Maniacal Melodies

New Orleans native son Branford Marsalis riffs on the state of southern politics, the snares of pop music and the future of his hometown.

By Sobukwe Odinga

If you’re in the market for another tritely hopeful sound-bite about the road ahead for New Orleans, Branford Marsalis is the absolute last person to call. Don’t get the wrong idea; when I caught up with the virtuoso saxophonist he had plenty to say about his hometown and its prospects for recovery. Yet, he refused to sugarcoat his memories of what New Orleans had been, his vision of what the city could become and his appraisal of the long journey underway. Instead of reaching for the convenient platitudes about New Orleans’ destiny to return “better than ever,” he let fly a litany of well-reasoned, at times caustic, observations. Much like any artist searching for the pulse of his or her community, traces of what James Baldwin might have called “menaced love” for New Orleans were unmistakable in Marsalis’ remarks.

His critical eye, however, wasn’t reserved for New Orleans alone. Everything from the endemic corruption of southern politics to the anemic state of pop culture fell under his sword. Reminding me that there still may be musicians who are disinterested in coddling the consumer or transporting the listener to some ahistorical fantasy land. Marsalis seemed to be more interested in seeing artists wrestle with the nitty-gritty, the concrete. Throughout our conversation he insisted that it was up to musicians to maintain a commitment to innovation in the face of the restrictions and boundaries that often accompany commercial success. A tall order, to say the least, but for those who have followed his highly celebrated career, hardly a surprise. Marsalis has dropped over 20 albums of jazz, blues, and classical music, along the way collaborating with luminaries as disparate as Herbie Hancock, Sting, and DJ Premier. In 2001 with the help of his father, legendary pianist Ellis Marsalis, the three-time Grammy award winner formed Marsalis Music with the stated goals of “providing a service to the music community” and cultivating “an atmosphere where people who make creative music can be heard.” Success soon followed with the release of two concert dvds and 11 records. The label’s most recent dvd release, A Love Supreme Live in Amsterdam, features Marsalis performing a masterful interpretation of Coltrane’s most well known composition at Holland’s Bimhuis Club. Despite his breakneck schedule, not long after the flooding of New Orleans Marsalis and Harry Connick Jr. became honorary co-chairs of Operation Home Delivery, a rebuilding program sponsored by Habitat for Humanity. The two homegrown musicians then took the effort a step further by proposing the Musicians’ Village, a collection of houses specifically constructed for displaced musicians.

The hope is that these homes will allow musicians to return to the city and bring with them the jazz, blues and Dixieland music for which New Orleans is so renowned. In these times, when so many artists appear eager to embrace the status of hastily manufactured commodities, suffice it to say, Branford Marsalis is cut from a different cloth. By turns irascible and insightful, the day we touched base Marsalis brought the blues man out to play.

In light of the fact that many of the problems New Orleans had prior to Katrina—crime in particular—seem to be returning, what type of changes would you like to see in the city as it is renewed? What type of city would you like to see resurrected? New Orleans has an education problem. New Orleans needs to get to a place where it is producing something besides a low paid workforce for hotel use. If you get an education from a New Orleans public school, and some private schools, you’ve basically got no shot. So, what happens when you have a kid who’s not super brilliant, but kind of likes school, and whose parents have not gone to school? And he’s spent his whole life watching HBO and not reading books, and school gets a little tough for him. What’s he going to do? He’s going to drop out. So how do you counteract that? Well in New Orleans you don’t. The kid goes straight to the streets. Still, one of the things that makes New Orleans great is that anything anybody wants, they can get. Whatever your heart desires can be found there. You can say that about very few cities in the world.

Switching focus for a minute, can you tell me a little bit about some of the forgotten heroes of jazz and blues in New Orleans, perhaps from your father’s generation or prior? The Neville Brothers are from my dad’s generation. There was a guitar player named Deacon John and guys like Bob French, Albert Baptiste, Alvin Thomas and Red Tyler. New Orleans had a very vibrant music scene. The musicians didn’t make a lot of money so there was very little jealousy. When money gets into the picture people become really bitchy. Because New Orleans is a tourist town the hotel and club owners accurately understand that people come to New Orleans to see jazz, not to hear it. As a result, they don’t know whether you’re good or bad. As long as you’re standing on stage and you’ve got on a white shirt and a black tie, you’re good to go. So it’s impossible for you to establish your clientele. You just take what they give you. The bad side of that is that musicians get the short end of the stick economically. The good side of that is that they support each other and you don’t see situations like you sometimes find in New York with musicians trying to undercut each other, backbite each other and embarrass each other on stage. Anytime one of the older guys in New Orleans got after me, it was because they thought I should’ve been playing better. And if I stepped up, they were cool after that. It was just a different way.

So, how do we create a more aware listening public among African-Americans? How do we change their way of thinking? I don’t know if I really want to. People have to be more naturally curious. One of the things I like to talk about with my students is the difference between education and intelligence. That’s what you see in The New York Times now. The really well-off, educated people are demanding that the Arts Section be more receptive to the kind of music they have the capacity to understand. When you open up the Arts Section rarely do you see jazz or classical music on the front page. What you wind up seeing is rap or some strange pop cultural theme, because that’s the stuff that makes them feel comfortable.

