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Branford Marsalis in Conversation Youre best known as a jazz musician but youre coming to Sydney to perform a concert of 20th

century classics for saxophone and orchestra. Tell me a bit about your interest in classical music. Well its something that was around the house and my father [Ellis] believed it was the basis of all musical understanding. As the schools for jazz became more and more popular you could get these jazz etude books. I brought home one from the Berklee College of Music and he laughed and said, Man, youre reinventing the wheel because Classical music has a thousand years of expertise in this very area that jazz does not need to try to compete with that. There was always an appreciation of symphonic music in our home. Did you study the saxophone formally at a conservatorium or university? No. Wynton studied the classical trumpet very seriously from the time he was 12 years old until he was about 19. I played clarinet at that time so I would learn his lessons, he would bring the books homethe Arban Method for trumpetthat had duets in the back and Id play duets with him and Id listen to the music that his teacher asked him to listen to and I would get a sense of the sound of the music just from listening to it. Im just thinking back to my time at the conservatorium where the jazz musicians spent as much time, if not more in the practice room doing scales than the classical musicians. Is brilliant technique the be-all and end-all of jazz technique? Thats actually been to the detriment of the jazz musician. They would argue otherwise but its something I fervently believe because jazz when it was at its best the musicians who learned their scales but their playing was more melodic. A lot of modern classical saxophone music is very scalic in nature which I think is one of the reasons why it is only popular among saxophone players. But when youre talking about modern musicians like Messiaen, there is a sense and an understanding of the power of melody throughout the music that more modern composers seem to have lost or are afraid to attempt. And jazz musicians are no different, they played melody, they were very melodic. The modern player tends to be more pattern-oriented. There is a spiritual limitation, not to mention an intellectual limitation to what you can do in a scalic nature the solos tend to become almost preordained at worst, predictable at best. One of the things that Ive always done is get a lot of inspiration from symphonic music. One of my favourite weird things is that Kenny Kirkland my pianist for a long time and also he played with Stings group with us in the mid-to-late eighties would always play one of the Brahms Intermezzi I think the one in A flat major and he would play the piano score to the Brahms Third Symphony. He was a big Brahms freak. Some years later I wrote a piece of music for sax trio (saxophone bass and drums). It was called the Beautyful [sic] Ones Are Not Yet Born. And I was convinced, I said Man, this is the best

song Ive ever written, its amazing and my brother Delfeayo who was producing the record said, Thats the best song youve ever written, thats an amazing song. And a year later I was in a car and the radio said, And now were going to play Brahms Symphony No 3 and I almost crashed because it was the exact same melody. And it was just sort of this subconscious learning because its not a symphony that I had even heard. Id just heard Kenny playing it. I grab on to these melodies. And its not exact, not the exact same thing but its a very excellent piece of plagiarism. And I called my brother, Delfeayo, and I said, Hey man, I want you to go buy Brahms third symphony and he said Why, and I said, Im not going to tell its a surprise you just call me when you get it. And he called me back about two weeks later and I said Hello and he said, You thieving so-and-so! [laughs] I said Man it was a mistake and he refused to believe that I subconsciously grabbed it and I said, I dont even own a copy of the Brahms Third Symphony. But from that point forward Ive used a lot of classical music as melodic inspiration for the songs I write. It is the sincerest form of flattery Yeah, but Im talking about thievery. All of the music that you're playing with the Sydney Symphony is very melodic and while it undoubtedly takes a lot of skill and control to play the emphasis isnt on virtuoso display its much more about emotion Its not Paganini! The power of playing that music is in the ability to interpret it and thats one of my strong suits anyway. The Debussy Rapsodie is quite a simple piece, almost spare by Debussys standards That piece was written for a wealthy woman who played the saxophone and she paid to Debussy to write something she could play and he despised the instrument. Eugene Rousseau, a famous classical saxophone player, looked at the score and took all the juicy bits for the instruments other than the saxophone and wrote an arrangement where all of those juicy bits are on the saxophone so it does have a little technical bite to it. Im working on a couple of those passages right now, actually. Its very beautiful though, much like a lot of Debussys writing. Youd never know that he didnt like the saxophone from hearing that piece He compared it to a lawnmower The Copland 'Saxophone' Concerto Its a clarinet concerto, actually but Im playing it on the soprano saxophone. Does it change the character of the piece, playing it on a soprano? Since you play the clarinet as well, do you play the concerto differently on the different instruments?

