press

Publication: Mother Nature Network
Author: Gerri Miller
Date: March 21, 2012

“We certainly recycle and force our children to recycle and we compost,” says saxophonist Branford Marsalis, adding that his wife’s attempts at gardening have lacked success “because the deer and rabbits and raccoons love the garden more than you do.” He lives in Durham, N.C., “an environmentally conscious area. I’m trying to convince the city to invest in hydrogen cars for the fleet they drive. BMW and Hyundai make them. Right now there are no stations, but if they buy them the stations will follow. I have a hybrid, but I would love a hydrogen car.”

Marsalis is featured in the premiere episode of PBS’ ten-part series “Finding Your Roots With Henry Louis Gates Jr.” in which the Harvard professor traces the ancestry of such celebrities as Kyra Sedgwick, Kevin Bacon, Geoffrey Canada, Barbara Walters, Michelle Rodriguez, Margaret Cho, Robert Downey, Jr., Maggie Gyllenhaal, Martha Stewart, Wanda Sykes, Samuel L. Jackson, John Legend and Condoleezza Rice. Marsalis’ friend and fellow Louisiana jazz musician Harry Connick Jr. is also in the opening episode. Read more »

Publication: FayObserver.com
Author: Rodger Mullen
Date: March 19, 2012

Saxophonist Branford Marsalis has enjoyed a career as one of jazz’s more visible musicians, thanks to gigs as a sideman for Sting, Jay Leno’s sidekick as leader of “The Tonight Show” band and roles in movies including Spike Lee’s “School Daze.”

But Marsalis said he’s never really sought the spotlight.

“A lot of popular culture is counter to my nature,” he said. “In order for it to work, there’s a certain level of superficiality that you have to blatantly embrace. I was never that guy.”

Marsalis, 51, is scheduled to perform Thursday in Southern Pines for the opening night of the Palustris Festival. He will be joined by pianist Joey Calderazzo.

A native of Louisiana, Marsalis grew up in a musical family. His father, Ellis Marsalis Jr.; and brothers Wynton, Jason and Delfeayo are all jazz musicians.

In 1980, while still a student at Berklee College of Music, Marsalis toured Europe in an ensemble led by drummer Art Blakey. He went on to play with Lionel Hampton and Clark Terry before joining brother Wynton in Blakey’s Jazz Messengers.

In 1985, Marsalis began an association with Sting, playing on his “The Dream of the Blue Turtles” album. From 1992 to ‘95, the saxophonist was the leader of “The Tonight Show” band.

Since leaving “The Tonight Show,” Marsalis has kept busy recording albums and performing live. Last year, he and Calderazzo released their first album as a duo, “Songs of Mirth and Melancholy.”

Marsalis recently spoke with the Observer from his home in Durham. Following are excerpts from that conversation:

Observer: What was it like growing up in such a musical family? Was there a lot of competition?

Marsalis: It’s hard to compete when you all play different instruments. My competition was with guys who played my instrument and I loved them so much that there wasn’t really a competition. I mean, to my left was a guy named John McGarry, he’s a doctor now in San Francisco, he was incredible and I really looked up to him. And to my left was David Vitter, who’s now the senator from Louisiana. Read more »

Publication: irockjazz.com
Author: John Moultrie and Nyasha Nyamapfene
Date: March 2012

Miguel Zenón’s story is remarkable. Growing up in a barrio in Puerto Rico that was originally a settlement for freed African slaves, he discovered his calling in jazz as a teenager. Miguel arrived in Boston in 1996 having never studied jazz, yet 12 years later he received a MacArthur Genius grant and a Guggenheim award for his ability to blend the folkloric music of his island with America’s own original art form – jazz.

iRockJazz spoke with Miguel during his most recent visit to Chicago about growing up surrounded by the music of San Juan, how jazz changed his life, and how he has connected jazz with the music of Puerto Rico. Miguel describes more broadly where he sees jazz headed globally, and the extent to which the genre continues to transcend itself.

iRJ – Tell me a little about your home town in Puerto Rico, your early beginnings, and how you began with the music.

MZ – I grew in San Juan, Puerto Rico in a neighborhood called Santurce. It was a very traditional neighborhood linked to a lot of folklore. Music was around all the time. There was a gentleman in the neighborhood who taught music to kids for free every day. The idea was he’d teach you music theory and once he thought you were ready, you’d pick an instrument and join the marching band.

