INTERVIEW: Jason Marsalis reflects back on these difficult times
Photo: Jason Marsalis has recently released a live album on Basin Street Records. Photo courtesy of Dwayne Hills / dhillsphotography.com / Provided by BSR with permission.
There may be no better New Orleans musician who honors the past and simultaneously paves the way for the future than Jason Marsalis, the acclaimed drummer and percussionist who recently released a live album on Basin Street Records. Marsalis, of course, has music pulsating through his blood and in almost every part of his family tree — with his brothers Wynton, Branford and Delfeayo also building successful careers in the jazz world.
The root of that family tree — the father figure who held everything together — was Ellis Marsalis, who tragically died at the age of 85 a couple weeks ago. His death was from complications stemming from COVID-19, according to news reports.
[Read Hollywood Soapbox’s experience of catching Ellis Marsalis at Snug Harbor.]
For Jason, this time has been a reflective one. He has thought back to his time sharing a stage with his father, often at Snug Harbor, a memorable club on Frenchmen Street in New Orleans. He has also looked toward the future, seeing how his music might be transformed in the coming years, especially in light of current events, both personal and global.
“Reflective? Absolutely,” Jason said in a recent phone interview. “We definitely miss our father, for sure. I think about him everyday and just the times that we have shared because he was … with me quite a bit, as I was growing up and even as a musician. As I grew older, there were a lot of things that we had done a lot together, whether it was playing music together or even him seeing his granddaughter — my daughter, if you will. It’s a lot of time we had spent together. It’s definitely on my mind.”
Bourbon Street Ain’t Mardi Gras
Jason, who has been making music ever since he was a young boy, has come a long way from growing up in the house of Ellis and Dolores Marsalis. He is the youngest son in this musical family, and while his brothers headed toward different instruments, Jason found his identity behind a drum set.
His journey has taken him far and wide, and many of his musical stylings over the years can be heard on his releases for Basin Street Records, the NOLA record label run by Mark Samuels, a friend of the Marsalis family.
A couple years ago, Basin Street celebrated its 20th anniversary, and they decided to throw a special concert at the Little Gem Saloon, a historic club and restaurant on Rampart Street in the CBD neighborhood. Unfortunately the venue, which hosted a weekly residency by Basin Street musician Kermit Ruffins, has shuttered its doors — leaving music lovers searching for ways to resurrect the unique sound of the two-floored establishment, which had stages both upstairs and downstairs.
Luckily, Basin Street recorded those sessions at their 20th birthday party, and to honor that special night, the label has recently released both Jason Marsalis Live and Dr. Michael White Live.
“So they got all of the artists that were on their label together to do this show at the Little Gem Saloon,” Jason said. “It was definitely a fun night. It was great seeing everybody, and it was great to play in different settings. There were a few other sets that I had a chance to play a few songs in, so overall it was a great night. … From the stage, I felt it was a nice room. I think the rooms were just big enough. I say that because you do have some places where they open up the rooms a lot. You have some places where the rooms are really huge, and unfortunately you start to lose the intimacy of the crowd when you do that. I think the stages at Little Gem — because there were two places to play — were just big enough to where you didn’t lose the intimacy with the audience, so I enjoyed being on the stages.”
Jason Marsalis Live, which is now available digitally, with plans for physical copies once the pandemic subsides, has six songs, all featuring Jason on vibraphone, Oscar Rossignoli on piano, Jasen Weaver on bass and Gerald Watkins on drums. The selections on the album are: “Ratio Man Strikes Again,” “Passionate Dancer,” the nearly 10-minute “Bourbon Street Ain’t Mardi Gras,” “Ballet Class,” “Short Story #1” and “At the House, in da Pocket.” Three of the tunes come from Marsalis’ recent album, Melody Reimagined: book 1, a selection of contrafact songs.
“You take a harmonic progression from another song, and you put your own melody on top of it,” Jason said of contrafacts. “Think of all the different blues songs that you know. It’s the same progression, but there’s all these different melodies over that one progression. So that’s one example. … To be honest, I didn’t know the ‘Alphabet’ song and ‘Twinkle Twinkle Little Star’ were the same thing. I never really considered that for a very long time, but that’s a good example of that. The melody is the same, but it’s two different sets of lyrics that people know. So in this case the harmony is the same, but I put a different melody over it.”
As far as the “Bourbon Street” selection, Jason said there’s some cultural clarification in the tune. He wrote the song by taking elements of traditional music and placing them in a more modern context (again that wonderful marriage of old and new that he has been able to master throughout his career).
“Most of the time when people think of traditional music, they think of it in this bag of this old repertoire of music, this old style, but it’s not often that people think, well, let’s take this music and do something else with it and bring some other elements to it or put it in a different context,” he said. “Let’s take ‘Bourbon Street Parade.’ Let’s take that chord progression, but let’s write a completely different melody that’s more influenced by musicians like Ornette Coleman and Keith Jarrett, that sort of thing. That’s what the music is. Since the tune is based on Bourbon Street, the title is a cultural clarification because a lot of times when people think of Mardi Gras, they think of Bourbon Street, like immediately, but one of the ironies is there’s no parade routes that go down Bourbon Street. Bourbon Street is just a place where out-of-towners can go and act decadent, but you can do that all year. So the title, yeah, Bourbon Street that’s not really where Mardi Gras takes place. You have to go to different parade routes, Uptown, or go where the Mardi Gras Indians are going to congregate, which is usually on Claiborne Avenue.”
