Branford MARSALIS (Jazz Hot 620)

Jazz Beyond Distractions
By Josef Woodard

Last October, on the gala occasion of the opening of the new Jazz at Lincoln Center, the name Marsalis hovered over a long day of festivities. All within and beyond any connection to jazz knew of the pivotal role of Wynton Marsalis, whose firm, quiet, determined leadership had brought this all to pass. Marsalis started the day by leading a New Orleans-style parade from the actual Lincoln Center a few blocks to the new centrally-located Columbus Circle home, before a press conference and other hoopla.
And the first official concert in the large Rose Theater in the J@LC compound, ended with a Marsalis family reunion. After the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra finished up its business, patriarch Ellis Marsalis broke out an original song for the family band, with Wynton joined by Branford on tenor sax and Delfaeyo on trombone, with Jason stirring up time on drums. Suddenly, the dynamics of the day-the jazz politics, the rare public affection for the still-marginal music of jazz, the almost unheard-of marshalling of jazz and fund-raising-boiled down to a first family of jazz reducing a theater to a living room, with Wynton now brought down to a more common level in the presence of his brothers, especially the eldest, Branford (born August 26, 1960).
Although they're clearly different animals, the Marsalis' brotherly connection is hard to get around. Another surprising connection emerged late last year, when two very different versions of the John Coltrane classic A Love Supreme were released
Comparing the two recordings says something about the distinctions between the brothers. The LCJO version is polished to a fault, a tidy arrangement of what was originally an unfettered and spiritually-tinged force of musical nature. The version presented by Branford's quartet, recorded live in Amsterdam for a DVD project, is truer to the source, but on this uniquely fiery quartet's own artistic terms. Few could take on Coltrane's landmark work and get away with it. Branford does. Since his public arrival in the early '80s, Branford has been braving new worlds, and usually getting away with it.
Those who would dare to cast aspersions on Branford, accusing him of selling out by playing with pop star Sting or leading the band on the popular television staple, the "Tonight Show," for a time in the early '90s, aren't listening to the musician's real work, as a potent saxophonist whose band is one of the most consistently exciting and musical jazz groups anywhere. Naysayers sometimes also fail to give Branford proper respects as an opinionated cultural figure who has recently been putting his money and his art where his mouth is, as the so-far insightful head of a new independent label, Marsalis Music, after a long stint on Columbia Records.
In 2004, in addition to A Love Supreme, his quartet released a beautiful all-ballad album, Eternal, garnering his record label's first Grammy nomination. In between jazz commitments, he carves out time to work on and perform in classical situations, with the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra and other settings. Apart from its self-evident value, working on classical music helps him refine his overall musicianship, Branford insists.
But there's no question he's diving deep into jazz at the moment. Hearing Branford stretching out on tenor, especially in collusion with his longtime drummer ally Jeff "Tain" Watts, can be a reminder of the power of jazz blowing with a purpose. You can still catch echoing elements of Branford's heroes-Coltrane, Sonny Rollins, Wayne Shorter-in his playing, but, more and more, Branford is sounding like a musician with a deepening commitment to a sound and vision all his own. He is the prodigal son who keeps returning to the aesthetic home we always suspected he belonged to.


Jazz Hot : Your latest project, A Love Supreme, is a surprising and successful musical blast of energy. Between that and Eternal, there's a nice compare and contrast situation. Was that a plan on your part, or just a matter of coincidental timing?
Yeah, the records just come out when they come out. A Love Supreme started when we were in Paris, and I was having an argument with a journalist over what they call "European jazz." I blurted out that the stuff they're playing sounds more like new age music to me than anything else.

