In saxophonist Branford Marsalis' world, there is practice and there is Practice. Small-p practice is just keeping limber, or preventing musical muscles from atrophying. But capital-P Practice, where you try to push beyond what you've already done, is much, much harder. Marsalis saw firsthand how it worked while growing up in New Orleans, watching his brother Wynton honing his craft on the trumpet.
"I was no fan of practice, and the R&B band I was in didn't require it," Marsalis says by phone from his home in Durham. "But Wynton was playing classical and he was very serious about it. He put in a solid three hours a day from the time he was about 12 to 24, and it shows. He was incredibly disciplined. Me, I was out playing basketball and being a jackass. He was in the practice room gettin' it.
"And that," Marsalis concludes, "is how you make progress."
He may run himself down, but Marsalis has done well, too. He has put in enough of the hard kind of Practice - that 10,000 hours Malcolm Gladwell writes about in "Outliers" - to become a polyglot musical virtuoso. One of the most renowned jazz musicians in the world, Marsalis is also noted for his work in styles from rock to classical. And he's no stranger to Broadway, earning a Tony nomination this year for his score to August Wilson's "Fences."
Some of his many facets will be on display Tuesday at "Branford Marsalis and Friends," a benefit concert for the N.C. Symphony in which he teams up with a wide array of musicians across genres. He'll play straight-up jazz with his longtime pianist, Joey Calderazzo. N.C. Symphony music director Grant Llewellyn will make his Meymandi Concert Hall debut as a pianist, joining Marsalis to perform Karel Husa's "Elegie et Rondeau."
Pieces by Mozart and Dvorak are also on the program, played by Marsalis with a quartet of N.C. Symphony players. And blues guitarist Scott Ainslee, old-time string band Big Medicine and gospel singer Tina Morris-Anderson are among the other performers on the bill.
"He is so professional, and you can tell he really knows what he's doing," Big Medicine's Joe Newberry says of Marsalis. "But he's also just the most regular guy, very warm and great and open to everything."
Marsalis might be one of the few musicians on earth versatile enough to handle all of this in a single evening without whiplash setting in. In fact, he'll probably make it look easy. Most of it (though not all of it) will take just practice rather than Practice.
"Some of that will happen on the fly," Marsalis says of Tuesday's program. "We've had a couple of meetings. Joe [Newberry] played some of the music they want me to play on, and I just grinned. 'All right. Yeah, I got it.' That's the thing I love about bluegrass tunes; they stay true to the folk form. Three-bar phrases through the whole song, just point the way. Now the Husa and Mozart, that takes real practice. But the rest of it, I'm good. It's just an extension of what I've grown up with all my life."
Digging in to work
Growing up as a musician doesn't involve just playing, either. In a musician's education, Marsalis thinks that listening is just as important as playing. It's something he doesn't see nearly enough in his younger peers.
"A lot of people want to self-identify as jazz musicians," he says. "But evidently, they don't like jazz. They like soloing, but not jazz because they don't listen to it. There are working musicians in New York, doing well, and they've never heard Jelly Roll Morton. They want to buy books rather than dig in and do the work.
"Part of the reason I'm pretty good now is that, when I was young, Dizzy Gillespie had a laundry list of things I was doing wrong," he adds. "And it all came down to listening. Wynton and I were 23, 24, tearing it up. Didn't matter. 'Your sound projection is poor, and you guys don't know enough jazz to play jazz. I listen to you play and you're so ill-informed. Rhythm is an essential component of jazz, and you guys have no rhythm at all. Bebop came from swing, but you think it's just its own entity.' He was right. And now you have a generation of kids who know even less than I did, trying to 'reinvent' jazz through sheer willpower.
"How do you fight that?" Marsalis concludes. "I don't. I just play."
Taking a long break
Actually, however, Marsalis will be playing a lot less this summer than he has in years, at least in public. Except for next week's show and another in July, his schedule is open until September - his longest stretch off the road in more than three years. And after a stretch in which he was home for a grand total of 10 days between February and May, Marsalis needed a break.
"Yeah," he says, "I'm off. And I mean off. I've been turning everything down. I lose most of those battles, but I'm winning this one. They can talk and cajole - 'You have all these things, and bills to pay,' management said - but I'm physically exhausted. My response was, 'It's hard to pay bills if I'm dead.' Nobody argued that point. I think it's good. I'm gonna enjoy it because it might be years before I get another one."
Of course, there's every chance that Marsalis will get restless, and some work will creep back in. He has a couple of albums recorded and in the pipeline, including a live Marsalis Family album (due out in August) and a duet collection with Calderazzo. And he's never been one to go very long without picking up his horn.
"I might call some guys together, do some stuff," he allows. "And I'm also going to practice to try and get better. The hard kind where you're really busting your hump. You know, Practice."
