“He… [is] a romantic with a taste for lush voicings, high-drama soloing and bouts of introspection, while steadily refining and nurturing a rhythmic vigor and flair for melodic invention and forceful bass lines that contribute in setting him apart.”
- Fernando Gonzales, Jazz critic
With this feature, I wanted to pick up on a thought that Bill Evans expressed in the Universal Mind of Bill Evans documentary that Louis Carvell produced for Rhapsody Films in 1966 and apply it to the late pianist Michel Petrucciani’s evolution as a Jazz artist.
“It ends up where the Jazz player, ultimately, if he’s going to be a serious Jazz player, teaches himself.
You cannot progress on top of vagueness and confusion. It is true of any subject that the person that succeeds ... has the realistic viewpoint at the beginning, knowing that the problem is large, and that he has to take it a step at a time, and he has to enjoy this step-by-step learning procedure."
Still a few days shy of his 23rd birthday, on December 20, 1985, Michel Petrucciani on the Blue Note label along with Palle Danielsson on bass and Eliot Zigmund on drums recorded Pianism [CDP 7 46295 2]. With this recording, Michel achieved the distinction of being the first French-born Jazz musician offered a contract by this famed label. He would record seven albums for Blue Note during their nine-year association.
Somewhat ironically relative to the statement by Bill Evans that motivated the development of this piece, with Pianism, Michel begins to move away from Bill’s influence and more towards an expression of his own individuality.
Pianism [which means the technique or execution of piano playing] was recorded after this group had finished a 6-week, 32-concert tour and Michel, Palle and Eliot approached the recording session as just another gig on the tour.
Michel is a two-handed pianist; he uses both hands while improvising instead of playing an occasional chord or interval with his left-hand to form an accompaniment for horn-like figures being played in his right-hand.
He has the technical ability to carry this two-handedness even further by employing improvisations with both hands at the same time or even using both hands to play two different tunes or even two different time signatures simultaneously.
Michel has a special way of practicing that helps in achieving this skill that he described to Mort Goode in the insert notes to Pianism as follows:
“I play a song with my left hand in the original key. Let’s say it’s in ‘C.’ My right hand plays the same song a half-step higher in ‘C sharp.’ Then I improvise on ’C sharp’ and comp [accompany myself] in the original key so it sounds like a kind of study. It sounds terrible. It’s wrong but interesting, because when you change melodies it’s completely different. That teaches me to have two different brains, to keep my hand actions separate.
My technique goes where my mind would like to go. Sometimes I don’t have the mental agility to get there. That’s why I’m an instrumentalist. That tool (the piano) helps me go further than my mind might go. This practice helps me reach there.
Incidentally, Mort was to later discover that Art Tatum also practiced by playing a half-tone higher in his right hand than he was in his left hand. It is doubtful that many others Jazz pianists would have the discipline and the perseverance to practice in this manner.
Michel’s nine years with the Blue Note Label from 1985 to 1993 would find him on many new voyages of musical discovery. On these recordings, he would play in a variety of musical settings involving an array of both young and seasoned Jazz musicians, experiment with electronic instruments and synthesizers, and compose a wide array of original compositions. All of these experiments would contribute to the creation of a style of his own.
Throughout his career, Michel was constantly altering his musical settings; this was particularly true of his choice of bassists and drummers. In general, he simply enjoyed playing with as many good musicians as possible. Since his preferred group format was a piano bass and drums trio, one way to enhance the development of his own style of Jazz piano was to play with a wide variety of bassists and drummers.
As Michel commented to Mort Goode:
“I don’t want to get too intellectual about my music. My philosophy is quite simple. For one thing – too much intellectualizing is boring. Too much comedy is boring. Too much of anything is boring. We all need to know when to get off, to simply stop.”
In many ways, Pianism is a breakthrough album for Michel in terms of the evolution of his own approach to Jazz piano for with, and perhaps because of, the concentration of original compositions, the Evans-Jarrett-Tyner influences are hardly discernible this recording is an expression of Petrucciani’s Jazz conception.
And what a conception: improvisational ideas that seem to flow limitlessly, punctuated by a forceful attack and encapsulated in a variety of constantly changing tempos and rhythmic displacements.