Fighting words...
I said to the writer, `well, if they really want to impress me, let's hear them use that sensibility and play "A Love Supreme." And then the writer says `well, I haven't heard you play "A Love Supreme." I said `you coming to the gig tonight?' `I'll be there.' `Alright, fine.' I walked in and told the guys `we're playing "A Love Supreme" tonight.' They said `alright, cool.' I told them the story.
We played it, and then later played it a couple of times. I think this was in 2000. This shit just went to another place. I couldn't believe it. We were all kind of sitting around looking at each other. You know, we're usually a bunch of loudmouths, kind of garrulous. We just sat there for ten or fifteen minutes, huffing and puffing after the gig. I said `we should record this.' Everybody says `yeah, ok.' And that's how the idea for the record started.
The idea for Eternal started before A Love Supreme. We were playing at Catalina Bar and Grill in Los Angeles, and played the song "A Thousand Autumns." Two different women came up and said when we played the song, they started to cry. If you talk to people who love classical music-and I don't just mean the people who only like Baroque music-when you talk to the Wagnerites and the Mahler lovers, they start talking about the passion that comes from the melody. In Schubert Lieder, the songs are all about eternal longing. That's the trick. Anybody can sing the notes, but the feeling is something else.
I thought `how come jazz tunes don't have that? Miles had it. 'Trane had it. What happened?" I wanted to do a ballad album, but I didn't want to do a random selection of corny-assed love tunes. I didn't want to use the songs as vehicles for soloing. One thing that Miles taught me was that when you play a ballad, it's about playing the ballad. It's not about using it as a vehicle to get to your shit. On this DVD we put out, Alice Coltrane tells this story about Miles telling her that he was playing a song for a woman in the front with a necklace on. He started playing to her, looking right at her and playing. She was totally into the shit. Then, in the middle, he thinks `well, now she's really going to dig this. I'm going to pull out my shit.' So he started pulling out his bag, and she got up and walked away.
That's the lesson for me. When you're playing ballads, you've got to play the song. Listening to classical music really helped me understand that. Playing ballads is not about understanding the changes or, as my father likes to say, 'learning the words to the song.' It's about understanding the power of the melody and understanding that, when it's played correctly, the melody can have a certain emotional impact that supersedes all the nerdy comparisons-chord structures and all that cornball shit that musicians tend to focus on.
When this woman came up to us after that show (in Los Angeles) and said `you guys really got me,' and then another woman said the same thing, I told the band `now we're ready to do a ballads record.' And then (pianist) Kenny (Kirkland) died, and that set everything back for us. It set me back something awful.
It kind of crept back into my thinking eventually. I talked to the guys about it, and then they started writing ballads. That really made it a possibility. Then we were on tour and doing it, playing these tunes. The record just came together.

As part of a group of musicians now running their own labels, you must be very aware of your position as a kind of David vs. the Goliath of the industry.
No. We don't do the same things. We're not in competition. David Sanchez just picked up another Grammy nomination for his record with Columbia, and unless my spies are incorrect, they didn't pick up his option. If I had an artist like David Sanchez on my label, he wouldn't be dropped under any circumstance, Grammy nomination or not. So we're not even in the same business.

Can you touch on the origins of this label? Was it the byproduct of frustration with mainstream labels?
No. But that sounds great. But it's not real. It would make a difference if I was a pop star, but there's a difference between playing with Sting and being Sting--probably about eleven or twelve million dollars a year. When you make a decision to take all the money you have and put it into some shit like this, there better be a better reason than frustration. That would be a hell of a knee-jerk reaction, to be in a position where you have to mortgage your house because you're mad at someone. That's absurd.
When I was with Columbia and we released the David Ware record, it was clear to me that they just had no interest in jazz. Having worked there, I understood why. It's tough. It is quite conceivable that you could make ten of the greatest records that ever existed and be fired-because nobody bought them. As my manager said, in a situation like that, you can't win. You can't do it. The pressure is too great for everybody.
The president of Columbia's job is to increase profits. That's his job. It's a publicly-traded company and it's one of many labels under SONY Music Entertainment. In case you had any doubts about what you're dealing with, that's what it's called-SONY Music Entertainment. If you're not trying to entertain people... if Bruce Springsteen happened to be named Joe Smith and not be Bruce Springsteen, he couldn't be on that label, doing the shit he's doing and has done. You couldn't bring that. Tori Amos couldn't be on that label. They have done well for Bruce Hornsby one time around, but I think more of that was just that they wanted to prove they could still do it or something. We'll see what happens in the long run. I love Bruce. Bruce is killer. Ani DiFranco couldn't do it.
She's a great example of an independent person who took matters in to her own hands.
I don't even think she did it out of frustration. She just figured `if I want to do what I want to do, this is what I have to do.' It was very apparent that you have to do that with jazz. When you talk to other people, the jazz labels are just like the pop labels.

