20 Questions Branford Marsalis

Even before "Tonight Show" bandleader Branford Marsalis joined Jay Leno to tuck in America each night, the saxophonist had found a wide audience for his talents. The oldest of six musical offspring born to New Orleans pianist Ellis Marsalis, he played in bands led by his brother, trumpeter Wynton, as well as by Art Blakey and Herbie Hancock. In 1985 he joined Sting in a controversial move that earned him the temporary enmity of the outspoken Wynton. In addition to releasing 11 albums under his own name, Branford has hosted a pop-music program on VH-1 and jazz series on both the Bravo Channel and National Public Radio. He played a leading on-screen role in Spike Lee's 1988 film "School Daze."

This past February, Marsalis won his first Grammy Award for the top-selling jazz-blues fusion "I Heard You Twice the First Time." A month earlier, he made headlines of a different sort when he was arrested for speeding on a visit to his hometown. That news didn't surprise Neil Tesser, who was a passenger as Marsalis drove—at nearly twice the speed limit—to the musician's temporary and barely furnished Beverly Hills house. Says Tesser: "We were supposed to start talking at seven P.M. But Branford had tickets for the Clippers game, and after that he'd promised to sit in on a gig at a local club, so we actually began seven hours later, at two in the morning. At 33, Branford at times still seems like a teenager on top of the world, enjoying all his extracurricular activities before he settles into his homework."

1.

Playboy: Your career has already found you in jazz and rock bands, in movies and now on TV. You've been successful in all of them. Are you a lucky guy?

[A] Marsalis: Fortunate, not lucky. Lucky is like some guy who plays a horn and can't blow his fucking nose. He looks up and is selling 4 million records. Vanilla Ice is luck. But our band plays well, so we've earned the right to be there. It was good fortune that Jay called us. I create my own fortune, in a way. These opportunities come, I take advantage of them and I don't screw them up. I think of myself as charmed. That's a fate I have nothing to do with.

2.

[Q] Playboy: For a recent album, your brother Wynton joined you on Cain and Abel—apparently a reference to your public disagreements over musical direction. Which one are you?

[A] Marsalis: Take your pick, man. That was the whole intent. We were going to have a 900 number for people to vote who's Cain and who's Abel. Whoever they decided would be Cain would get to beat the fuck out of the other one on national television. We never got around to it, but it was a great idea.

3.

[Q] Playboy: You have a reputation for being somewhat of a peacock. Do you think of yourself as vain?

[A] Marsalis: Vanity has a lot to do with how you perceive yourself. For most people, vanity is insecurity. I don't like insecure people, because they crave attention. The people I like don't crave attention at all. They want to look good, they're extremely smart and extremely learned. They know what they know—and they don't give a damn about anybody else. It's great to be around people like that. I'm a stickler for decorum and presentation. I really am cautious of my image and how I am perceived. Just last week, my mother-in-law was picking on my eating habits and she said, "One day you're going to look up and you're going to be a fat old man." And my ex-wife said, "Not him. He's too vain." And I am. I'm a vain son of a bitch.

4.

[Q] Playboy: Do you like rap music?

[A] Marsalis: I love the beat. The words go by me—I don't know what the fuck's being said half the time. I think of it as entertainment. There are some really artistic elements to it, and some cats have done creative things in spite of the idiom itself. They call it rap music, but you can't talk to most of those guys about music. They talk all that shit about its being an art form, and then they say, "Well, we'd like to do more artistic stuff, but yo, man, we're going to give those kids what they want." That speaks for itself. I mean, is the job to make music or sell records?

5.

[Q] Playboy: You play alto and soprano saxophones, but you call your main horn, the tenor sax, "the blackest of all instruments." Why?

[A] Marsalis: It's just soulful, man. You know, it reminds me of Son House, Willie Dixon, cats like that. It sounds like a soul singer. The shit you can do on a tenor, you can't do on an alto. I'm sorry, man. You have cats who can play the alto soulfully, but I just think there's an inherent sound in the tenor. That's why so many cats play it: They gravitate toward it. That horn is just dope, man. It's a great horn.

6.

[Q] Playboy: You're bicoastal. How much do you miss New Orleans?

[A] Marsalis: It's a complex thing, man, the difference between being from a place and being of a place. I'm ecstatic, I'm happy as a sissy in a bathhouse, to be from New Orleans. The food is great, the peasant aesthetic is wonderful. In the rest of America and in most of the world, everybody aspires to be a rich man. New Orleans is the only city in the world where you see the richest man tie a rag around his head and dance in the street. But I could never live in New Orleans again. The South hasn't changed a lot, even though people keep saying it has. When you start getting into that shit, everybody gets mad at you: "You're trying to stir up trouble down here. We don't want no trouble down here." It sounds like 40 years ago.

