Branford
Marsalis
Our Chief Creative Officer, Jason Cater, sat down with one of his own inspirations, music legend and renaissance man, Branford Marsalis, for an enlightening chat that ventures from craft to golf to life. In his own words: “I’m all about forward motion. That’s my thing.”
You’ve had, and continue to have, an incredible career. What’s one of your proudest moments or one of your highlights?
They really are all equal. I mean the same feeling I had when we were playing in my brother’s band for his first professional performance at the Chestnut Cabaret in 1981 in Philadelphia is the same feeling I felt the first time I played electric piano in The Creators in 1972. The excitement. The same feeling I had the first time we played with Sting, which was at some club in Manhattan before we did the record. The first time I played with Miles Davis, the first time I played with Art Blakey. The first time I played with Jeff “Tain” Watts, who was one of the best drummers in jazz. We were in college together at the Berklee College of Music. And those feelings are all the same.
What other craft do you appreciate besides creating music?
I appreciate all craft. I love watching sports. I don’t take beer breaks, I don’t do the wave. When I’m at a game, I’m in the game. I love the amount of preparation that often goes into one successful play. These men and women are so skilled. I have a sense of how many hours they’ve put in. Even the guys and gals on the bench, the ones that don’t play all the time. I know how hard that is.
I appreciate a great server. Watching a waiter or waitress in motion, how they anticipate the needs of different people at different times. It’s just a smooth kind of thing. People can walk around with seven, eight glasses at one time…all that kind of balance. That’s high level brain process stuff.
I don’t value one over the other because they are all highly skilled jobs. I was a bus boy for a while. There are people who are really good at it and people who were just okay at it. The ones who were really good, they have the level of awareness and intuition, or the level of repetitive cognition that allows one to develop the intuition. It’s the same, regardless. There are things that we, as a culture, value: we value high-level sports people more than we value other people. We might value famous models more than we value people who do regular jobs, but the skill level is the same to me.
“It’s definitely a journey you take. You have to have something born in you to be ok with the insecurity. You’re not looking for a safe route.”
Tell me a little bit about how you feel about style and why you still commit to that formal approach.
When I first started playing with my brother’s band, I wanted to dress casual and he said, “No, we have to wear suits.” I was pissed at him. ’Cause no one else was wearing suits. We’re talking 1980s. And he says, “Every musician that you respect as a jazz musician, when you look at their pictures, they always have suits on.” He says, “Regardless of the form of music, the majority of the people hear music with their eyes first. So how you dress says how you feel about the thing that you are doing.” And I was like, “Man, fine.” So I went and bought a couple of suits.
Originally I was dragged along, but as I became better and better as a jazz musician, it’s just not a casual music. It really isn’t. I know a lot of musicians wear casual things, but we don’t really represent that. We play in the traditional style, even though the music we play is modern, it’s played in the spirit of the traditional. It makes a huge difference.
What does being an artisan mean to you?
It’s definitely a journey you take. You have to have something born in you to be ok with the insecurity. You’re not looking for a safe route.
What it means to be an artisan is that you pursue a thing that you love and you live with the rest of it. And if no one ever knows your name, so be it. You just do your thing.
“What it means to be an artisan is that you pursue a thing that you love and you live with the rest of it. And if no one ever knows your name, so be it. You just do your thing.”