You mean in that they're bottom line-oriented?
Of course they're bottom line-oriented, and then they start telling the musicians what to play. That's not what jazz should be, where you've got people making "concept" albums. To hell with a concept. The musician makes it up. What songs are you going to play, who are you going to use? They did that for Charlie Parker, trying to tell him what musicians to use.
I reject all of that. I'm not going to tell musicians who to use. If they don't have a sense of the development of a band, forget it. A lot of musicians come in and say `I want to do a record.' You say `what do you want to do?' They basically say, even thought they don't say it directly, `what do you want me to do?' That's not my job, man. They say `I was thinking of doing this kind of record and using these guys...' I say `ok, can you get those guys to go on tour with you? For the next ten years?' The whole thought process is like record-to-record. It's like you can use these guys, put a sticker on the record, place an ad in Down Beat and Jazz Times, and that's it. That's how the whole jazz world seems to think. It's not about developing a band. It's an old problem.
My dad told me a great story. I was talking about this with him. The two times 'Trane came through New Orleans, my dad was talking to him about the New York scene and the jazz scene in general. 'Trane said that one of the problems is that the club owners regret the fact that there aren't more bands out there. My dad didn't say anything, but he thought 'Trane was nuts. Being from New Orleans, whenever he would buy a record, say Lee Morgan's Sidewinder, in his mind, everyone on that record was a band. Nobody came to New Orleans, so he had no way of knowing that it was just a pick-up band. You look at these records, and it's a legacy of pick-up bands, one-offs, sessions.
This is probably one of the reasons we have this obsession with individual pursuit in jazz. When you think about all the great players, they all did one-off records and didn't really have bands. The difference is that, because they grew up in the jazz tradition, they had the sense of community that you should really have when you're trying to play this music. But now you have a lot of other musicians who don't know the tradition of this music.
There should be certain requirements for playing jazz. `How many of you know "Giant Steps?' All the hands go up. 'How many of you own a Reverend C.L. Franklin record?' All the hands go down. Have you heard a Baptist preacher speak? How many of you have ever been to a black college football game? What happens is that people try to rewrite the legacy of the music and the anthropological element-which is crucial to any music in the history of the world-just gets erased. You say `well, the society and the culture that spawns it doesn't matter. Jazz is all about chords, patterns and scale.'
I have a student from Switzerland. He came to play for me. I said `yeah, this shit is sad.' We worked on some technical things-not technical in terms of fast playing, but just how to play the instrument. Now that I'm conscious of it, I'm amazed at how many saxophone players have really small sounds on the instruments. The small sound allows you to have more technical work with less work, so you can concentrate on the more important things, like playing fast.
In situations where you have to play for long periods of time, like an hour and a half or two hours, guys' lips start to break down. It wasn't something I ever thought of. Me, Tain and Bob Hurst played a concert at Stanford, and a professional saxophone player came up afterwards and said `man, I was amazed at how your tone didn't break down after an hour and a half. You were still playing.' I was like `what?' Then when he said it, I started thinking about it and I realized that guys don't play that long anymore. They used to. They used to play for dance bands, for two and a half or three hours. They don't play that long anymore. I played I a funk band where you had to play for four hours every night.
The whole experience is different now. You have guys who are twenty years old, never played in a funk band, never went to a Baptist church. I'm Catholic. When I went to the Baptist church, I went because I needed to go. It's not my tradition.