With Michel playing more Petrucciani and less his influences, his music not only reflects Whitney Balliet’s “Sound of Surprise,”more and more, it becomes The Sound of the Never Heard Before.
I took a break from Jazz some time in the early 1970’s. I didn’t like where the music was going at the time so I decided to check out for awhile.
Many of the independent Jazz record labels were gone including Pacific Jazz [Dick Bock], Contemporary [Lester Koenig] on the Left Coast and Blue Note [without Alfred Lion] and Riverside [Orrin Keepnews] in The Big Apple.
The conglomerates hadn’t quite made their mark - Columbia was not as yet Sony, The Universal Music Group was still on the horizon, Warner-Elektra-Atlantic was still a decade or so away and EMI was still primarily a British recording and electronic corporation and not as yet a multinational amalgamation.
I got back into the music in the mid and late 1980s largely because of the recorded convenience of the compact disc and the huge LP reissue campaign that was characteristic of the nascent period of the digital music revolution. [Ironically, it was this very digitalization that brought into full swing the flurry of consolidations that resulted in the recorded music conglomerates.]
One day, while searching around a music store not too far from my office in San Francisco during a lunch hour break, I notice the name of an “old friend” on some discs released on the Landmark label.
Orrin Keepnews, the producer of so many legendary recordings for Riverside Records was back in business.
The discs in question were by Ralph Moore, a young tenor saxophone player, and they were entitled Images [Landmark LCD-1520-2] and Furthermore [Landmark 1526-2], respectively. [Perhaps “Furthermore” should have been titled “Further Moore” for those who enjoys puns?!]
Moore’s tenor sax was joined by Terence Blanchard’s trumpet on the former and Roy Hargrove’s trumpet on the latter and both are supported by a superb rhythm section of Benny Green on piano, Peter Washington on bass and Kenny Washington on drums.
I knew hardly anything about any of these musicians at the time but my ears told me that they were the real deal.
Speaking of “ears” [and eyes], in order to better familiarize myself with both the musicians and the music on these recordings I relied heavily on the following insert notes for each of these recordings.
Images [Landmark LCD-1520-2] - Stuart Troup [New York Newsday]
“A great musician is distinguished by his ears as well as his chops. And Ralph Moore, at 32, has obviously heard, absorbed, and assimilated the rewarding grit of jazz— and embroidered it with singular intensity.
He has gained acceptance from such bandleaders as J.J.Johnson, Freddie Hubbard, Roy Haynes, and Horace Silver. But even more impressive than those credentials is the convincing evidence we have right here in these recordings.
Moore is London-born, where "my mother got me interested in playing, at the age of 14. I was playing trumpet at first, but my teacher had a tenor sax and I liked the way it looked. It turned me on." A year later, Ralph emigrated to central California to live with his American father. "The music program at the high school included a jazz band," he says. "And then I spent a couple of years at the Berklee School of Music in Boston. Early on, I listened to Stanley Turrentine, Sonny Stitt, and Charlie Parker. Then all of a sudden it was Coltrane."
He needn't have confessed; the evidence is clear.
When Moore reached New York, he was quickly found and nurtured by Haynes, then Silver, and moved easily into the company of Hubbard, the Mingus Dynasty Band, and orchestras led by Dizzy Gillespie and Gene Harris. More recently he has taken part in J.J.Johnson's return to full-scale jazz activity.
What Ralph now brings to Images is exactly what all of the above found in him: a sense of adventure, understanding, and innovation. There is one important addition; as his own leader, he has been able to pick the repertoire and the sidemen of his choice. The compositions are divided between newer material and some unhackneyed, overlooked gems from the earlier years of the modern jazz tradition. In particular, his use of works by tenor players Hank Mobley and Joe Henderson, plus a personal tribute to John Coltrane, makes clear one meaning of the album title. And his accompanying musicians form a support system that provides a resilient cushion and complementary strengths.
The basic unit of pianist Benny Green, bassist Peter Washington, and drummer Kenny Washington meshes solidly from the opener, a Moore original called Freeway.This is one of four cuts calling on Terence Blanchard, a supple, often poignant trumpeter who has earned his high visibility during the past few years. He and Ralph play unison passages on the head, a modal excursion through 16 bars, with a 12-measure bridge.
