Branford Marsalis itv 2016

my definition of jazz is that the music sound like jazz so if if you listen to a record it's very similar to classical music if you listen to vogner it sounds nothing like Bach on the surface but if you really listen in the Bach you can hear the Bach and vogner and that's how I think all any kind of music that's considered an art music should be like that like you should be able to hear the influences of the people who came before you in the music jazz did not invent improvisation so it is one of those myths that needs to go away French Baroque music in the 17th century was improvised music all the piano players will the harpsichord head was a melody in the top line and a bass line on the bottom bar so continual and everything in between was improvised the people who were the better improvisers got the most work that isn't that is not the Jazz inventions or the consistent use of the flatted 3rd and the flatted 7th in the melody not in the harmony but in the melody and the swing beat and you have a lot of bands that are being trumpeted as jazz bands and they don't do you thing of those things so in my mind no it's not jazz but at the end of the day considering what jazz is and how unpopular it is I'm confused why all these people want to fight to say that that's what they do it makes no sense but more power to them if I was if I was the king for a day I wouldn't change anything if it really makes them feel better to say they're playing jazz great this jazz - ok the swing beat is not the pulse of 2 & 4 the swing beat is not a ride cymbal going ting ting ting ting ting the swing beat and what makes music swing is the space between the notes in classical music the space is narrower and to a certain air more precise the swing beat is much wider the space between the notes is much wider and when I say much we're talking about the smallest possible micro whatever you want to call them of beat it's it's almost it doesn't even register to the human ear to the normal person's ear but it registers and how they feel the beat and the reason I stumbled on that is because I've started last year to listening to a lot of early music so I was listening to Louis Armstrong's hot 5 in hot 7 I was listening to McKinney's cotton pickers which is an incredible band I was listening to general Morton's red hot peppers red peppers hot peppers Jelly Roll Morton hot peppers that's it and what all those musics have in common and also Benny Moulton's band and when all those bands have in common is that the pulse of the music is on one in three not on two and four tuba bands the pulse will always be one in three but it still swings so then I said when I heard that I said well clearly two and four has no bearing on this conversation and the more I listen to it I'm more I realized that on one in three the beat is so wide that that's where the the funk the groove comes from now it's boom pocket you can do but back then is boom boom boom boom that's the backbeat but it's applied because nobody's playing it but the next advanced in jazz was when the drummer would use the hi-hat to played the backbeat because the snare drum hadn't been invented yet the snare drum was coming baby dogs hadn't you know New Orleans boy baby DAWs hadn't put the drum set together yet so the original drummers played a woodblock a bass drum and a hi-hat and a symbol of splash cymbal and Don Redman did a song with Louie Armstrong called tight like this and that is and that's I think 29 and that was the first time that I'd even heard a song where the bass drum was on all fours the whole song is a boom boom do don't do and it was unbelievable I mean it really picks it up and but that was the first recording I had heard where the drummer wasn't doing anything other than just Shh and the whole band were playing the drummer wouldn't play anything and then they'd get to one party play the would like and at the end of the song that goes and sometimes you hear though but so it was it was an evolution by the 30s the drum set was there if there's a one one problem with with modern jazz is that it has gotten away from the dance beat and if you even say the dance beat now they think it's a back beat and it's not it's about the pulse the pulse the pulse when you listen to Jelly Roll Morton played piano by himself the pulse alone makes you want to get up and dance Keith Jarrett I love and that pulse is not there but he is such a thorough scholar he knows jazz like he does these interviews and he talks about Bach and he talks about classical music and I owe all of this to classical music well he also knows jazz very very well he is he has an encyclopedia in his head that he doesn't like to talk about for whatever the reason is that he doesn't like to talk about it you don't get the sound like that without it the one thing that I try to make my students understand that anytime I listen to music the first question I listen to ask is why don't I like this what's wrong with this because it's hard to be a good musician if you're a fan of music because when you like things you tend to miss the small details that might make you not like it when you learn how to play jazz and you learn how to play jazz harmonically which is all about Scout scales and patterns then you really don't know what to do for an hour and a half I mean you can't play scales for an hour and a half you kind of know it's not working because these people are smart people we're not talking about dummies or dumb or really smart people even when I heard Sonny Rollins his solo record after about 20 minutes you just it can't be that random there has to be some structure or it won't work and I wound up going back to something that I've been talking about for a while now songs with melodies and if the song has a great melody it can sustain the audience's attention a lot of people that talk about what is now the project they talk about the mixture of classical music and jazz I don't even think about that melodies it's all it's all almost all of it is melodies so if you play the first movement of the concerto the the the car Philipp Emanuel Bach concerto for oboe solo it's a beautiful melody and if you play Hoagy Carmichael Stardust just behind that it is again a beautiful melody I used to listen to this Miles Davis record someday my prince