It was a case of gaining cultural education?
It is. It's anthropological information, cultural education. Kenny Kirkland and I used to talk about that. He grew up Catholic, too. We would finish church early and come outside and you could hear the music from the Baptist church on the streets. You take any of those old guys, black, white or otherwise, who hung out in those neighborhoods, you were going to hear that music on the streets on Sunday when you were out playing football. That kind of situation has more influence on you than people tend to realize.
I think the sense of community that is lacking with a lot of people now, plus the fact that when they think of jazz, the only thing they think of is the soloing aspect... That's the only aspect of the music that intrigues them. They don't have any requirements of the musicians in their band, just to "get the fuck out of my way when I'm soloing."
That's why you have a situation with Lester Young, Coleman Hawkins, Dexter Gordon, and all these guys who didn't have bands for long periods of time but they had such powerful musical personalities. They were all parts of bands. They played in dance bands, Kansas City bands, swing bands, jump blues bands. There's a natural relationship between the cultural aspects of society and the shit you're trying to do that has been moved out of jazz. There's no aspect of anthropology. That is all left to the musicology department, and the jazz students never go to the ethnomusicology department. If there is going to be an honest assessment of any kind of music, there needs to be a perfect blend between the musical aspects of the music and the anthropological aspects. That's true of classical music, too.
That's one of the reason why jazz has been so elusive in Europe and why musicians have felt pressed to go ahead and invent their own style of jazz.

The question tends to pop up: is jazz inherently a music that is best serve on an independent label?
Anything artistic is. I don't care what it is. I think Edwin McCain and Tori Amos are best served on an independent label. Jazz and classical music are best served on an independent label.
Any time I have to have a conversation on the plane with a dude who thinks Paul McCartney has written one of the best oratorios in the history of western music, classical music has to be as far away from that as possible. The dude wasn't even curious. That's what was deep about it. It cemented for me the idea of what baby boomers are. The idea of calling yourself enlightened is way more important than being enlightened. This guy was saying `Yeah, it's amazing that Paul McCartney can write great tunes for the Beatles-' a band I happen to love-'and then he stretches out into classical music.' I said `dude, the music is really not that good. It was on SONY and I was able to get a copy of it and it was not that impressive.'
He said `well, I thought it was great.' I said `yeah, but how many oratorios do you own? Do you own any by Bach or Mozart Masses, any Requiems? Stravinsky wrote an oratorio. Why would you have to compare him to them?' Since McCartney decided to write a fucking oratorio, it's like if you decided tomorrow to play tennis, you being compared to the people who are the best in that field. This guy just didn't want to talk to me anymore. All he wanted to hear was affirmation. He didn't want any information at all. All he wanted to hear that Paul McCartney is great, and he wrote this great classical piece, and now I can appreciate classical music, because a dude on my level wrote some shit on my level.
Whenever you're encountering that sensibility, I want to be as far away from that shit as possible.

You have a pretty expansive concept for your label, if you consider the range from your own music to that of gospel-country-jazz guitarist Doug Wamble, for instance.
Yeah, he's a conceptualist. Jazz is a major influence of his. I dig the music. I would rather get other people, too. I would rather get other people, too, if they were available-a cat like Edwin McCain or someone like Bjork. Bring it.

David Sanchez?
Of course. But he might not want to be there, especially if Miguel (Zenon) is there. Joshua Redman. The door is always open for bad cats. But they have their expectations. They're not going to get no advances. We're a little label. I really believe that musicians are best served when they go out on the road and develop their own clientele. Everybody dreams of shortcuts. That's the battle I have with the people who work in the company. They say `if we do this TV show, this could click.' No, it can't.

So you hold the hard idealist line in the company? That's somewhat ironic.
Well, there's no evidence that the other shit works in the long run. Norah Jones sold six million records, and her second record sold two million records. I would be happy to sell a million records, or 200,000 records. But her second record is an abysmal failure, because it's four million short of the first one, and the next one will sell less. The one thing unfortunate for Norah is that the immediate success of her first record does not allow her to go out and establish a clientele. Now she has to go do that, as opposed to Springsteen, who spent fifteen years establishing his clientele. Then, when his records started to blow up, he already had an established clientele, like Dave Matthews. He will be able to work for the rest of his life. If radio plays his songs, great. If they don't, fuck 'em.

I think Norah has her head together, at least, and she's a real musician.
She does. She's cool. Record companies look at Norah and then they're all running around trying to find the next Norah Jones, like it's that easy. If it was that easy, you all would have found it by now. It's just one of those inexplicable things that happened. She won her fifth Grammy and said `what the hell happened?' She's smart. She's grounded, and good for her. I'm just using her as an example. I don't have no beef with Norah.
That's not what I hope for my artist, that I look up one day and they sell four million records on their first or second record. That could be a disaster. It would be a good disaster to have, but not what I'm looking for.