Moore gently nudges trombonist Johnson's haunting ballad, Enigma, with his melancholy tone, and caps it with the coda that Miles Davis played on the original record. "It's sort of my tribute to J.J., with whom I worked quite a bit during 1988," he says.
Episode from a Village Dance is a tune by Donald Brown, one of several impressive newer pianist/composers. It is underpinned by infectious Latin rhythms—including deft conga playing by Victor See-Yuen. Moore's tenor is warm; Blanchard's trumpet is searing. When producer Orrin Keepnews asked Brown to explain the unusual title, "he said he was trying to get the feeling of a carnival in a South American village, and this piece is just one aspect of what's going on there."
Ralph supplies a plaintive but tension-free edge to Morning Star, a medium-tempo tune by Rodgers Grant (who spent a number of years playing piano and writing solidly for Mongo Santamaria). Moore and Green solo with warmth over the impeccable foundation supplied by drummer Washington.
This I Dig of You, a Hank Mobley original, evokes the spirit of hard bop.The piece has remained undeservedly ignored since the late saxophonist recorded it on Blue Note years ago. "Kenny and Peter really hooked up well throughout, but especially on this one," notes Moore. "Kenny doesn't just play drums, he plays music. He breathes." Keepnews had a comment of his own to add about these two players: "I told them that unrelated bass and drum teams with the same last name was an important jazz tradition"—the reference, of course, is to Sam Jones and Philly Joe.
Blues for John, as indicated, is dedicated to Coltrane. "When I was writing the head," the young tenor player says, "I was thinking about Trane." It's a fine example of Ralph's adventurousness. And, as he points out: "Benny plays his brains out."
Moore thoroughly explores Joe Henderson's Punjab, stamping the punchy, percussive melody with his own imprimatur. "We played it a little faster than Joe did" — but with no less imagination.
Elmo Hope, the great bop pianist who died in 1967 at age 43, was responsible for the closer, One Second, Please, an unusual, even arch, piece on which Ralph displays a forceful, almost swaggering attack.
It's all powerful evidence that those of us concerned by the passing, in recent years, of such heavyweights as Sonny Stitt, Budd Johnson, Lockjaw Davis, Zoot Sims and Al Cohn, and Charlie Rouse, can at least feel confident about the future of jazz tenor.”
Furthermore [Landmark 1526-2] - Orrin Keepnews
“One of the greatest satisfactions in my line of work has come from observing that magic sequence I sometimes think of as "crossing the line." Occasionally it is swift, but more often it sneaks up gradually but inevitably, as a musician you're working with breaks through the invisible, intangible (but quite real) barrier tha distinguishes the merely "promising" from the accepted, the interesting from the important. Calendar age has nothing to do with it: some achieve this status quite early, while others may spend a lifetime waiting. Musical maturity is very relevant; the event is best described — if you'll forgive the cliche — as separating the men from the boys.
By the middle of the year in which these numbers were recorded, RALPH MOORE had crossed the line. There was no single blinding flash to mark the occasion, but there were many signposts along the way:
Still in his early 30s, Moore has worked with a dazzling array of leaders: Horace Silver, Roy Haynes, Dizzy Gillespie, Freddie Hubbard, J. J. Johnson—which sounds like (and is) great training, but led one critic to wonder if he weren't destined to be "a sideman for everyone." But that same writer, Peter Watrous, reviewing Ralph's previous Landmark album in Musician magazine, pronounced it "a stunning leap forward" and called him "an individual voice."
On the first Sunday in 1990, the Calendar section of the Los Angeles Times devoted a page to five acoustic jazz artists "most likely to have an impact. . . in the coming decade" and included Moore, citing his Landmark debut as "one of the most rewarding and listenable jazz releases in recent memory."
Last fall's Phillip Morris-sponsored "Superband" world tour, by an almost entirely veteran orchestra with only three young players, had Ralph as one of two tenors, affording him the honor and pleasure of teaming with all-timer James Moody.
When teenage trumpeter Roy Hargrove (who plays an important role on this album) made an early sideman appearance at New York's legendary Village Vanguard, it was in a quintet led by Moore: Roy's management were looking to Ralph as the comparative veteran to introduce the newcomer — an unaccustomed task, but one he might as well get used to.