will come second song is old folks and I'd listened to that record when I was in high school playing an R&B band they're not even thinking about playing jazz I would listen to that record then I moved to New York and I listened and I would listen and I would listen I would listen to it all I listen to music perpetually and my ears started to improve because I was listening the way I don't listen I listen different than a lot of musicians a lot of musicians listen for things for instance what you often hear a saxophone player say our trunk play say well I'll listen to a solo and I'll find the thing that I like and I'll take it out of the solo and then play it in all 12 keys that's not the reason you listen to a solo how I used to listen to learn how musicians react to one another in a true improvised environment I used to listen for the sound is it a happy sound is it a sad sound can they change it can they just create happiness Charlie Parker could definitely do all of that miles - so one day when I'm listening and with headphones right before he goes to the bridge and the very melody at the beginning miles leans in the chair and you hear the chair go jumped when I heard it because it was the first time that I ever heard that way what and this is pre CD put it back on that LP yeah it's there you know at that moment what I realized was I realized how like records are magic recordings are magic because we put these records on and this information comes at you and you accept the information with no thoughts of anything like what do you think about when you hear music most times about the music nothing and when you hear the chair creak it suspends the disbelief suddenly you see there's a human being that was sitting in a chair in front of a microphone something that never thought of I'd never actually thought of miles like most people when they listen to music even if it's pop music do they visualize their favorite singer standing in front of a microphone no they don't no one does and then that happens and then you go man they were in the room Wow and that's when I said yeah we're just gonna let it happen and we'll roll the tape and if something's on we'll leave it on because that makes it real at that moment makes it real and just yeah there's one that the one on blue velvet on the new record I know that I'm not supposed to talk until about 15 seconds after you finish but we had never played the song before and Kurt had explained it to us how he wanted a song to be said we said so how are we gonna play this song cuz it was his idea to play it I said I'd write it out and I wrote it I said how we're gonna play says well let's pretend we're all dead so if we're dead we can't play it he goes right but imagine if we're dead and it's our ghosts trying to play the music and you can barely get the notes out because of course we don't have the physical and you're just eating he's just trying it your best and I went that's a great idea actually so then we played it and it went so well on the first take that I kind of went damn that's deep but I thought we were going to do another tape but then we went and heard it it was perfect I said wait great can you get rid of that he looked at me says you know I can't get rid of that because he's from northern England Rob you know I can't get rid of that you just said I know I know I'm sorry I just I was so excited so it stayed it had this day because I'm a jackass that's why because I mean idiot and that spoke I got too excited I couldn't contain my I couldn't contain my enthusiasm I see that was great yeah so yeah you know you leave them on the reason that there's so much I guess people call it eclectic because that's how my brain works you know before the before that the iTunes playlist I had the most if collectors eclectic playlist in my state you know in and people be amazed at the stuff I would listen to that's how I've always listened to music because I hear the commonality in those musics I don't really people always tell you you know you know you don't allow music to be in a box although the boxes don't exist we create the boxes and so the idea that I'm breaking rules the rules have to exist for me to break them there are no human beings infinities because of a limitation in our brains you know it's like that thing that we have to do we have to categorize things you know so so we can because we can't really explain what music is so then we find a way to say well this is what I like or this is what I'm about and now it even goes like people who like hip-hop why is it that most of the young people who like hip-hop have to wear baggy pants with their underwear showing well why do they have to do that why can't they wear a suit and like hip up and I'm sure there are people who do but it says a funny thing now how the music's not enough now we've gotten to this thing where it's like cars like if I had a friend who drove a BMW in the 70s he called it a car now he calls it a Beemer because I have these things style of music I like where my house is location of my house my favorite football team and it's supposed to tell you things about me and the great thing about is that it tells you absolutely nothing about anyone which is probably why we like it so much and what music is and what makes it so difficult for a lot of people is that we're supposed to tell you Here I am and you're supposed to bear everything and we have as we have evolved we become more mysterious that's not really the right word I'm being polite here but we go out of our way to keep ourselves from people I don't know fear of being heard I don't know but artists have always been the ones out on that edge and that's where we go and you know we have this joke I said about gratuitous saxophone soloing when a guy plays something that has nothing do with the song and the joke is why does a dog lick his balls and the answer is because he can so why do we play all of these songs because we can and that's the first thing the first thing is that we have all learned enough music to not just play a basa with the play a basa that sounds like an actual basta to the degree that a friend of mine from Brazil heard the song and it took the middle of the song before he realized that none of us were Brazilians see that's it's not enough to just say yeah we played