And that’s not going to change because these days labels are more important than the actual thing. I think most people would prefer to be presumed intelligent than actually be intelligent. So how the hell do you change that? How do you make people understand that actually learning is more important than getting a diploma? Why do people go to school? They go to school because they want to make some bread, they want to get paid. The hope is that when you go to university you would take classes that pique your curiosity. But now, everybody takes classes that are just germane to their major. When they get out, they go to find a job. The brighter the name—Harvard, Yale—the better the job. That’s just the deal. Our focus has become narrower and narrower.

So how do we change all of that? I don’t know. All I can say is that this is the way I see the world. If that makes people happy, then great. It’s like when you play golf with people and they score a seven, but then write down a five. I just don’t have time to police everybody else. I’m trying to get better as a person.

There’s a singer named Frank McCullen who writes his own music. I challenge you to find any music out there right now that is as scintillating and as engaging as his. They call it jazz, but when I was a kid they would’ve called it r&b. Donny Hathaway was not a jazz musician, is not a jazz musician. But now, people call him jazz because they don’t know what else to call him; because r&b is mostly rap—singers singing to samples and really simple songs. But my point is, how do you make people understand how great Frank is? I don’t know, but them understanding it or not understanding it does not make him any less great. In a fairer world, he would be somebody that people would talk about more than whoever the new pop sensation is.

If we follow that logic, does that mean that the older, more sophisticated forms that you speak of are going to die a slow death as the public that consumes them becomes smaller and smaller? That’s entirely up to the artists themselves. For instance, who goes out and buys poetry books? I don’t know that many people who buy them, but poetry still exists. Poets still write. You see, that’s what I mean. As a jazz musician, I’m playing it! I don’t have time to worry about who’s listening to my music or who’s not. I am lucky enough to make a living playing the music that I want to play. And I don’t have to listen to marketing analysts or worry about whether the kids that listen to the radio like my music. Very few people get to have a job where they get paid to do exactly what they want to do. And they don’t have to listen to somebody saying, ‘Do it this way. Be more like this. Be more like that.’ I don’t have time to worry about why jazz isn’t more popular. I like it the way it is. I don’t care if it’s not more popular. I’m still able to make a good living doing what I do. I may not be able to have a house like Prince’s, but most people who work in this world aren’t going to have that either. So why would jazz musicians have it? Plumbers don’t get it. Garbage men don’t get it. Car salesmen don’t—well, some car salesmen get it; the ones who own the cars—but most car salesmen don’t get it. And we can go down the line. Teachers don’t get it. Accountants don’t get it. So why should jazz musicians get it? Musicians have to make a decision as to what it is we really want to do and just do that. I have observations about how pathetic pop culture is right now and I’m not saying them out of envy like some people would, because there is no scenario that I can envision which would allow me to be a part of that world.

How do you think the African Diaspora has influenced the New Orleans sound? Everything in America is a walking example of the Diaspora. I just think that the advantage of being from New Orleans is that so much of the slave culture was retained. So, when you take New Orleans musicians and put them in different situations, like playing with Afro-Cuban musicians for instance, the transition is very quick for us and it’s not so quick for brothers from other parts of the country. Because in their environment, that influence is completely gone. In New Orleans we still have words that are left over from the Creole patois, and there’s this kind of hybrid language that comes from the slaves breaking away from the plantations and becoming integrated into the Choctaw community. We have all of these traditions that you won’t find anywhere else and it’s because of the slave trade. New Orleans was often the first stop in America for slaves coming from Cuba and Jamaica. So, you find all of these influences in New Orleans’ beats and sounds. We even play mambos and have sounds that are very, very similar to calypso music. When I moved to New York and started meeting brothers from Puerto Rico, Cuba or places like that we would start playing their music and they would always ask, ‘How did you pick that up so quickly?’ I would say, ‘I’m from New Orleans, that’s how. It’s a New Orleans thing, man.’ And the brothers that are from New Orleans don’t even know it. One of my favorite stories is from when I was playing with Art Blakey, the great jazz drummer. I was playing in his band and he invited a brother up from Senegal to play percussion. The brother started playing this rhythm and then I would play the rhythm back to him on the saxophone. And he would play it again and then I would play it again. Then he got to a part where I knew what he was going to play, so I played it. And he smiled and he started speaking to me in Wolof. And I said, ‘Whoa, whoa.’ He said, ‘Are you from Senegal?’ I said, ‘No.’ He said, ‘But I don’t understand it, you know the rhythm. How do you know the rhythm?’ I said, ‘That was a drum beat in my college marching band.’ It was a beat that Southern University used to use and I guarantee you they don’t know that. It’s just one of those things. We have retained so much of the African heritage subconsciously. I love being around African musicians. We get along really, really well because I play with the same vibes that they play with and they’re not used to that.