Following these and other examples, it was hardly any kind of surprise when the 1990 critics polls of both Down Beat and JazzTimes magazines agreed on him as tenor saxophone winner in the category known, respectively, as "Talent Deserving Wider Recognition" and "Emerging Talent." No surprise, but a very fitting pair of exclamation points for a sentence such as: Ralph Moore has arrived!!
A good deal of documentation for all this is to be heard on the seven selections here: the power and imagination, the swiftly-growing command and assurance. Ralph has now taken steps to assemble a regular working group of his own, and this could well be its permanent rhythm section (with either drummer). Up to now, he has worked with them as often as possible. When a schedule conflict made Kenny Washington (who had combined superbly with Peter Washington and Benny Green on Ralph's previous Landmark recording) miss the Vanguard week, Victor Lewis had been called in. When Victor was unavailable for the first of these two sessions, Kenny stepped in! There clearly was no problem either way in achieving a fully-meshed unit.
On four selections, the addition of Roy Hargrove makes it the familiar post-bop trumpet/tenor front line, but actually Roy makes it anything but routine. There is much empathy between the two horns, and the younger man has a whole lot to add here. To be strictly accurate, Hargrove can no longer be called a teenager, since he has by now turned 20, but he is very likely to be recognized as part of the great tradition of early-blooming trumpet players.
A well-balanced repertoire combines three examples of Ralph's writing with contributions from Hargrove and Green and adds a soulful version of Neal Hefti's Girl Talk and an impressive quartet treatment of Thelonious Monk's seldom-attempted Monk's Dream. Altogether a proper celebration of the solid status of Ralph Moore.”
I put together the following video tribute to Ralph and “the boys in the band” using the Hank Mobley This I Dig of You because I have always dug the tune and because the harmony that Terence Blanchard plays is in the lower register which is sadly not often heard on the instrument.
When we listen to a big band, what we hear is a formed tonal entity - the whole equaling the sum of its parts.
The composer-arranger gives the tonality its form through the structure of the notes given to each instrument to play and these are further shaped into various melodies and harmonies throughout the piece.
But there is another element “shaping” the sound of the big band as its plays the arranger's "charts" - the drummer.
Jeff Hamilton, who has been a premier drummer on the big band scene for the past four decades, beginning with Woody Herman in the 1970s, Bill Holman in the 1980s and continuing through to today as a co-leader of the Clayton Hamilton Jazz Orchestra, explains why this is so in the following excerpt from Bill Dobbins, ed. Conversations with Bill Holman: Thoughts and Recollections of a Jazz Master, a work we plan to review in its entirety.
Jeff Hamilton
Top jazz drummer and co-leader of the Clayton-Hamilton Jazz Orchestra
"The first I became aware of Bill Holman was through his charts for Buddy Rich's band. There was a certain sound that Bill had that I wasn't aware of when I was 16 or 17 years old. But after that I soon grew to understand what Bill Holman’s writing was. I learned that his music needed to be played at the tempo in which he envisioned it from the get go. As a drummer, you need to learn to be sort of an orchestrator/co-ar ranger to set up the next section of the piece without being obvious about it. This later became so apparent to me, especially by playing in his band.
He heard Mel Lewis as the glue from segment to segment, from background to shout chorus to melody out. He had Mel Lewis in his head. I learned this from knowing Mel, being friends with Mel, studying Mel and then knowing Bill's writing, learning Bill's writing and putting the two together. They were like one person. Knowing Mel, his playing and his views of how to play the music, taught me that the drummers task was to feel like a big overstuffed sofa the band can sit on when they're playing. Not lay on; but a sofa they can sit on. That's how comfortable the band should be in order to play the music.
Playing Bill's music feels comfortable if you let it come in. If you force it, it's not going to sound the same. A good example of this was when I travelled with Bill to Cologne, Germany, for a recording project with the WDR Big Band. I love Bill Holman and I felt a lot of friendship and respect from Bill Holman over the years so I knew he trusted me with the music he wrote. But I also knew that nobody could play his music from the drum chair like Mel Lewis. I respected that and I knew that I couldn't play the music as well as Mel, but I would do my damnedest to bring what I could to his music. I said, 'Let me know if there's anything you want me to do to help this band come together. I've played these charts with you in your band, so let me know if I need to do something.'