Initially I chose piano, but you can’t play piano in the marching band, so I chose saxophone. Funny enough when the time came, I was admitted to Escuela Libre de Musica – the local music school. A lot of musicians, like David Sanchez, went there. So I never got to play in the marching band because I enrolled in the school fulltime from 7th grade, learning classical music.

iRJ- So what year did you move to the US?

MZ – I moved to the US in 1996, two years after I finished high school. Around the time I was finishing at the school (I was 15 or 16) I started listening to jazz – Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, etc. Before that, I enjoyed music, but I really never thought I could make a living doing it. But when I discovered jazz, it really made a difference. It felt like a calling – something I could really relate to. I made up my mind to pursue jazz. From the time I graduated from high school, I started gigging, saving money, and trying to find scholarships, so that I could go to Berklee. Read more »

Publication: Times-Herald
Author: Rich Freedman
Date: March 11, 2012

Yes, Branford Marsalis toured with Sting . Yes, he did two years on “The Tonight Show” with Jay Leno.

But, while it might make a good line or two in a lengthy biography, it’s far from who the brilliant saxophonist is. One may as well have found the credits on a cave wall.

For the record, performing with Sting was a good experience. And Leno was a decent chap. But Marsalis, 51, was never the guy to lure the former Police front man onto a recording merely to put “featuring Sting.” Nor was it ever his intention to forever be “that guy who once led the Tonight Show band.”

“One thing I did learn from ‘The Tonight Show’ is that unless you’re on TV, people don’t know who you are,” Marsalis said.

Most folks who have picked up a horn — or even have a mere passive interest in jazz — in the last 30 years likely know of Marsalis. And if it’s not Branford, it’s brother Wynton or the patriarch of the jazz-playing family, Ellis Marsalis.

It’s been a life of jazz — and, more recently, classical — that keeps the father of three motivated. Not that the scene, the industry or his own body haven’t change through nearly 30 recordings as The Lead Guy and more than 50 recordings as a sideman.

Still, touring — including a March 29 date at the Napa Valley Opera House — is “the same as always,” Marsalis said, “the airlines is more of a drag.”

But he continues. The Marsalis Music label he founded in 2002. He won the 2010 Drama Desk Award for “Best Music in a Advertisement Play” in the Broadway revival of “Fences.” And he released, “The Songs of Mirth and Melancholy” duo with Joey Calderazzo in 2011.

These days Marsalis listens to his kids — a 26-year-old son and daughters 11 and 7 — and realizes perhaps it’s good to be 51. Read more »

Publication: Jazz Times
Author: Ron Wynn
Date: December 2003

Branford Marsalis’ latest session is both a celebration of an incredible artistic genius, Romare Bearden, and a marvelous salute to African-American musical heritage and tradition. It’s also another indication that Marsalis was right to desert the corporate wars and go the independent route. This disc’s nine cuts have a joyous, emphatic quality that was seldom approached on Marsalis’ final Columbia releases. There’s nothing clinical in his tone or sound, nor anything rote in his or anyone else’s solos. Marsalis’ playing reflects the passion and confidence of an improviser thoroughly immersed in each composition. Read more »

Publication: We Heart Music
Author: Dave
Date: March 5, 2012

What makes New Orleans not only a musician’s town but also a place that produces musical families? Take the Marsalis family. There’s Wynton, one of jazz’s more tireless promoters. Then you have Branford, Delfeayo and Jason. Plus, don’t forget the man who started it all, Ellis.

What is surprising about this multi-gifted family is how they never grew up playing together à la the Von Trapps, the Osmonds or Hanson. Ellis was aware of the gimmicky nature of children dressed in uniformed costumes trying to please a taskmaster of a father. He had no intention of pushing his kids to follow his tradition. If Ellis’ sons wanted to learn jazz, he would show them how, but they would have to discover what it meant to them on their own.

That’s what Ellis did most of his life, first teaching music in high school before moving on to New Orleans University. In fact, The Marsalis Family: A Jazz Celebration is a concert that only came to fruition because Ellis was retiring from the University’s jazz department. Only at the end of a distinguished career would his sons come to play together for the very first time. Read more »

Publication: Los Angeles Times
Author: Scott Timberg
Date: February 22, 2012

For the last three years, audiences have been walking into shows by Branford Marsalis and other headliners and walking out talking about Justin Faulkner.