a basa because most Americans don't want to put in that kind of work I can't speak for other places which is why when you buy one of those fake books that they sell you have a song from the Dominican Republic or song from Puerto Rico or song from Brazil and at the top it says Latin like what the hell does that mean what a Latin mean so the whole thing is oh and back to the NE it's just I'm coming back thinking about random ass correct I was 27 there was no overarching logic to it at all other than the fact that it was clear to me that I had a record contract and I wasn't very good so what I decided I was going to do was basically go to school on these records all I was doing was affirming that I was a student of the music and those were the things I was working on at that time so and this one is very different I mean I'm still a student but I'm a real good student now so I don't buy like remember I had this one record called not long a little call for em f's playing tunes and the reason that the song was called that was because a writer came to the session and said well what's the concept of this record and I said well there is no concept and he was like what do you mean there's no concept I said y'all always use that word it's like you have a body of work and your body of work is your concept so any record you make is a validation of your concept or repudiation of your concept you can't invent a new concept every year and a half you can't just invent the new concept just there's a way that I feel about music that I felt about music since I was 15 years old and this is a validation of that so there is no concept he's like no well if you had to have a concept what would you call it and I said I guess for playing Tunes is the concept because that's all we're doing is playing tunes and then my manager heard it and the next thing you know the records call for him is playing tunes I mean that's what musicians used to do you listen to Lester Young all he's doing is playing solos based on the melody you listen to Charlie Parker he's playing solos based on the song now for the people that didn't have ears as good as him then they started charting out the chord changes and then by the time he died it was about playing the chord changes but for Charlie Parker it was never about playing the chord changes cycnus it's like this little simple thing if you go to jazz school anywhere in the world they give you a sequence of things that you can learn how to play on two five one chord progressions they call them to five ones Charlie Parker never played - you only play five so as soon as I hear a to five one I say huh they don't listen to jazz Pass you know Cole training up Coltrane is the first guy to really play to five ones they played five and when you play five instead of playing to five it sounds less mechanical and less clinical so I don't play twos so and I never learned I never had a vocabulary of two five one so it's all based on sound for me so when I hear it - I just hear five because I know where it's going it's going to 5 and 1/2 is a passer it's a passing chord five is the game two is just whatever so I just don't really play so I'm lucky because then you never hear me play be bootloader or butter butter butter butter I just I never play that I never have to play it I met Joey called Durazo in 1979 and when he was 14 years old and we were having this jam session and it was really funny because you know I come from the south and there's all this racial strife in the South so now I'm coming to Boston I'm coming we used to call it the promised land I'm coming up north so we start these jam sessions it's a bunch of black guys that I just met and all the white guys were scared to come into the room because there were all these black guys in the room and I said look and say man is this in New Orleans they'd be five white guys in here you know I mean in the place where it's supposed to be so bad so I always thought that was funny so Joey hears us playing and he's a little tiny guy and the doors have a little window and you can see this head coming up and down in the window from where I was standing hell is that so the song was over knock on the door frantic knock on the door you open the door and he's looking up saying come play would you guys yeah come on in he's okay guys I'm Joey I'm Joey I'm jeans brother his brothers gene called Durazo he lives in London he's a drummer I knew gene and everybody said well what do you want play man he goes uh let's play moment's notice and everybody starts laughing cuz moment's notice is a very difficult song to play so the guy who ran the sessions got boned played trombone his name's Tim Williams about six six he says all right kid you want to play it you kind of dog he says okay ready one two one two three four bang he's nuts burn it and I'm like Jesus I can't play that at that tempo and he's looking around smiling it's like watching the Mozart character in the Amadeus film he's looking around so when the session is over it's actually the only song I know I practice it every day for the last two years I said well you got to do better than that and he was talking to people so what should I do somebody said man just buy every Miles Davis record so he went home and he bought every Mouse record and started playing along with him I mean it's you know and he learned all the harmony and all that stuff and he leans on it too much but he's phenomenal and and a lot of ways to me this is like he starve this new record because in of the many things that have been sacrificed in modern jazz the art of comping is just completely gone and this record that he did especially with the myriad styles that were going through he is basically giving a piano lesson to everybody on how number one to play with a singer and number two how to just function in a musical context through all those styles and it's great I mean he was phenomenal his Kurt was phenomenal Joey was incredible Eric it's just he didn't have a talent attack the whole night he didn't say let me just do we do voodoo he just played the part Justin played with so much discipline on this record I mean there's little things that most people wouldn't notice that on the first song there's a boat that's leaving he doesn't play a single fill the entire song and nor does he crash down