This interview was originally published in the Long Beach Post, a nonprofit news organization, on March 6, 2025.
The Branford Marsalis Quartet is set to perform for one night only at the Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts on March 13. I had the privilege of speaking with Mr. Marsalis in advance of the event.
Marsalis is widely regarded as jazz royalty and a master musician, his career extending into classical music recordings and performances as well. He has played with the likes of Sting and the Grateful Dead, appeared in Spike Lee’s film “School Daze,” lead “The Tonight Show” band for three years, founded his own record label, performed “The Star-Spangled Banner” on saxophone at the 2012 Democratic National Convention and currently teaches music at North Carolina Central University.
Despite those accomplishments, Marsalis emphasized in the interview that considering an audience — playing for people who know little of the language of music, only its feeling — is paramount when performing.
‘The energy in the room’
Branford Marsalis is no stranger to the stage, having played in front of audiences for over 40 years, over 20 with his jazz quartet. And it’s the audience, he said, that determines his band’s set list of rhythmic, lyrically layered, soulfully groovy yet upbeat music.
“What we play is contingent upon the audience’s energy,” Marsalis said. “It’s not based on applause; it’s based on energy. I can feel the energy in the room.”
Based on that feeling, Marsalis and his long-time quartet — with Joey Calderazzo on piano, Justin Faulkner on drums and Eric Revis on bass, all virtuosos in their own right — will “shift the direction of the music” in response.
“We enjoy playing together,” Marsalis said of the band. “We’re constantly talking on stage. We have musical jokes going on. We make a lot of eye contact, too.”
That palpable enjoyment and fluidity is a hallmark of the quartet, perhaps the result of having performed together for over two decades, save for drummer Faulkner who joined in 2009.
And all the band members came from places where they played for others rather than just themselves, Marsalis said, including in a church and in rock, funk and R&B bands.
“When I was 15 years old, I wasn’t going to jazz camp,” he said. “I was playing R&B in bars. It gives you a different sensibility.”
Striking chords of emotion in the audience is the most important thing in music, Marsalis said. His quartet likes to play with the “bottom heavy” feel of a dance beat rather than a “top heavy” intellectual or mathematical approach sometimes found in contemporary jazz, he said.
“If you’re going to write all this complicated music, then you have to deliver it in a way that has an emotion attached to it,” Marsalis said. “And if you don’t, then it’s just going to leave everybody flat.”
He likened how musicians need to master their technique to the way top athletes can make running look easy, even when it isn’t. Audiences shouldn’t have to “take a harmony class” to get the music, he quipped.
“Our job is to deliver it to the audience in the simplest way possible, even when it’s a complicated song,” he said.
That’s because most people who attend jazz concerts aren’t versed in the language of jazz, Marsalis said, and may not even listen to jazz, but they can feel the music and that’s what they come for.
“Audiences have always been the same since audiences have existed,” he said, adding that they don’t have to have “sophisticated” knowledge to attend a jazz concert. Instead, Marsalis believes “all music sounds best when it’s a collaborative effort.”
“It’s a different thing, sharing something with people as opposed to walking on stage and thinking ‘I am superior and you should bow down to me,’” he said. “The music comes across very differently. At that point, you can’t play with enough fragility to invoke any emotion at all.”
It’s also less enjoyable for the performer to play in that more “top heavy” way, Marsalis added.
“I can be completely impressed by something and completely unmoved by it at the same time,” he said. “And when I go to concerts, I would like to be moved.”
‘Chipping away at the edges’
The quartet also has a “great time” playing together, Marsalis said, and likes to improvise with their songs on stage in a way he calls “chipping away at the edges” — making the song not really new but building on what came before.
“Most [music] is neither innovative nor new,” he said. “We just chip away at the edges. And in doing so, our music might be different or new, but at the bottom of the music is kind of like the gravitas that the old music had — the understanding of the relationship between the dance beat and the swing beat — so the music has a real punch when we play as opposed to being top heavy.”
He also noted that when musicians try to do something “new” it usually means they first cast the older music as “heretical.”
“That’s the new version of new — inventing something completely out of whole cloth by rejecting everything that came before,” he said of the emphasis in the music industry on newness. “It is entirely possible for something to be new and shitty at the same time.”
Instead, he sees the quartet’s music as “new” in the sense of building on the legacy of jazz music but from a different angle, like he said Ernest Hemingway or William Shakespeare did as writers with the English language.
When he was younger, Marsalis said he wanted to “expand the jazz vocabulary” by learning as much “older” music as he could, believing that “you are essentially the sum total of the music you listen to.”
“Playing music is no different than writing,” he said. “The more books you read by excellent writers, it creeps into your writing, but you can’t pinpoint your style of writing to one specific book.”
In fact, the quartet’s newest album, due out on March 28, looks back to jazz pianist Keith Jarrett in remaking his 1974 record “Belonging.” Marsalis said the quartet may play a couple of songs from the album when they perform next week at the Cerritos Center— depending on the audience.
In closing, I commented on Marsalis’s rich voice and asked if he sings.
“People run away when I sing,” he jibed. “I couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket.”
“Well, we’re lucky you play the saxophone then.”
“Not as lucky as me,” he laughed.
The Branford Marsalis Quartet will perform on Thursday, March 13 at 7:30 p.m. at the Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts, 18000 Park Plaza Dr., Cerritos. For tickets and information, call the box office at 562-916-8500 or visit CCPA.cerritos.gov.
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