About one arrangement he said, 'The shout chorus always seems to pick up a little tempo-wise.' I said, 'I noticed that, but I thought you wrote it that way, like you wanted to goose it a little bit on the shout chorus.' And he says, "No. Keep letter C in mind when you get to the shout chorus.' (Letter C was simply played by a couple of saxophones.) That was such a huge lesson for me because I ignored the shout chorus. I went to letter C when they went to the shout chorus and Bill looked up at me at the fourth bar, winked at me, and chuckled with that wry smile of his. That's the subtlety, often overlooked, that Bill Holman brings to the music.
A shout chorus is a shout chorus; it's on the ceiling. But Bill's underneath supporting all of that like Mel was on the sofa. It's the same thing. That's why those two guys were so compatible; they thought the same way about the music. He let all the bombs burst in there but wanted that comfortable sofa underneath.
So Bill was recording a Woody Herman tribute and Wolfgang Hirschmann, manager of the WDR Big Band, says, 'We should bring Al Porcino in on this.' Al lived in and had gotten his own big band together in Dusseldorf. He was on that particular date as a third trumpet player because he was no longer playing lead trumpet. So there was also a hot young trumpet player as well as a good jazz player from Germany. We're rehearsing this tune and Al's kind of laying out. Halfway through Bill says, 'OK, let's record this.' Al says, in his halting voice, 'Willis! Hold it! Hold it, Willis!' We all stop and Bill says, 'What is it Al?' Al says, 'In my part, you've got jazz written at letter E. I don't play jazz!' And Bill said, while the bands kind of chuckling, 'Well, pass it down to another trumpet player.' Al says, ‘I’ll do just that, Willis.' And Al passes the part down to another guy. As they're exchanging parts, Al says, 'You know, they called Roy Eldridge "Little Jazz". Well, they call me "VERY Little Jazz".’ (Much laughter.)
On that same trip I said to Willis, 'Do you realize that I have to think like Mel Lewis? I don't lose myself, but I think like Mel Lewis in order to play your music properly. I think you have Mel Lewis in your mind every time you put your pencil to paper. And I think, "What's Mel Lewis going to do to make that music pop off the page, to make it work?" You know he's the glue from this section to that section. Mel Lewis is your guy. Do you think of anyone else when you write?' And Bill looked at me and said, 'Hmm. You might be right.' It's like he'd never thought about it. And I said, 'You have early Duke Ellington and Sonny Greer when it was the Washingtonians and Duke was the piano player, but he had to write with Sonny in mind on those '20s arrangements because Sonny was the leader. And then it became Sam Woodyard and Louis Bellson when he was writing later on.' Ralph Burns had Don Lamond. Bob Florence had Nick Ceroli. Every arranger has his own drummer, and I pointed all of those things out to him. Bill Holman had Mel Lewis.
You cannot not study Mel Lewis and play drums in Bill Holman's band. And that's one of my beefs with drummers who play in Bill Holman's band and haven't studied Mel, and won't give in to that. You can never sound like Mel Lewis but you have to study what he did to bring that to the music, because that's what Bill is hearing!"”
Although I was aware of his tenor and soprano saxophone playing from his days time with his trumpet playing brother Wynton when they were on Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers together, I really didn’t get into what Branford Marsalis had to offer until I heard his soprano sax playing as accompanied by pianist Mike Lang and bassist John Patitucci on Jerry Goldsmith’s score to the movie version of John Le Carre's The Russia House, which was released in 1990.
I’ve been a Branford fan ever since for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is due to the high degree of skill and creativity on display in his music, but also, because of the courage he has put forth in leading his career in directions that are artistically satisfying, irrespective of the financial consequences.
Ironically, his bravery has resulted in a well-lived and financially successful musical life as detailed in the following interview that appeared in:
The Sydney Morning Herald
With Rachel Olding
April 19, 2019
“American jazz saxophonist Branford Marsalis is practically inhaling a bowl of lentil soup and a glass of red wine when I meet him in a hotel lobby bar in New York's East Village. He has been up since dawn, heading to this place and that place, meeting people, doing interviews, rehearsing, signing CDs, listening, watching, eating, drinking.