on one there's no crashing on the entire song it's just the more I listened I was like wait a second and then on the on the Brazilian tune he plays one symbol and the only time he plays it it's when I played the melody on soprano he never played that symbol for the rest of the song so his symbol switching was not just random I think a lot of times when I listen to records like okay the drum was just bored so he's switching to the other symbol there's no musical reason for the switch other than all my arms tired or I'm tired of hearing it it was so meticulous about how he approached this session it was just yeah it was just that's the way I listened to I listen globally and I listened specifically but I'm never listening for chord changes those you know licks to steal and I mean I'm proud of the guys I mean it's an incredible it's incredible that way I mean to go back to one of your earlier questions I think I mean if you're gonna make a record with a singer it should be a record that does what like Kurt is an amazingly versatile singer that's the problem I the two problems I have with most modern jazz saying is there's number one they don't sound like jazz people when they sing and the other thing is that they're really good at our thing and that's it so the idea of doing of doing a Blue Note record of doing the record with 12 songs that sound exactly the same I'm not into it I've learned too much music to do that I wouldn't want to do that on any of my records but not we have Kurt here we can do all of these experiments into all of these things that we wouldn't do in our own situation because we would be playing naturally longer solos there'd be fewer songs on the record we did all these things 2-minute songs one-minute songs West Virginia Road one chorus done I mean there were all these really cool things that we did the Brazilian song was my idea I wanted to do that mostly because I thought that we would be able to play it authentically which would be great that Brazilians would be flattered to hear a bunch of Americans not butcher their music for a change and it's the kind of record I what I noticed when I for my audiences is that sometimes we play music that's a little hard for regular people to listen to but we always play one or two things that they can like and when the show is over they seem to say thank you for playing two things that I could stomach not God what about those other six songs so I so it really I really caught on this idea that people come to concerts first of all they want to like it except in France everywhere else they want to like it and then here too I'm just joking just a thing you know in French French already but everything they want to like it and if you just kind of like extend your hand a little bit they'll come back they're grateful that you just throw them a bone and so this kind of record is like if you don't like that maybe you like this if you don't like that maybe you like this and if you find one song they're like they'll like the whole record because I just don't the whole the problem with developing concepts in jazz is that then once you have your concept that be everything sounds like that and so that's why I avoided that I avoided the whole concept thing because I didn't want to make records that always sound like each other there wasn't there wasn't a directive from me to the band saying alright man look you know we got to use less notes but the one thing that we've been talking about for years in the band is that if we're gonna play a song so let's play the song let's play the song let's not take the song turn it into a vehicle for our own egotistical machinations like let's play the song and there's all kind of we can do in the song and still play the song so when the singer is involved I mean if you have musical instincts the musical instinct kicks in the musical instinct kicks in and you say well I have to play this I have to play that I still have to support the singer and I have to get to the point I have to get out and I didn't have to tell him but because when you hear the song and how song takes shape it's clear what you have to do now if you ignore that then you're not paying attention and I've been in situations where musicians who are considered great musicians just are so disconnected from the reality of the situation that they just don't notice things and that's how I know who I want to hire who I don't want to hire I'm not really interested in a person who knows the tactics you know like this like you know like a football manager it's not enough to just know that the tactics you have to feel the game you have to know and sometimes it's a hunch I got to get that guy and put this guy in and what a lot of modern musicians they don't play hunches all they play is data it's all about data and with these guys yeah we didn't have that discussion it just happened because we were playing the song we played normal no more notes than were required and when we go back to our quartet there'll be way more notes than other people will want but that's life I mean this isn't this isn't a formula this is a thing that happened this is winning when it goes wrong when you say why this happened is is great people like it let's make another one that's when you're dead you can't go into a record trying to duplicate that's lightning in a bottle okay we caught it great now let's get back out there and do what we do we're gonna you know so when we do our next quartet record it's gonna be us doing a question I record we are not going to try to duplicate that that's done that's done I mean Joe Henderson did this record where he did Strayhorn songs great record and what happened the next record they tried to do it again the music of miles bombed then they tried it again was it the music of Gilley I don't remember there was a third one and it bombed you bombed because the first one was just a natural musical instinct I always wanted to do this I want to do this thing great then you don't say well I was great let's do that again no it can't do that again never works the second time

Channel: COULEURS JAZZ - Digital Magazine

Views: 16,693

Rating: 4.8740158 out of 5

Keywords: Branford Marsalis, Kurt Elling

Id: AuOOWTlao4I

Length: 28min 14sec (1694 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 22 2016