Marsalis takes listeners along on his musical journey

Publication: The Herald-Sun
Author: Cliff Bellamy
Date: January 13, 2012

DURHAM – An audience at Motorco Music Hall heard everything from Miles Davis to Montiverdi during a listening session that tenor and soprano saxophonist Branford Marsalis led Thursday.

“It’s very cool that Branford lives in Durham,” said Aaron Greenwald, director of Duke Performances, who moderated the session. “It offers us some additional credibility.”

Marsalis also had some good things to say about Durham. The city reminded him of New Orleans, where he grew up, he told the audience. Too many cities are fragmented between the rich and poor, but Durham has “a lot of great economic diversity,” he said, and he wanted his child “to be mindful of people of all walks of life.”

In a wide-ranging talk, Marsalis answered questions from the audience, even joked about being mistaken for his brother and trumpeter Wynton Marsalis, but the focus was music. Greenwald started the session by playing a sample of Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power,” on which Marsalis played saxophone on a portion. Greenwald said the record was his first encounter, at age 13, with Marsalis’ music.

Marsalis talked about growing up listening to funk and rock music. He first played piano, which he said he hated. His father, pianist and bandleader Ellis Marsalis, had bought his brother a trumpet. “I realized if I joined the school band it would get me off the vile piano,” Marsalis said. He first played clarinet. Later he played piano in a funk band, then lured another piano player for the band, and began playing saxophone.

An audience member asked him about his journey from pop music to jazz. Pop music had become predictable, too easy to figure out. “My brain was craving more,” he said.

His decision to listen seriously came when a roommate played Miles Davis’ album “Nefertiti.” Marsalis played a composition from the record for the audience. “I heard that record, and I said, I’d love to play in a band where we could play that kind of stuff.”

In a lot of modern jazz, musicians do not play songs so much as chord structures, but Marsalis said he has tried to focus on listening to music with strong melodic elements. An audience member asked him if he had heard anything in the past month that inspired him. He played a sample from Renaissance composer Montiverdi as an example of music with a strong melody that he found inspiring.

He played another example of a composition from his recent record with pianist Joey Calderazzo, “Songs of Mirth and Melancholy,” titled “The Bard Lachrymose.” After playing the piece, Marsalis played samples to show how he had incorporated slices of tunes from Sergei Prokofiev, Wagner and other classical composers.

When an audience member asked if he ever wanted to step away from music, Marsalis said after a long time listening to jazz when his career was first beginning, he was tired. “It takes a long time for that music to come out of you,” he said. About that time, he got the chance to tour with Sting, and the discipline of having to focus his solos in smaller units of time made him a more concise and aggressive player, he said.
Marsalis comes from a musical family that includes brothers Wynton, Jason, Delfeayo, and the patriarch, pianist and teacher Ellis Marsalis. Last year, the Marsalis family became the first group to receive the Jazz Masters Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Branford Marsalis tours locally and nationally with his quartet. He also is a guest artist in the Jazz Studies Program at North Carolina Central University, and he is a member of the North Carolina Symphony’s board of directors.

Thursday night’s listening session was a prelude to two concerts Marsalis will play today and Saturday at Duke University. Both concerts were sold out.