# The Marsalis brothers know how to set city life to music: Photos, Video

- Link: https://jazzblues.eu/2020/12/05/the-marsalis-brothers-know-how-to-set-city-life-to-music-photos-video/
- Published: 2020-12-05T14:14:22+01:00
- Author: https://JazzBlues.EU

**Branford and Wynton Marsalis Are Keeping New York’s Jazz Scene Alive. New York
is not the birthplace of jazz but rather its town square, where discipline is sharpened
and lessons are taught. In the late 1970s and early ’80s two brothers from New Orleans
came to New York. First, the trumpeter Wynton Marsalis moved to Harlem, then his
older brother, saxophonist Branford, arrived in Brooklyn. In the 40 years since 
then, the Marsalis brothers have done more than most to celebrate jazz in and through
the city.**

“I grew up here,” Branford tells me. “I became a man here. I was 20 years old when
I got here, just a regular kid.”

In the early ’80s he was honing his R&B skills and “learning to become a jazz musician.”
He hung out at a club called Seventh Avenue South, which was owned by Randy and 
Michael Brecker (another pair of siblings who play horns). The club’s live sets 
were piped into the downstairs bar, where Branford hung out and played Ms. Pac-Man
with R&B singer Patrice Rushen until four in the morning, “just listening to the
music and talking shit.”

He also went to the Village Vanguard so he could learn from the elders. “I used 
to go to the Vanguard, and they’d let me come in for five bucks on the third set,”
Branford says. “It was a poor man’s paradise.”

No longer a regular kid or a poor man, Branford—a three-time Grammy winner who used
to lead the Tonight Show band—has just finished scoring George C. Wolfe’s film adaptation
of Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, due out this winter. Branford had a specific assignment:
to recreate the arrangements and the sound of 1920s music, which was both an artistic
and physical challenge.

“In the 1920s musicians played outdoors as much as they played indoors,” Branford
says. “I needed to find a bunch of musicians who had outside voices and could still
play the music, roughly in a style that’s similar to the ’20s.” The resulting album
is a testament to the hard-as-nails dance music that held sway long before jazz 
players got lost in “solos and structures, way far away from the melody,” as Branford
puts it.

The album was made in small groups using voice, cornet, trombone, clarinet, piano,
banjo, and, in one case, feet. “There are two songs we did where the snare drum 
was replaced by Savion Glover hoofing.”

Branford’s younger brother Wynton, the managing and artistic director of Jazz at
Lincoln Center, puts together groups on a daily basis. The only thing more impressive
than his work with Jazz at Lincoln Center is how excited he is about the work, and
the musicians who build that work with him.

“I work with the greatest musicians in the world,” Wynton tells me, shaking his 
head and smiling. “We revived Duke Ellington’s music! We breathe life into the music
by not divorcing it from its tradition! We program more from American composers 
than has ever been programmed by any entity in the history of America.” By the time
he’s done, he is half out of his seat, about to turn a Zoom call into a Zoom concert.

![wynton marsalis photo](https://i0.wp.com/hips.hearstapps.com/hmg-prod.s3.amazonaws.
com/images/tcx120120nyportfolio-007-1605227008.jpg?w=640&ssl=1 "Wynton Marsalis 
photo")

Jazz at Lincoln Center hasn’t let the pandemic slow its roll. It has put on more
than 600 live online events since March, including swing university classes and 
lectures. Over the summer Wynton also released the most audacious album of his career,
_The Ever Fonky Lowdown_. He may be royalty now, but that’s not making him avoid
the real talk.

“New York is such a segregated place now. We got too greedy,” Wynton says. “We need
to have more citizens participate.”

It was something else when he got here. “I got here in 1979, when I was 17, to go
to Juilliard,” he says. “In my first year I played in the orchestra pit of _Sweeney
Todd_, when Angela Lansbury was in it. I played with the Brooklyn Philharmonic, 
Art Blakey, David Murray, so many people. And I taught elementary school in the 
Bronx with Hispanic kids—everybody thought I was Puerto Rican.”

What stayed with me after talking to Wynton was how many other people he talked 
about. Swapping notes with a friend, days later, I mentioned some of the newer jazz
artists I had been playing over the past week: saxophonist Immanuel Wilkins, composer
and singer Cécile McLorin Salvant, vibraphonist Joel Ross. He asked me where I’d
heard about these people.

“Oh, you know. Wynton told me.”

![marsalis brothers cover](https://i0.wp.com/hips.hearstapps.com/hmg-prod.s3.amazonaws.
com/images/tcx120120covermarsalis-lo-1605227321.jpg?w=640&ssl=1 "marsalis brothers
cover")

On Branford: Etro coat; Brunello Cucinelli sweater; Officine Generale trousers; 
David Yurman watch; Giorgio Armani shoes. On Wynton: Brunello Cucinelli jacket and
suit; Brooks Brothers tie and loafers.

![branford marsalis photo](https://i0.wp.com/hips.hearstapps.com/hmg-prod.s3.amazonaws.
com/images/tcx120120nyportfolio-006-1605226878.jpg?resize=640%2C960&ssl=1)

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