Listen to our full conversation on my podcast “Beyond the Fame.”
His Grammy-winning jazz career includes “Do the Right Thing” and “The Tonight Show.”
Branford Marsalis performs at Strathmore this Thursday and Wolf Trap on Jan. 26-27.
“Most of the people that come to the concerts aren’t huge jazz fans, but I’m glad they like us enough to come check us out,” Marsalis told WTOP. “We started touring last summer in Europe, then we had a break and did some concerts on the West Coast in November.”
Folks in our area will remember his Bruce Hornsby live duet of the “Star Spangled Banner” when Cal Ripken Jr. broke Lou Gehrig’s consecutive-games streak at Camden Yards in Baltimore in 1995, pausing and pumping his fist for the crowd to chant, “O!!!”
“I had played the National Anthem for an Orioles game a while earlier and they were explaining to me, ‘The crowd’s going to say, ‘O!,’ and I didn’t know what they really meant. … I almost jumped out of my skin,” Marsalis said. “By the time we did the Ripken game, I told Bruce, ‘Look man, when we get to ‘O’ at the end, the whole crowd is going to say, ‘O!'”
Born in Breaux Bridge, Louisiana in 1960, Marsalis grew up in a musical family, including his talented brothers Jason, Delfeayo and, most famous of all, Wynton Marsalis.
“Wynton was practicing, he wanted to play classical music, went to Juilliard, had a full scholarship and was one of the best trumpet players in the world by the time he was 20,” Marsalis said. “I was proud of him because I didn’t have any aspirations to do that.”
Their creativity was sparked by their parents, Dolores, a jazz singer and substitute teacher, and Ellis Marsalis Jr., a music professor and pianist for New Orleans trumpeter Al Hirt.
“Al gave Wynton the trumpet; I was playing piano, which I hated,” Marsalis said. “Wynton was joining the school band and I said, ‘I want to join the school band.’ My dad said, ‘What do you want to play?’ I said, ‘Trumpet.’ He said, ‘Nope, Einstein says the same matter can’t occupy the same place at the same time or chaos ensues.’ I’m like, ‘What the hell?'”
Instead, he was handed the clarinet, which he gladly accepted to get off the piano.
“The clarinetist for Al Hirt’s band was a guy named Pee Wee Spitelera, so Pee Wee got me a clarinet,” Marsalis said. “I started playing in school band, youth orchestra and all these things. When I was 14 years old, I saw these girls. … I followed them into the dance and saw this band playing. … I said, ‘I’ll join a band and that way, I’ll meet girls.'”
He asked for a saxophone for Christmas and Santa delivered in 1974. For the next three years, he convinced family and friends to join a Louisiana band called The Creators.
While attending Berklee College of Music in 1980, he was offered to tour Europe with Art Blakey, Lionel Hampton, Clark Terry, Herbie Hancock, Miles Davis and Dizzy Gillespie.
“I didn’t know what the hell I was doing, but I was game,” Marsalis said. “They taught me a lot and I was eager to learn. I didn’t think of it as a metaphor for, ‘I have arrived.’ Even if I had Instagram I wouldn’t have been taking pictures of me and Dizzy Gillespie. … I learned a lot from those guys. It was great. They really aided in my development as a musician.”
In 1985, he was invited to play with Sting at Live Aid at Wembley Stadium in England before earning a Grammy nomination with Sting on “The Dream of the Blue Turtles.”
“To this day, I don’t even know why he called me,” Marsalis said. “It was cool. He’s an incredibly cool dude, he’s a prolific, fantastic songwriter, an underrated musician. It was a great musical experience, it was a great personal experience, it was a great experience to basically be a fly on the wall of a rock star. … It was really cool to see these things.”
After wrapping the Sting tour, he formed the Branford Marsalis Quartet in 1986.
“When Kenny Kirkland and I left to go play with Sting, my brother filled the band with other guys,” Marsalis said. “We were with Sting for a year and a half; it would have been ridiculous for me to say, ‘Fire your guys, I’m back now.’ So, Kenny and I just started a band, we hired a bass player and a drummer and we just started playing gigs.”
In 1988, his pal Spike Lee cast him in his second feature film, “School Daze.”
“Spike was a friend, we lived down the street from one another,” Marsalis said. “When you’re 25 years old, you’re not thinking about posterity. I just had friends and my friends became famous. It wasn’t like I had famous friends. Terence Blanchard is a friend of mine. Spike Lee is a friend of mine. They became famous. OK, cool. … That’s my boy.”
The next year he played sax with Public Enemy in the opening of “Do the Right Thing.”
“He asked me to play on ‘Fight the Power,'” Marsalis said. “I met Hank Shocklee, Chuck D and those guys. They were gracious, allowed me to get in their space, I played some notes, then they kicked me out of the studio. It was pretty straightforward.”
He even fronted “The Tonight Show” band for Jay Leno from 1992 to 1995. One night, Leno surprised him by announcing on national television that Marsalis had won a Grammy.
“We won a Grammy for a record called ‘I Heard You Twice the First Time,'” Marsalis said. “Jay brought it out and said, ‘Hey, Bran, look what I got, you just won a Grammy!'”
While he enjoyed the nightly TV experience, he missed performing out on the road.
“It was cool,” Marsalis said. “The whole steady gig thing lost its luster pretty quickly for me because I really missed being a [touring] performer. … Kevin Eubanks was really cool with the steady gig thing and didn’t really want to get back out there. … Jay and the guys were great. I learned a lot in that situation, mostly that at the end of the day, I’m a musician.”
Indeed, he was happiest touring with original groups like Buckshot LeFonque and the Branford Marsalis Quartet, which won another Grammy for “Contemporary Jazz” (2001).
He even hit Broadway, earning a Tony nod for August Wilson’s “Fences” in 2010.
“I wrote a lot of music after reading the script and the director rejected it and said, ‘You haven’t seen the play yet,'” Marsalis said. “I came to New York and watched Denzel [Washington] and Viola Davis. … I was reduced to tears by the end and realized most of the music I wrote was inappropriate. … I wasn’t writing it to the energy of the actors.”
In 2011, Marsalis received the NEA Jazz Masters Award with his father and brothers.
“Every time you win a Jazz Masters Award it comes with a $25,000 honorary, but because it was the family, my dad got the honorary,” Marsalis said. “I turned to the guy who runs it and said, ‘That’s all cool, but when am I gonna get my honorary?’ His answer was a chuckle. … Everybody else gets a nice check except me and my brothers. That sucks!”
Even so, he was still grateful to see his father recognized.
“I was happy for my dad because my dad lived in New Orleans, he spent his life there and if he didn’t, if he had moved to New York, we probably wouldn’t exist,” Marsalis said. “The other jazz masters who came to the event were contemporaries he grew up with: George Benson, Jimmy Heath, Herbie Hancock, so he was in heaven being with his peers and mentors.”
Sadly, his father passed away on April 1, 2020.
“What he did for all of us was give us all critical thinking skills,” Marsalis said. “When I’m listening to music, my thought process is very different than a lot of my colleagues and I’m very grateful for that. Living with him was like living with Socrates. … If you say, ‘How was that dad?’ … he would say, ‘How do you think it was?’ … We were lucky.”
Listen to our full conversation on my podcast “Beyond the Fame.”