Well, Ive debated that. When I played the soprano in high school I used to spend a lot of time mimicking the clarinet playing, playing with a straight tone and no vibrato. And Ive toyed with the idea of playing that way. There are a lot of different ways to approach the piece. It does change the character of it a lot. The saxophone is a louder instrument so the orchestra can be less restrained. Im looking forward to playing it. As a jazz musician do you find it limiting to play classical repertoire where youre expected to play whats on the page? No. You dont really play exactly whats on the page. And I dont: there are times when I hear the music at a dynamic marking different to what the composer wrote and thats where I go. I let the conductor know I dont want to play that pianissimo, I want to play it mezzo-forte or even forte. You have control over tone quality, tempo, approach, shaping of notes. All of those things that I think are really helpful in a jazz situation. Because if you really sit down and listen to jazz with a critical ear the large majority of musicians after Louis Armstrong, particularly the Be-Bop music of the Fifties theres very little improvising actually going on. It was codified system whereby you use a series of licks and phrases that coincided with preordained chord changes. And that is not what improvisation is supposed to be, it was supposed to be much like in the days of Mozart and Bach. It was supposed to be improvisation, you were supposed to make it up as you went along. Not following set patterns and clichs that you know will work. I use that same philosophy when I play with the Symphony. How do you move away from those set patterns and regain that spirit of improvisation that Bach and Mozart had? Its easy and hard at the same time. You basically have to become a historian. For example in debate class, one of the advantages I had other the other kids was that I was a voracious reader. So while the subject was set up, I had a variety of ways I could approach each subject. As opposed to guys to those guys who prepared everything, like those boring-ass presidential debates we have in America, where every answer was carefully scripted (and it smelled like it) from both candidates. Thats they way I think jazz has become. Its a bit like being in a competition where the judges arent listening to what youre playing, theyre listening for mistakes. So you spend all your time avoiding mistakes instead of making music. Its a very difficult philosophy to overcome. Being from New Orleans and playing with absolutely incredible musicians there who could barely read a note you learn to play without a score. I remember playing with a band when I was eleven and they called a tune I hadnt played before and I asked the trumpet player what key the song was in and he held down two valves and then started playing. And I was like, OKOK, Ive just got to do it. It really helps being put in situations like that. Where the musicians are really interested in playing and playing is the thing thats important.

I got a letter from a musician asking me why I played the last movement of Scaramouche on my album, Creation, so slowly Two reasons: I dont think I could play it at the tempo that a lot of saxophonists play it at and number two, if youve ever listened to any Brazilian music that rhythm that Milhaud uses in the piece is never played at a fast tempo. An the bass player of the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra (Orpheus is one of those freaky orchestras that I like playing with because they have a lot of different musical influences) was an avid Brazilian music fan and his wife was actually from Brazil so when we were doing the rehearsal his wife says That rhythm is never played that fast and she starts to play the rhythm and well all decided to play it at that tempo. It had a dancing quality that I think is really more in line with what Milhaud was looking for, a reflection of what he had heard when he was there. Its become a piece where saxophone players flex their muscles. Thats not something I want to lean on so Im forced to do something else, like actually make music out of the piece. One day I hope to have that much technique. Even if I could have, I dont think I would have played that piece any faster. Tell me about recreating Coltranes A Love Supreme. Did you approach that in the same way as you would approach a piece of music thats written down? Absolutely. I play it and then when I hear it, Im very conscious of the things that are good and the things that are bad and once I identify the things that are bad I think about what I can do to fix it. Sometimes in classical music youre working on little technical things. But when played the Glazunov first, I really had issues with it, and I did things differently, slowed parts down, sped parts up, until I was happy with it. Its very much the same with A Love Supreme. The first time I did it in 91 I decided I need to have a better understanding of the blues to play Coltranes music well. People never talk about the blues when theyre talking about Coltrane. They focus on the records he made for Atlantic when he was in his nerd phase and everything was about harmonic analysis. The interesting thing about the Impulse records that came later is that he had seemingly abandoned all that or had learned what he needed and let it go. The songs went from having two chord changes in every bar to having one chord for an entire song. And it really changed the nature of the music and the nature of the group. A Love Supreme is basically a blues so I started inundating myself with John Lee Hooker and Robert Johnson and Blind Willy just to get a sense of what the music is supposed to be because that is what jazz came out of. Branford Marsalis performs 4, 5, 6 August 8pm Sydney Opera Concert Hall. Book now. Branford Marsalis spoke with Robert Murray of the Sydney Symphony.

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