Delfeayo Marsalis schools his audience on the key to good jazz
Feb. 9—The Art + Sol Santa Fe Winter Festival February 9-19 is a convergence of music performances, dance, visual arts, plays, and other happenings that feed the city's appetite for arts events during the winter season, traditionally a quiet time for performance venues and stages. Highlights of this year's festival are on the following two pages. Visit artsolsantafe.org for a complete listing of events and for ticket information.
------
Wherever he goes, he brings Mardi Gras with him. Delfeayo Marsalis, the nattily clad trombone-playing scion of the first family of jazz, is as much an ambassador of New Orleans as he is a touring musician and educator.
Marsalis, the son of jazz pianist Ellis Marsalis Jr. and the brother of horn greats Wynton and Branford Marsalis, doesn't shy away from the distinction.
He believes there are just two kinds of jazz: the kind made in his home city and the kind made everywhere else. Jazz music in New Orleans, he likes to say, is made with an eye toward entertaining an audience, while jazz music in other locales can sometimes be introverted and understated.
"New Orleans is a survival city, and that's how the music is," he says. "They've been saying, 'Hurricane Katrina, what's going to happen to New Orleans?' That's the same thing with jazz. They've been saying jazz is dying since the '30s, but it's a survival music and a survival city, and what I find over the years is that it becomes what it needs to be to capture the time."
details
Delfeayo Marsalis' Uptown Jazz Orchestra
* 7:30 p.m. Saturday, February 10
* Lensic Performing Arts Center
* 211 W. San Francisco Street
* $35-$115
* 505-988-1234; lensic.org
Marsalis and his Uptown Jazz Orchestra will play the Lensic Performing Arts Center on Saturday, February 10, as part of the Art + Sol Winter Arts Festival, and Marsalis says it's just the second time he's played Santa Fe. He came out with his first album, Pontius Pilate's Decision, in 1992, and it featured not only brothers Wynton and Branford but also brother Jason Marsalis on drums.
Branford was just gaining prominence as the bandleader for The Tonight Show at that point, and Wynton was five years away from winning the Pulitzer Prize for Music for his composition Blood on the Fields. That self-contained unit — the brothers Marsalis on drums and horns — is something that Delfeayo says happened organically. He helped in the booth as a producer as Wynton and Branford made their names, and then he added his own flourish.
"I didn't know enough to be intimidated when they started," he says. "By the time they got out and were doing things, it was too late. I was already in the thick of it. And playing trombone, it's a cool instrument. Trumpet and saxophone, they've got their own thing going on. I've had a great time working with them, and I'm having a great time doing my own thing as well."
The brothers — along with their dad, Ellis — became the first family recipients of the NEA Jazz Masters Award in 2011. Delfeayo, much like his father (who died in 2020), has spent a good portion of his career in music education. Ellis Marsalis was a revered instructor at the University of New Orleans and other area institutions, and Delfeayo has made a mark with his Uptown Music Theatre.
For two decades, Marsalis and his colleagues worked with New Orleans youth to stage original musicals and to compete with other like-minded groups around the country. It's a labor of love, he says, but it's also an important part of continuing his family's legacy.
"My dad is well known, but there were people like Alvin Batiste and Danny Barker who taught a generation of musicians how to play traditional New Orleans music correctly," he says. "Danny Barker had played alongside Louis Armstrong amongst many others. That idea of mentorship is strong in New Orleans. So many musicians are educators, so I'm just following in that path."
Marsalis and his band will head back into the studio this spring to cut an album, and he says that many of the musicians who will be supporting him in Santa Fe have been with him a long time. The Uptown Jazz Orchestra features Terrance Taplin on trombone, John Gray on trumpet and occasional vocals, Andrew Baham on trumpet and vocals, and Jarrel Allen on drums.
Allen is the son of Shamarr Allen, the lead trumpet player and singer for Shamarr Allen and The Underdawgs. Marsalis says the band will also feature a few guest horn players who studied under his brother Branford at North Carolina Central University.
Marsalis will take his band to Idaho and Maryland later in the month, and he says they had a successful stint in Europe last year. But wherever they go, he says, they're just trying to fit squarely into the same traditions that inspired them.
"Sometimes when we study the history of music, we study it like classical music. So you say, 'OK, you had Monteverdi and then Bach and then Mozart and Beethoven and so on,'" Marsalis says. "But the great thing about American music is that, yeah, you had Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong, but they influenced Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, who in turn influenced them right back with their new sound. And then they influenced Ornette Coleman. So it's like a cycle. We're all able to learn from each other and also able to contribute at the same time."
Two election cycles ago, Marsalis and his band fell prey to an old tradition and sign of the times. The musicians like to make up songs on the spot, he says, and sometimes they'll look out into the audience and ask the people what they'd like to hear them play.
On one such occasion, he says, they had an audience member shout, "Make America Great Again." And Marsalis, not knowing that it would become a political rallying cry, led his band on an improvisational journey that would later be immortalized by that name.
"We said, 'OK, we're going to start with a vaudeville groove and take it into the modern," he says. "When you take that step into the political realm, you never know what's going to happen with it. But it was a really great recording, and I think that song in particular is a poignant reflection of a Black man looking at not only himself but his ancestors and what they have contributed to America and how they have been received. [Actor] Wendell Pierce did a great job with the narration, and that's become one of my favorite songs."