Your relationship with "Tain" is sort of the core of your quartet. You two go back how far?
1979, 25 years. We both went to Berklee. There were a lot of musicians who said he was a horrible drummer, but since I thought they were crappy musicians, I thought "well, the guy's gotta' be great, because these guys stink." I found him and said "hey, let's do a jam session." He started playing and I was "whoa, no wonder they hate you. I love you."
Then Wynton was starting his band and he needed a drummer. I said "I got your drummer. I know your piano payer. The bass player is going to be tough. I met both the drummer and piano player, and they're killers."

So you brought them into Wynton's band?
Basically. Wynton was on the road with Herbie and Wynton wanted me to get a band together for him. Ever since we were in high school, he knew that was my strong suit-player personnel development director. That kind of thing. He said "go find me some guys." I said "I got your piano player and a drummer. It's going to be great. Bass player? We'll find somebody." There weren't a lot of good bass players out there at that time.

At that time, we're talking about a period when acoustic music hadn't really stepped out again yet, right?
Right. I mean, there were some guys, but everybody started to embrace that very thin amp sound. I didn't like that sound. There were guys who could play the hell out of the bass and knew a lot of harmony, I could never get past that sound. It reminded something like me fully understanding and being cognizant of the role of an offensive lineman, knowing every play in the playbook, but you can't get around the fact that I'm roughly 250 pounds too light to do the job. No amount of knowledge is going to change that fact. It's kind of like that.
When I was younger and wilder, I would take these guys to task for not having a real bass sound. Now, I don't care. As long as the guy in my band has a good bass sound, they can do whatever they want. That's one of the great things about getting old and wise. It ain't my job to save the world. My job is just to have a good band. Let them other guys do what they do.
But it was hard to find guys who were young and enthusiastic and could just pull the damn strings. When I left Wynton's band and joined Sting's band, Reginald Veal came to town and then right behind him, Bob Hurst came to town. There were guys like Ray Drummond who had a good sound, but he was strict bebopper guy. Anything other than that, he didn't know what the hell was going on.

Do you look back to that early period of your career and look at yourself as something of a crusader?
No, Wynton was more the crusader. I was just trying to pick up the chicks along the way. You know what I mean?

I think it's a little bit deeper than that.
No, it really wasn't. Wynton was on the crusade. He really wanted to propel jazz to a position of prominence in the country, particularly in the eyes of popular culture. That's why it makes sense that he's doing the project at Lincoln Center. It would make less sense if I was doing it, because I always just wanted to play.
I was a notorious non-practicer back then and I was quick on the draw with a joke. I wasn't really in a place where I was interested in really addressing my weaknesses on the instrument. The one thing I will say, to my credit, is that I didn't develop a defense mechanism. In interviews, I didn't defend the fact that I had crappy technique. It was clear to me that I did. I just didn't give a damn. I said "so what."
I said that "music is more important than technique," even though people like Coltrane and Charlie Parker had both. But there were so many guys at that time who were considered great jazz musicians who had tons of saxophone technique but knew so little about music that every record sounded the same. There was no growth pattern or anything. Given the choice, I would spend my time listening to music rather than practicing the saxophone.
But after being on the "Tonight Show," seeing entertainment first-hand and realizing that it really wasn't for me, I really decided to dedicate myself to all areas of playing the instrument and the music. I'd spent so many years listening to music that the music part really wasn't a problem for me. I earnestly started addressing the technical deficiencies in my playing.

