A Conversation In Music

It's 9:30 a.m. Eastern time, and saxophonist Branford Marsalis is sitting in a barber's chair. He laughs a little ruefully, saying it's not for a haircut but a shaving of his head. It's the only dignified thing to do when you have half a head of hair, he says.

Marsalis might not put dignity first in his list of guiding principles. But the musician opening the UAFS Season of Entertainment on Thursday seems to be a very serious man -- not just about jazz music, for which he is considered "arguably the most respected living U.S. jazz instrumentalist," but about what he considers real. Although he's appeared in some films, he is very definitely not an actor, for example.

"I've never been a fan of the loose definition of the word 'acting,'" he says. "When you learn how to assume other identities, to become a different person, that's acting. If they give me a [character's] name but I'm basically me, that's not acting."

Acting was one of the paths Marsalis considered, growing up the oldest of six brothers in 1960s and '70s New Orleans.

"I have a personality that works for theater," something he calls "theatrical charisma," he says, adding that he had just spoken with his high school drama teacher, who tried to "strong-arm me into being an actor." He also considered politics after he'd spent a week in Washington, D.C., on the strength of an essay he wrote in 1974. He had, he thinks, enough "actual charisma."

Growing up with a pianist and music professor father and jazz singer mother, "music was last on my list" of potential careers, Marsalis admits. His brother Wynton took up classical music when he was 12, he recalls, "and I admired him for it, but I didn't get interested in it until orchestras started calling. That was in my 40s." But he and his next oldest brother did take on New York together, playing together in Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers, touring with Herbie Hancock and then starting Wynton's first quintet.

It was in New York that Branford returned to the study of acting, reading plays suggested to him by a neighbor, Laurence Fishburne.

"What I learned from reading a lot of Shakespeare was that in America, we have this innovation myth, where people are innovative for the sake of innovation," he says. Most true innovators, he elaborates, either had successful experiments or found practical solutions to a problem. "Shakespeare invented 300 words because the words that existed didn't suit his purpose. That's kind of the way music is. You have to find sounds that make what you're trying to do better."

Marsalis takes nothing more seriously than his stance on jazz: Innovation for the sake of innovation doesn't make good music.

"A lot of modern jazz does not have -- it has no pulse to it, which is why when people listen to it, it just sounds like flat-line music," he said in a 2012 interview with National Public Radio. "You have to really understand the technical context of it to even get what makes it good."

"You have musicians who aren't very good, so they need to be 'innovative' or declared innovative just to have a career," he expanded on the idea in a 2016 interview in Huffington Post. "But I think, ultimately, music is like language. You and I are having a conversation, and we are essentially improvising. No one would call this innovative, it's just conversation. To me, improvisation is conversation, and much like all the conversations that I've had in my lifetime, the success of the conversation is based on the ability of two people to share a vocabulary."

"It's our job to know what we're playing; it's the audience's job to feel what we're playing," he told NPR. "And if they have to know what you're playing to appreciate it, you fail."

NAN What's Up on 09/01/2017