The drummer joined Marsalis’ group on his 18th birthday while still a high school senior; Ben Ratliff of the New York Times described him soon after as playing with “the cutthroat sensibility of the very young with something to prove. At the same time, Mr. Faulkner is listening and attuned to sound.” Read more »

Publication: Rifftides
Author: Doug Ramsey
Date: February 29, 2012

MARSALIS AND CALDERAZZO

Parts of Brandford Marsalis’s and Joey Calderazzo’s Sunday concert of saxophone-piano duets suggested the atmosphere of a 19th century recital somewhere in middle Europe. The beauty of Calderazzo’s “La Valse Kendall,” Marsalis’s “The Bard Lachrymose” and the short “Die Trauernde” of Brahms encouraged quiet reflection. These are jazz musicians, however—two of the most adventuresome—and a complete afternoon of stately salon music wasn’t in the cards. The impression they left the capacity crowd in Portland’s Newmark Theater was of good friends enjoying the rewards and risks of spontaneous creation.

Some of the music was from their 2011 album Songs Of Mirth And Melancholy. Calderazzo’s “Bri’s Dance” was, among other things, a reminder of the richness of Marsalis’s soprano sax tone, which is wide and nearly without vibrato. It was also an occasion for Calderazzo to unleash the Bach in his left hand and lead into a round of give-and-take exchanges with Marsalis that gained in both rhythm and precision as the action unfolded. Their performance of “Eternal” was at least as long as the 18-minute one on the 2003 Marsalis quartet album of that name and gave, if anything, an even more intimate tug on the emotions. Calderazzo’s loping 16-bar composition “One Way” has the character of something Sonny Rollins might have thought of in his “Way Out West” days. Marsalis’s tenor playing on it had that playful spirit. Read more »

Publication: Today’s Zaman
Author: Alexandra Ivanoff
Date: February 28, 2012

Borusan & Branford: 20th century gems

Aside from the celebrity of American saxophonist Branford Marsalis appearing here in a classical program with the Borusan Philharmonic, conducted by Sascha Goetzel, there was another cause célèbre, in my opinion, at the unusual concert at Lütfi Kırdar Concert Hall on Feb. 23.

The most familiar classical composer in the line-up was Sergei Prokofiev, with other, lesser-known works by film composer John Williams, Sally Beamish, and Erwin Schulhoff. The latter, a Czech whose music was banned by the Nazis and who perished in a German concentration camp in 1942, produced a unique body of work in his short life, and some of it was during his time as a prisoner. Two of his extraordinary compositions shared the spotlight with the soloist of the evening.

Marsalis, a jazz musician from a prominent New Orleans family of jazz musicians and who was the first bandleader on television’s “Tonight Show” with Jay Leno, is another one of the few cross-genre musicians able to play as stunningly in classical repertoire as jazz. His formidable musicianship, wherein he executed many styles with suave über-control and tonal luster, took the stage not as a celebrity, but very much as a team player. Read more »

Publication: Oregon Music News
Author: Tim Willcox
Date: February 24, 2012

Branford Marsalis. Period. That’s pretty much all you need to say. About as well know as any Jazz musician can possibly be, Mr. Marsalis is no stranger to the limelight that comes from performing around the world with his own various groups or with pop-stars like Sting, not to mention being beamed into millions of homes every night as former musical director of The Tonight Show. The eldest brother of New Orleans’ royal family of Jazz, Branford has remained at the top echelon of Jazz, both as a saxophonist and bandleader for a quarter century.

Joey Calderazzo, while perhaps not a household name, is undoubtedly one of the finest and most well-known pianists in all of Jazz. Mr. Calderazzo came to notoriety and critical acclaim in the late 1980s as pianist for the late, great Michael Brecker. Performing with Brecker for nearly twenty years, Calderazzo was added to Marsalis’ quartet line-up in 1998 after the untimely death of Kenny Kirkland. Since then, the pair have played around the globe thousands of times together in The Branford Marsalis Quartet (BMQ).

They will close out this year’s Portland Jazz Festival on Sunday, February 26, 3pm at the Newmark Theater, $28-$58.

After playing as a duo at various celebrity golf tournaments, the pair booked a gig at the 2009 Newport Jazz Festival. Some serious sparks must have ignited during that performance because the two have now teamed up for a duo recording on Marsalis Music, the record label owned and operated by Branford. The resulting album, Songs of Mirth and Melancholy is full of beauty, space, intimacy, and longing. It’s truly one of the best duo recordings by any pair of musicians in recent memory. Read more »