Branford Marsalis’ Secret

“The guys who say, ‘You can’t play the blues unless you’ve lived them’—what the fuck does that even mean? I gotta have my teeth punched out before I can play the blues?”

“I’m ready when you are.”

Branford Marsalis does not waste time. In the handful of minutes since we shook hands in the lobby of his New York hotel, the saxophonist has marched into the adjacent restaurant, picked a window table, and ordered coffee and a pastry. He’s still looking at his cellphone, scrolling for last-minute messages, when he fires the starting gun for this interview.

What follows is like a flash flood, a 90-minute torrent of strident judgments, firm challenges, and illustrative anecdotes, delivered with informed passion in often colorful language. Questions are asked; some don’t make it to a full sentence before Marsalis fires back. “It was never really popular,” he declares, cutting short a suggestion that jazz was a mainstream entertainment in its first decades. “Swing was popular.”

Later, Marsalis corrects an assumption about his own emotional commitment to jazz. “I play it, I don’t live it,” he explains. “The music is a reflection of my life. But the guys who say, ‘You can’t play the blues unless you’ve lived them’—what the fuck does that even mean? I gotta have my teeth punched out before I can play the blues? Of course not.”

If pianist Ellis Marsalis is the local pillar/patriarch of New Orleans’ most famous jazz clan, and the second of his four musician sons, trumpeter Wynton, is the polymath and public educator, the eldest, Branford, now 58, is the enforcer—a street-savvy dynamo