Ratio Man Strikes Again
When Jason talks about his native city of New Orleans, there’s an educator’s spirit behind his words. He understands the history, examines the contextual evidence, immerses himself in the sounds and styles. He is a bonafide expert on not only NOLA but NOLA jazz, comprehending its evolution and its possibilities.
One aspect of New Orleans that he understands — perhaps better than most — is how New York City has impacted the Big Easy. For years, the two metropolitan areas competed for musicians, and this competition shaped the musical trajectory of each city.
“The truth is I’m convinced that one of the things that changed New Orleans, believe it or not, was the city of New York,” he said. “Honestly, when my older brothers, Wynton and Branford, moved to New York, that’s where you had to go to build a strong career and to get a national presence, and so the point being, no musician was thinking about coming down to New Orleans. That was not at all on anyone’s radar, but as times changed, and as the business changed, and as the scene changed in New York, as rent prices started going sky high, after a while some musicians started to look at New Orleans, saying, ‘Wait, let’s check that out.’ They get down and realize, wait, I can come down here and do some other gigs, work everyday and also play music that I believe in because the music in New York has changed, too, so you start to get more and more guys coming down here that hadn’t come previously.”
He also described the NOLA music scene as increasingly fashionable, and this was perhaps a positive consequence following the Hurricane Katrina tragedy. It may be one of the few silver linings from that hellish storm. Jason saw many musicians want to come to the city after that devastating hurricane, and previously they didn’t think too much of the Crescent City and its jazz history.
“But they want to come down,” he said. “Then you start to get more and more out-of-town people, and less of the people were actually from New Orleans. So I think the cultural clarification is something that is very important.”
Interestingly, Jason himself has not always lived in New Orleans. A few years ago, he and his family left not only the city, but the entire United States. They headed, appropriately enough, for Orléans, France.
“That was really from my wife’s suggestion,” Jason said. “We were there two years. I would still come to the States now and again, and work and do some things here, but really it was an opportunity for my young daughters, who were in a French immersion program in New Orleans, to actually be in an area where you have people speaking French. So their French skills, which were good, improved after being there, and all three of them are fluent in French. So that’s what that was about. As far as living there, I think it was great to be in Europe and in a different place.”
Shorty Story #1
Jason received a toy drum set from his parents when he was only 6 years old. He believes that was the spark he needed to head in the direction of percussion and drums. Jason said his father, Ellis, probably saw he had a propensity toward drumming and wanted to expand its potential in his life.
“I think drums was always something I believed in,” he said. “But my first instrument was actually the violin. That was the first instrument that I got, and the drums were after that. But what stopped me from playing the violin was when I was in a youth orchestra. I was in a junior youth orchestra in sixth grade, and I see drums in the back of the orchestra. I had never seen that. I was always in string orchestras, and I’m seeing timpani and bass drum. And I’m saying, why didn’t anybody tell me that there were going to be drums here. And so the following year, I stopped playing violin because I was more interested in the percussion, and that’s when I started to study percussion. And things took off from there. I think drums and percussion was something I always had a belief in.”
He added: “Music was just something I’ve always loved to do. I’ve even heard stories from my older brothers when I was an infant, maybe 1 or 2 years old, and how I would like to listen to them because they would be listening to records. And I would always go in with them and listen to the records also, so there’s different stories of that. Music is something I always loved to listen to and loved to play, so I think that it helped having family play music. Nonetheless, I was going to go in that direction because I love to do it.”
He studied those drums for quite a long time and started to get a name for himself in New Orleans, and that’s when he hooked up with Samuels and Basin Street Records. The record label had recently released their debut album, and they were throwing a party.
“I was actually there,” Jason remembers. “Mark was talking about people that he was interested in and so forth. I was like, OK, it was something that was on my mind, and so then I did this gig with a newly put-together group called Los Hombres Calientes [with Irvin Mayfield and Bill Summers]. And things moved really quick with the band because the first gig got amazing buzz, and the next thing I know we’re making a record. … It’s kind of quick to be making a record, but then that’s when I saw Mark Samuels again. I said, ‘OK, we must be doing this at Basin Street Records, cool.’ After a while, I should do a [solo] record for them, and I should go with the label because things were starting to pick up.”
Ballet Class
Jason is looking toward the future and considering what his next professional move might be. No doubt in the coming days, weeks and months he will join with his family and the city of New Orleans to properly honor his father’s legacy. If anyone deserves a second line once this pandemic lifts, it’s definitely Ellis Marsalis.
“I think I’m still inspired to try to figure out what to do to help younger students that may not hear the music or may not be exposed to it,” Jason said about refocusing his efforts on education. “I think the music will always inspire because it never lost touch with its traditions.”
And there will be more albums, for sure, including one last recording session he had with his father.
“There is music that I do want to create, and there’s some music that will be released down the line,” he said. “There’s actually a recording that my father and I just did. It’s sort of bittersweet because it was [my band] Vibes and piano, and it was the first time we had done it. We did this a month ago. We had just done it. Sadly with his passing we won’t be able to go back because we did talk about going back to the studio and recording more music, but unfortunately that won’t come to pass. But I’m just grateful we did this one session, so at some point that will be released.”
He added: “I need to go do more things in education, in documenting the music, in teaching the music and with helping other players because there’s a lot of things that need to be taught to students. There’s a lot of things that they don’t know, or they’re not getting exposed to. So there’s a lot more that I need to do in education, in the aspect of music education.”
Sounds a bit like his father.
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Jason Marsalis’ new album is Jason Marsalis Live, now available digitally from Basin Street Records. Click here for more information.
