Branford Marsalis aims to make music with meaning

Publication: The Georgia Straight
Author: Alexander Varty
Date: February 3, 2016

“Busy” doesn’t begin to describe Branford Marsalis’s hectic life. When the Georgia Straight reaches the versatile saxophonist at home in Raleigh, North Carolina, he’s just returned from a European tour, and he’s already packing his bags for the West Coast jaunt that will bring him to Vancouver next week. Sensibly, he’s timed his visit home to coincide with his wife’s birthday, but when we speak he’s also making a pit stop at his haberdasher’s and studying a “ridiculously difficult” orchestral score by composer Gabriel Prokofiev, which he’ll premiere with Florida’s Naples Philharmonic this March.

“Yeah, I’m multitasking,” Marsalis says with a laugh.

This doesn’t keep him from spending a generous 40 minutes in conversation with us, covering everything from performing John Coltrane’s epochal A Love Supreme (“It’s more like Mahler than it is anything else”) to the perils of being a frequent flyer (he’s at his tailor’s to get a coat repaired that was damaged in transit).

What we walk away with, though, is the feeling that it’s a damned shame no one recorded the dinner-table conversations at the Marsalis home when musical siblings Branford, Wynton, Jason, Delfeayo, and Ellis III were growing up.

Please visit The Georgia Straight to read the full article.