7.

[Q] Playboy: Can you recall your first encounter with racism?

[A] Marsalis: No, I was too young. You have to understand, if you grew up in the South, they called you nigger from the time you were born. It's something you grew up with. I do remember something funny, though. We were living in a town called Breaux Bridge, Louisiana. I was five years old, Wynton was four. When Halloween came around it was a big deal for us to go trick-or-treating by ourselves across the street, where my mom could still keep an eye on us. So we walk across the street to our neighbors'. Their thing was to dress up their son as a ghost. We knock on the door and out runs the ghost, and Wynton and I go running back across the street and say, "Mom, the Ku Klux Klan is coming to get us!" The poor neighbor, a nice white guy, felt terrible. My mom just laughed. You grew up laughing at that kind of shit.

8.

[Q] Playboy: What is your favorite music, movie and food for seduction?

[A] Marsalis: Music? Opera and jazz. Madame Butterfly, La Bohème, Tosca. And then, Nat "King" Cole: The Very Thought of You and the record Nat King Cole Sings/George Shearing Plays. Charlie Parker with Strings, and Ben Webster with strings: one album called Sophisticated Lady and one called Music with Feeling. For a movie, 9-1/2 Weeks. Food? 9-1/2 Weeks.

9.

[Q] Playboy: Keith Jarrett, in a New York Times essay on declining musical standards, seemed to refer to you when he wrote, "John Coltrane could not have led a television band." Rebuttal?

[A] Marsalis: I'm sure no black man could have led a television band in the Sixties. If Coltrane were alive today, a lot of the circumstances that led him to be Coltrane wouldn't exist. I doubt if he'd be the same person with the same singular purpose. And besides, I am not John Coltrane. I am Branford. But it's nice of Keith Jarrett to compare me to Trane, seeing that he never mentioned my name once in print anywhere in the ten years I played jazz—not even to say, "I don't like him." It was odd to me that all of a sudden Keith Jarrett would start fucking with me when I joined the television show. Keith Jarrett is a great musician. Ain't no question about that. He's influenced my music tremendously—the way I play ballads. The shit he did in that article is deserving of ass-whipping, and I might consider it if I ever see him. But there's no book that says great musicians have to be great people.

10.

[Q] Playboy: What's the nastiest trick you ever played on Wynton or on one of your other brothers?

[A] Marsalis: Wynton and I worked together. We used to fuck with the younger ones. We would wait until there was a food that they really liked—say, fried shrimp. Whenever one of them got to the last shrimp on his plate, we would always take it. They knew we were going to take it, but we'd always invent some way to get it. Like, we'd just make up some argument and start screaming and then the younger ones would immediately look to my mom, because she's the police. Then they'd look back at the plate and start crying: "Aw, he took my last shrimp." And I'd look at Wynton and say, "What's he talking about, Wynton?" "I don't know, man. They're punks, what do you expect?"

11.

[Q] Playboy: One of those "punks," your younger brother Delfeayo, happens to produce your albums. What happens when you have an aesthetic difference?

[A] Marsalis: We don't. It's my record. He may have an opinion, and I say, "Good, that's your opinion."

12.

[Q] Playboy: You took some heavy flak from jazz purists—and from your brother Wynton—when you joined Sting. Did Sting swing?

[A] Marsalis: He had his swing, yeah. Not in terms of a jazz swing. But Sting is real slick. He can take different styles of music and incorporate them into his own, which is kind of what we do as jazz musicians. I didn't join Sting's gig for fame and attention. I always wanted to be in a rock-and-roll band; I grew up listening to rock and roll, not jazz. And I like his music. It's really dope, man. People said I sold out to play with him. That's a value judgment that has little to do with how well a guy plays or whether his music is good or bad. They couldn't say Sting's music sucks, because it doesn't. They couldn't say that it made my own records shitty. It was a value judgment, a personal opinion based on jealousy.

13.

[Q] Playboy: In the documentary film about you, The Music Tells You, you say about some of today's more popular musicians, "There's no freedom in freedom." Care to translate that for us?