In some way, did the "Tonight Show" adventure prove advantageous by illustrating what you didn't want from music?
Well, I went in knowing that it had nothing to do with music. It was just an opportunity. I played with Sting and that's one side of it. Being on television was another side of it. A lot of people were running around saying that thing that I don't believe in, that we're going to bring jazz to the masses. You can't bring jazz to the masses on the masses' terms. You have to do it on jazz' terms, and the masses won't let you do that.
I don't know what happened. There was this spin going around, like we were going to be the jazz crusaders. Wrong. I never thought that for a second. It was not about jazz. No music is designed to be played in two-minute commercial breaks, and that's what we got. So it wasn't about that.
It was just I wasn't sure if I wanted to put the effort into really be a good jazz musician. I'd taken the lazy route as far as it could go. It was also an opportunity to escape some personal crap going on in my life, leave New York, go to California and sort some things out. Being on the other side of the country away from my kid really helped me sort some things out. After that first year, I realized that I needed to be where he was. So he came to L.A.. But that didn't work out either, because he needed to be where his mom was. So it was one of those things where I said `ok, this was nice,' but all the things were pointing to the fact that I needed to get back to New York and deal with a lot of crap that I chose not to deal with at the time.
On top of all of that, I decided "I really want to play music for a living." Some people are put on the earth to be rich and famous. Most people are put on the earth not to be rich and famous. Well, it was really clear to me that I was put here to play music and not to be in show business. I'd have little flirts with it, because I'm pretty good at it. I just have this charisma that works on the camera. Sometimes, people ask me to do something and I'll do it, and I enjoy doing it. But I could not intellectually convince myself that it was ok for me to be defined by that experience. So I just had to move on.

It sounds like you have a healthy attitude about that episode in your life.
Well, they're all there. It's like trying to undo life. A woman once told me something, that life is like sex... well, for a clean interview, let's just say that life is like an infant tasting sugar for the first time. Once that momentous occasion occurs, you can never return back to the state that things were before they actually tasted it. You can tell a one-year old that lemons are sweet, and get away with it, because they actually are sweet, in a certain context. You can get away with that as long as they never ever in their lives taste a piece of chocolate. Once they eat that shit, it's over. The lemon is finished. It's done as a desert.
Sitting around doing the woulda-coulda-shoulda, looking back at your life, doesn't make sense. Ultimately, the decisions we make are the decisions we had to make at the time. All those decisions lead to the person that we are, if we choose to deal with it and look at it in the proper perspective. I don't regret it. Hell no. I wouldn't be in the situation I'm in now if it weren't for that.

Surveying the 25-year arc of your musical life, there's a sense of coming full circle. You've returned to acoustic playing, without compromise. Do you see it that way?
Yeah, well, I've always done that. To me, jazz should be jazz. I was never interested in polluting it, like a lot of other people have done, or choose to do because they can't do any better. When I was playing with Sting, I think a lot of people thought that I was playing with him as an overture to get the hell out of jazz, like other jazz musicians have done.
But, unlike those other jazz musicians, when I was a kid, pop music was the music I grew up with. Since they grew up a generation above me, jazz was the popular music of their youth. So their forays into pop had something different for them than it does for me, I think. For me, it was just playing some music that I grew up with. I enjoyed the shit then, I enjoy it now. I played with Sting last month in North Carolina. It was great. I enjoy playing with him. He's a cool man and he was good to me. But that doesn't mean that when I playing jazz, I was going to ask Sting to sing on my records. I was just going to play jazz.
Life, to me, is an art and jazz is at the center of all of the shit that I've done. I always come back to it, and I'm determined to play and use all the experiences I've had, and incorporate that into the music. But I'm definitely not trying to do a commercial version of the music or redefine what the music is for people who are unwilling or unable to process this shit at the highest level. I'm not really interested in that.
When we did Buckshot Lafonque, people would ask me in interviews, "tell me about this new type of jazz you're doing." I'd say "it's not jazz." In their mind, it has to be jazz, because we don't know what the hell it is. It's not jazz. With a DJ and a rapper-these are not jazz musicians. I can't tell you what it is, but I know what it ain't.
With this (quartet), when we're playing, we're playing hard. We're playing for keeps. I love my band. My band is great. I can't imagine playing jazz and not wanting to have a band.

You mean for the sake of the continuity and being able to develop it?
Yeah. You've got to have a band. The idea of playing jazz just to solo seems ridiculous to me. And so many guys that I meet, when they talk about jazz, all they're talking about is soloing.
One beauty of being able to make a record like Eternal is that you can't do that without a band. To me, that record has more emotion and power than eight gazillion notes that could be played, with the exception of a guy like Coltrane or Sonny Rollins. 'Trane could play a million notes and he would still have that potency, but when he played a ballad, it also had that kind of potency and emotional immediacy that a lot of jazz lacks for me because it's so caught up in self-aggrandizement that it's just nerd music.
It's just a bunch of nerdy-assed musicians sitting around developing a bunch of techniques to impress other nerdy-assed musicians. The whole goal is that if you get a good review in a trade magazine like Down Beat, then you're a success, because you've been "approved." And then the musicians wonder out loud why jazz is so unpopular.

