home entertainment 2007

Branford Marsalis understands
why the nation has made
rebuilding New Orleans a second
or even third priority.
“I kind of understand it on one
hand. Not only the administration,
but all the people in Congress who
signed off on this war, this is the legacy
that will define them, regardless of what
happens in New Orleans. They realize
that, ultimately, when the history books
are written, there might be a book on
how Congress and the administration let
down the Gulf Coast—maybe one.
There’ll be 25 books on Iraq and the ramifications
of all the disastrous foreign-policy
mistakes. Before [Bush] leaves, I think
he has a vested interest in righting the
ship, which is why all of a sudden there is
detente with North Korea, talking to
Iran, adult-type things that didn’t happen
in the first six years. And New Orleans is
just not a priority in the face of that,
which is a disaster of his own making.”
But this New Orleans native knows
his hometown well enough to know that
it’s not just Bush and Congress that are to
blame for the fact that the city continues
to teeter on the edge of social and economic
collapse.
“It’s a pile of things, man, that makes
New Orleans special. One of them is
that when you go there, you are literally
thrown back in time. People love that,
but there’s also a mentality that goes
with that. In order for things to be a
throwback in time, people have to be in
the stone age—they have to be—otherwise
it’s not.
“New Orleans doesn’t give a shit
about itself. We call it ‘the city that care
forgot.’ That’s what we call it. I mean we
don’t care. The rampant amounts of corruption
that occurred…New Orleans
has corruption that is, in a lot of
respects, with the exception of maybe
the murder of politicians, right up there
with Tammany Hall. And the United
States and, ultimately, New Yorkers
were tired of that shit, and they ran Boss
Tweed out of town.
“There were people, in NOLA, who
thought corruption was endearing, and
now they see the stepchild of all of that
stuff, and now it’s not so funny. Now the
catastrophe has kind of opened the curtain
to all the unsavory stuff that goes on in the
city. But that doesn’t mean that all of the
people who have considerably benefited
from the high levels of corruption are just
AURAL ROBERT
Robert Baird
A Change is Gonna Come?
going to lie down.”
Marsalis is doing
his part to rebuild
NOLA, first as a
spokesman and fundraiser
(along with
Harry Connick, Jr.)
for homebuilders,
Habitat for Humanity,
and the Musicians
Village Project,
which is building
housing for musicians
made homeless
by Hurricane Katrina.
His label, Marsalis
Music, has just released new records by
two veteran New Orleans players who’ve
remained in the city, clarinetist Alvin
Batiste and drummer Bob French.
The first record, Marsalis Music Honors
Alvin Batiste, Batiste’s first record in a
decade, is solidly modern jazz—a postbop
album from one of the few NOLA
musicians to have ever made a living
playing something other than Preservation
Hall-styled New Orleans trad music,
its low-brow, mostly white offspring,
Dixieland, or, worst of all, the pop/jazz
garbage you hear today booming out of
the bars on Bourbon Street. A composer
as well as player, Batiste jammed with
Ornette Coleman in L.A. in the 1950s,
and played gigs with Guitar Slim back in
New Orleans. The band on MMH Alvin
Batiste is a mix of younger, lesser-known
Louisiana players, such as pianist
Lawrence Field, bassist Ricardo
Rodriguez, and two former students of
Batiste, who’s taught music at Southern
University since 1969: drummer Herlin
Riley, and Marsalis himself on soprano
saxophone.
“Bat chased me out of Louisiana and
sent me to Boston because he realized
very early on that I didn’t need much
encouragement to become not serious,”
Marsalis says in a tired croak. He’s in
Amsterdam, nearing the end of a string
of European one-nighters. “At a school
like Southern University, if you can
play Grover Washington’s solo on ‘Mr.
Magic,’ you’re like a star. That was
never very difficult for me to do that.
So I eschewed the more difficult tasks
assigned to me because the honeys
liked Grover.
“Bat said, ‘Man, you gotta go.’ He
called my father [Ellis Marsalis] and said,
‘If I see him here next year, I’m flunking
him.’ Staying
there would
have been a
dead end for
me. He was
right.”
Also selftitled,
Marsalis
Music Honors Bob
French is an
easygoing runthrough
of
New Orleans
trad music, and
includes such
stone Crescent
City classics as “Basin Street Blues,”
“Way Down Yonder in New Orleans,”
“When It’s Sleepy Time Down South,”
and “Do You Know What It Means to
Miss New Orleans.” The track list’s Pops
slant is deliberate: French’s great-uncle
Maurice played trombone in Armstrong’s
band. French’s own band is
another mix of younger NOLA players—
trumpeter Leon “Kid Chocolate” Brown
and Troy “Trombone Shorty” Andrews—
and veterans like Branford and fellow
New Orleanian Connick, Jr.
French began his career in a high
school band that included piano great
James Booker, Art and Charles Neville
of the Neville Brothers, and Alvin
Batiste. Ellis Marsalis played traditional
music in French’s band for years when
Branford and his brother Wynton were
kids. One night, the Marsalis brothers
were invited onstage.
“Yeah, but I sucked; I was just playing
to play. When you’re eight or nine years
old, you get a free pass. And then, by the
time you’re 15, all the New Orleans
guys are like, ‘Don’t come on this stage
bullshittin’.”
Both albums feature a careful
approach to sound that Branford, who by
now is anxious to wrap up and crawl into
bed for a pre-show nap, rallies to explain.
“One thing that we do that separates
us from other jazz labels is that we focus
our money on making the records completely
representative of how musicians
actually sound at a given point in time. If
you listen to a lot of acoustic records,
they tend to be very thin, they use a lot of
compression, and the musicians record in
very small rooms—which works in electric
music, but it’s death in acoustic
music. We spare no expense to make the
sound quality great.” ■■
138 www.Stereophile.com, May 2007