulkner, whom Marsalis had employed as a teenager, is to light the flame. “The swing beat started in the Pentecostal Church,” Marsalis explained. “I’m Catholic, but I hung with the Pentecostals. I went to their church. Good God, the beat, the fire that came out of that. I thought, ‘I need some of that.’” Enter Faulkner. “Justin grew up playing in the church. He still plays in the church.”
Revis, who joined the quartet in 1997, keeps the flame under control. “The most important note in swing in jazz is the quarter note,” Marsalis said. “In modern music, the emphasis is more on the eighth note, so it lacks a certain kind of density that, growing up where I grew up, I need to hear. Revis was perfect because he had this big sound. He didn’t have this super-fast technique so he didn’t feel compelled to go on flights of fancy and abandon the quarter note.”
Revis said he learned to hold his fire early on, as the band played “The Impaler,” a hot number by then-drummer Watts. “Jeff and Branford had this magical dialogue thing,” Revis said. “They could go back and forth and almost step out of time. Well, there was a vamp in 7. I’m feeling myself: ‘Oh, yeah, they’re doing all this really bad shit; I’m going to jump in there.’ And I totally let go of what my given role was in the band, and it really hit me: ‘Wow, that bad shit they were playing was because I was holding it down.’”
On leaving the bandstand, he assured Marsalis that nothing like that would happen again. Marsalis, he said, offered a knowing glance and an oblique word. Nothing more has ever been mentioned about it, and that absence of comment, characteristic of Marsalis’ understated leadership, speaks volumes about the mutual respect — and beyond — that helps keep the quartet together and on the road.
“I love the band, as people and musicians,” Marsalis said, finishing his coffee and gazing straight into the camera. “If this band ceased to exist, I don’t see myself trying to get a new one.” DB
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