[A] Marsalis: There's freedom in control. I have control. I have learned how to play all these various idioms so I have the choice of playing what I want. People always try to get me to say disparaging things about the so-called "contemporary jazz" artists. When I was younger, I was happy to oblige. But now I realize I can't really begrudge them when their music does so well—because the option for them is either to play that music or repeat the phrase "Would you like fries with that?" For most of those guys, playing what they play is absolutely compulsory: There is no choice because they lack the musical skill to play anything else. That's not freedom, it's slavery. Then they spend all their time talking about how they should be free to make any other kind of music they want. Why? I mean, I made my choice. I chose to play this art shit and have people ignore me and not buy my records, and I accept all the societal and economic ramifications of playing that music.

14.

[Q] Playboy: You belong to a generation of jazz musicians in which drug use—once considered almost necessary to play jazz—isn't considered glamourous. Has that ever been a problem between you and older musicians?

[A] Marsalis: A couple of them used to offer me blow, and when I'd say no, they'd say, "Yeah, well, I guess you need to be a man to get this." But once they saw who we were, how we played, that stopped. Besides, all the jazz musicians from the older generation who were junkies, and who are still alive, are alive because they stopped being junkies. I never really received any criticism about not doing shit like that.

15.

[Q] Playboy: How would you explain improvisation to the uninitiated?

[A] Marsalis: I wouldn't. I would just say, "Go buy a record." How do you explain a Renoir to somebody who's never seen one? Just go to the fucking museum. It's different if you have somebody with specific questions; then you can get into specific answers. But there's no true-blue, western European textbook way of approaching this. Wynton makes allusions to food and stuff: "Jazz bands are like gumbo." Now I understand. It's like that whenever you're dealing with things that function on an intellectual level: great paintings, great classical works—take your pick.

16.

[Q] Playboy: As the son of a musician, would your son make you proud by following in your footsteps?

[A] Marsalis: You know, that's the first time I've been called a son of a musician. What would make me proud is if my son became a baseball player. Get that baseball contract, buy Dad a house. I mean, I'm a musician. And give me a break. I'm so tired of this "musical family" shit. I feel like I'm in a circus. A friend of mine used to tease me: He'd call us the Flying Marsalises, that great trapeze act. I mean, that's what it sounds like. The first family of jazz—what the hell is the first family of jazz?

17.

[Q] Playboy: As a saxophonist turned actor, what's your thumbnail review of the film 'Round Midnight, which starred Dexter Gordon? (concluded on page 218) Branford Marsalis (continued from page 186)

[A] Marsalis: It was cute. It didn't have anything to do with reality—not with my reality. They tried to make Paris into this wonderfully vibrant scene. They didn't want to make the musicians into what they really were. Some of those guys were there because they didn't concentrate enough. Some were refugees from music because they were not good enough to make it in New York. And a lot of them were refugees from racism, but they didn't want to deal with that in that movie. The idea of putting musicians in those roles turned out to be a very bad idea. Except for Dexter; he was perfect.

18.

[Q] Playboy: Your group, like many other American and European jazz artists, is popular in Japan. How do you explain this phenomenon?

[A] Marsalis: The Japanese, for whatever reason, are astute in terms of history and legacy. Unlike many other people, they have identified jazz as part of the American experience. But I don't think they understand it most times, especially at my shows. They just stare at us, like, "What the hell are they playing?" But they come to hear me anyway. It's almost like classical music: Somebody told them it's necessary and that we're good. So they come and scratch their heads and clap and they leave. The audiences are strange when you play those big concert halls. The clubs are much hipper and the club owners are great. They'll just take care of you. They take you out to eat, and they'll even get a great-looking girl for you if you want one. I've declined.

19.

[Q] Playboy: What effect did being black have in your getting the job on The Tonight Show?

[A] Marsalis: Based on the show's history, absolutely none. [Laughs] Couldn't resist that one. Really, I don't think it was a factor. I don't think they gathered around and said, "Guys, we need a black bandleader"—because when I first turned them down, they considered Harry Connick, Jr., for a while, and then they considered David Sanborn. I don't think they sat around and figured, "Let's get a list of Negroes and find out which one will do it."

20.

[Q] Playboy: When you were 30 you said you would be surprised if you were playing music after you're 40. Do you still feel that way?

[A] Marsalis: Yep. The way it happens in jazz, you make all this creative music, and when you turn 50, they want to pay you $50,000 to play some shit you played 25 years ago and you don't want to play anymore. But I want to be in a financial place where I won't have to do it, and the younger kids'll be out there playing the shit, and I'll step into the sunset, man. Plus, I got a lot I want to do in my life. I want to make movies, write documentaries, teach university.

tv's premiere bandleader belts out his thoughts on music for seduction and the joy of sax, and hits some high notes about selling out jazz