Eternity is a beautiful record, and it's your most dynamically low-key album to date, isn't it?
It's dynamically low-key in terms of volume, but I think in a lot of ways, it's even more intense than some of the other records we've done, because we're better as instrumentalists and we have a better understanding of music. With a song like "Gloomy Sunday," you have to have a certain kind of sustained intensity to be able to pull that off. You have to focus more in a situation like that than you do when you're playing a million notes a second.

Was this project you've had in the back of your mind but wanted to wait to do? Is there something to that notion that you can't really play a ballad well until you have a lot of life under your belt?
Well, you can play a ballad. I've played ballads on other records. But I think you have to look at the records that young people make as part of a growth process. One of the things I like to say, a phrase I stole from the saxophonist Andrew Speight, is that it's about "process over product." Too often, you listen to a 25-year-old musician and because of the influence of pop culture, we try to define what that person is, at 25, to say this guy is great or this guy sucks. As if what he or she does at 25 will be the sum total of their entire life experience, and that at 40, it's going to sound exactly like it does at 25. It seems to me that the more interesting take would be "I like this record" or "I don't like this record, but it will be interesting to see what develops over the next ten or fifteen years.
But musicians don't think that way. Musicians talk about guys who are playing as though the way they're playing now is the way they're going to play. Unfortunately, that's often the case: the way they play now is the way they're going to play. But in the best example of jazz, there's a growth pattern that's very obvious.
If you listen to Miles Davis when he was playing with Charlie Parker, he was one of the worst trumpet players you'd ever want to hear. Five or six years later, it wasn't even the same person. He had the intelligence and the talent to figure out what he needed to work on, worked on it and get it together. By the time he got to Kind of Blue, the transformation was from the ugly duckling to the beautiful swan. Now, we live in an era where, as the pop stars become younger and younger, that sensibility pervades our sensibility. We're looking for saviors in nineteen-year-old kids.
One writer was telling me the problem he has with jazz is that nobody's doing cutting-edge stuff. I said "what, in your experience, makes you think that you're qualified to tell what's cutting edge and what's not? They said Coltrane wasn't shit, Mozart sucked, Beethoven was deaf and the Fifth Symphony was trash. Sometimes, the shit is right in front of you and you just can't see it, you can't hear it."
So the best thing to do is just to try to listen to as much music as you can and just write about what you hear instead of trying to be like Woodward and Bernstein and bring down the empire, or find the next star. Everybody seems to want to be right, to say "I found this guy." I don't understand that thought process at all. We're supposed to all be in this together, but I guess not. So be it.

It's as if we're a country with collective ADD, and we're an anti-reflective culture. And yet people can still take refuge in jazz, which is going strong, if on its own level. Don't you feel like there's a strong undercurrent, whatever is going on at the surface level of pop culture?
It is. It's the in perfect place and is exactly where it should be. It's no different than chamber music or classical music and other things that are doing quite well. It's just that we need to identify to our audience and play to them. We need to play to audiophiles and people who like creative music and not sit around and try to invent records that the moms who hang out at Starbucks are going to buy.
Now, if the moms at Starbucks buy it, I'm a very happy man. Thank you for buying it. But if they start saying "why don't you make a record just like that last one?" Then I would say "no, that's not what we do. If you don't like this record, please don't buy it." That's completely the opposite of the way a record company operates. They're like "please buy it." I'm saying "if you don't like the shit, please don't buy it."
When we're making these records, these records are not for you. They're for us. If you can identify with it, awesome. If you can't, that's cool, too. I harbor no ill will towards you. I have made this choice and I, more than a lot of other musicians, have had situations where I could have made considerably more money and been considerably more popular, and every time, I've rejected it. So I, of all people, have no excuses. I have no right to bitch at anybody.
This is the choice I made and I made it freely. I accept all of the ramifications and all of the positives and attributes that go along with it.