"I shouldn't have a second glass of wine," he says to himself as a waiter approaches. "But ... yeah," he adds, with a vigorous nod and his eyes widening.
At 58 and with a career spanning 40 years, Marsalis, one of the most respected and unconventional saxophonists of all time, is still ravenous and opinionated. I can see why he once joked that critics weren't wrong to describe him as an "arrogant cuss". He excoriates the state of modern jazz and jazz musicians with the same energy with which he is ploughing into that bowl of soup. He talks of his home town, New Orleans, with a passion that borders on ferocious. He exudes a cavalier swagger and still plays tenor saxophone with burnished elegance. He nerds out in long, forceful diatribes about harmonic structures or diatonics or the criminal stupidity of messing with the tempo of Thelonious Monk. He extends the same vigour to assessing his own shortcomings, describing himself as undaunted to try new genres and musical projects even though he is terrible at most things to begin with.
"I got my first fancy car when I was 57 years old," he says in between mouthfuls of crusty bread. "If I'd stayed on the [Jay Leno] show, I'd have had a garage full of Audis in my 30s. But, when I die, I want to have said that I lived, that I went out there on a limb and did different things."
After earning acclaim as a jazz musician, Marsalis has set about bravely exploring almost every genre outside of jazz, earning him a CV that is dizzying in both length and diversity.
The son of jazz pianist and educator Ellis Marsalis – and one of four sons to become jazz musicians – Marsalis cut his chops playing with illustrious trumpeter Clark Terry and drummer Art Blakey in the legendary Jazz Messengers. He moved to New York in 1981 to join younger brother Wynton's band when the young trumpeter's star was rising meteorically;
Wynton appeared on the cover of Time (the story heralded the dawn of "The New Jazz Age") and was the first person ever to win Grammy awards for both the jazz and classical music. They played with a roll-call of all-time greats – Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, Herbie Hancock, Sonny Rollins.
But Marsalis left the safe confines of the Wynton Marsalis Quartet to tour with Sting in the 1980s before becoming the first musical director of The Tonight Show With Jay Leno. He stretched the bounds of fusion by forming hip hop/funk group Buckshot LeFonque in the 1990s and made an impromptu appearance on stage with the Grateful Dead at New York's Nassau Coliseum in 1990, a performance that has gone down in Dead folklore as one of the greatest. He has scored Broadway productions such as The Mountaintop, with Samuel L. Jackson and Angela Bassett, all while maintaining his own band, the Branford Marsalis Quartet, for two decades. Just to top it off, he co-starred in the Spike Lee film School Daze. Because, why not?
"The brain is incredibly lazy," Marsalis says, launching into one of his many theories on life; this one about why he thinks it's better to go out on a limb and embrace new genres, despite the risk of feeling hopelessly out of depth. He leans in when he talks and sustains intense eye contact. Each sentence is short with a moment's silence at the end, to really emphasise his point.
"By the time a child is about seven or eight the brain is like, 'I have all the keys to the universe I need right now', which is why learning is often a struggle. It's human nature to not address your shortcomings. The great thing for me is, I played with my brother's band and everybody said, 'You're incredible!' And I was like, 'Haha, not really'. And then I played with Sting and everybody was like, 'Oh man it doesn't get any better than that?' And I'm like, 'Ah, I think it does.'
"If I needed the adoration of others, I was pretty much done in 1985. But since I'm lucky enough to not need it, I said, 'Well what else can I do to make myself better?' One way you can do it is to double down on your strengths ... but I decided I'd go out there and find out how good I can be. People routinely stay in their lanes. They lose the thrill. Know what I'm saying?"
Growing up in New Orleans – the mecca of jazz and a music scene that manages to stay egalitarian and unpretentious – made him equal parts cocky and humble. He's not afraid to fail at something, and he's also not afraid to tell you he's not afraid.
Undoubtedly his home life played a role, too, where he was one of six children in the famous Marsalis family, often dubbed the First Family of Jazz. (There's Wynton, 57, trumpet supremo and veteran director of Jazz at Lincoln Centre; Delfeayo, 53, a trombonist and record producer; Jason, 42, a drummer; Ellis III, 54, who eschewed music to become a poet and photographer; and Mboya, 48, who is severely autistic and often cited by the brothers as their musical inspiration).
Their father, Ellis Marsalis, has never been one for platitudes and emphasised earnest work ethic over braggadocio. He mandated that each son would play a different instrument so there'd be no sibling rivalry to stroke their egos. Marsalis' mother, Dolores, who died in 2017, could be wincingly harsh. When she came to see a less-than-polished Buckshot LeFonque gig in the 1990s, she told the band it was "some of the saddest shit I've ever heard". "Y'all should be embarrassed," Marsalis recalls her saying.
"Some people say, 'Well, how do you deal with bad reviews?'" he says. "I say, 'I grew up with Dolores Marsalis!' What the hell do I care about a bad review?"
Blistering honesty runs in the family; the brothers don't often talk music, but if they do, it's usually to point out where the other could be better. Marsalis prefers is that way. How does flattery help you improve? There has also been the odd unsubtle dig at the different paths they've taken, like Wynton, a jazz purist, saying in the 1990s, "There's nothing sadder than a jazz musician playing funk".
As he empties his second glass of red and the sun begins to dip behind the city skyline, the self-flagellating only continues. Marsalis talks about his move into classical music about 20 years ago, yet another experiment in torching the boundaries of his comfort zone, and emphasises how awful he was for the first seven years. It took him two days to learn how to execute a down beat, the moment the orchestra starts playing together. In jazz, the down beat is negotiable; for the musicians of New York's Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, who were a tad wary of this imported jazz man, it was not.
"At first, yeah, I was terrible, as I should have been. It's like an American baseball player deciding he wants to fly to Melbourne and play AFL [Australian Football League]," he says. "But I was undaunted. Because the only way to not feel like shit, is to feel like shit."
The rest of the world must have been oblivious to his failings because Marsalis has been flown to almost every corner of the globe and implanted into various orchestras, taking on compositions by Debussy, Vivaldi and even works by Brazilian composer Heitor Villa-Lobos arranged for solo saxophone and orchestra. In Australia in May, he will perform a Latin American-flavoured program with the Australian Chamber Orchestra, including an arrangement written for him and premiered in Australia by Scottish composer Sally Beamish, who usually writes for viola.
"It has made my jazz playing exponentially better," he says. "All those little things; suddenly I had to be very precise. [I] started paying attention to the sound of things because you can't have a one-emotion-fits-all like you can in your own music. Suddenly I'm responding to sounds differently, asking, 'Is this a happy ballad? Is this a sad ballad?' These aren't jazz musicians' discussions. Jazz musician discussions are about tempo, structure."
The more jazz has changed, the more Marsalis has gravitated towards classical music. It's the reason he moved his young family to Durham, an artistic city in North Carolina, 10 years ago; the New York scene wasn't inspiring anymore. (He'd also had enough of "New York living", of five-year-olds calling adults by their first name).
Today's jazz musicians are too mathematical and wonkish, he says. Jazz clubs are half empty, only frequented by other musicians who appreciate each other's showmanship. Listeners need music degrees to understand what they're playing. The music has become rigid. Improvisation is mostly over-rehearsed regurgitation.
"[I'm often asked] the question, 'Jazz is so unpopular, why do you think that is?' And the answer is simple: the musicians suck," he says with typical subtlety.
He says the shift started in the '90s and I can't help but think the Marsalis family was not immune. While they still wield incredible clout, nothing can compare to the two decades in which Wynton and his siblings seemed to ruled the jazz universe. In 2003, the music critic David Hajdu stumbled upon Wynton playing as a sideman with a band in a near-empty jazz club in New York, and wrote a piece in the Atlantic (tartly titled "Wynton's Blues") hypothesising that Wynton's stifling orthodoxy and nostalgia was partly to blame for both his and jazz's dwindling relevance.
It's nevertheless hard to see that Branford Marsalis is slowing down in any way. Not in the flood of opinions he wants to impart. Nor in his commitment to improving music or lifting standards. Not in the pace and scope of his work, nor with that bottle of red wine. And especially not with the tempo of Thelonious Monk.”
