Sweet Song Podcast: Exploring Jazz Icon John Coltrane's Legacy with Branford Marsalis
A deep dive into jazz, memory, and new music with Branford Marsalis.
PLEASE NOTE: This is not a human-authored article, nor should it be read as one. It is an auto-generated AI summary and transcript of a podcast episode. This transcript is generated and published on the web for SEO to make it easier for listeners to search and find podcast episodes. This transcript may contain errors. Please refer to the audio recording for accuracy. Listen and download episodes here: APPLE: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/sweet-song-podcast/id1763926698
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLF7-SrAmDe5wZWYYMx2sgkC4yFvw9zN3H
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/033qOFHvw2L8ne1lavSEYa
Branford Marsalis invites us into a world where jazz is not just heard but felt. In a recent conversation with Sweet Song Podcast host Kristi Wooten, he shared nostalgic memories of discovering John Coltrane and the profound impact it had on his musical journey.
Rediscovering Coltrane's impact on jazz
Branford reflected on his first encounter with Coltrane's music, revealing, "My first memory was like my dad and Winton loved ‘Giant Steps.’ And I was not a fan. Still not really a fan, to be honest."Despite his initial resistance, he found himself immersed in Coltrane's work, particularly the avant-garde record Sonship, which left a lasting impression on him during his high school years.
As he transitioned to music schools and professional bands, Coltrane’s influence became undeniable. He humorously recounted the advice of his ear training teacher, who urged him to explore Coltrane's quartet, leading him to a transformative moment:
"...I grabbed one of those copies of any record by that group, and yeah, that blew my socks off."
The Journey to New Music
Branford's recent project, Dedicated to You, features vocalist Diane Reeves and marks a fresh exploration of Coltrane's legacy. Kristi noted, "Diane, you know, I feel that I don't know enough about her... but this record just blows me away."This collaboration reinterprets classic tracks, blending old and new in a way that resonates deeply with listeners.
Branford emphasized the importance of maintaining the original tempo and feel of the music, steering away from modern trends that often prioritize isolation over collaboration. He explained, "Everybody shows up and we play and we go home. It’s reflective of the records that I love the sound of… acoustic music is terrible in isolation."
This approach captures the essence of jazz as a live, dynamic art form.
Reflecting on the Past and Jazz's future
The conversation also touched on the evolution of Branford's sound and his initial reluctance to play soprano saxophone. He shared, "I treated it like it was a clarinet. I could make it sound like a clarinet."His journey from alto to soprano, influenced by his brother Winton, encapsulates the trials of growth and the pursuit of authenticity in music.
As Branford and Kristi discussed the intricacies of jazz history and its ongoing evolution, they painted a vivid picture of a genre that continually challenges its artists while honoring its roots.
For those eager to explore these themes further, tune into the full episode where Branford Marsalis and Kristi Wooten delve into the art of jazz, its influencers, and the journey of creativity.
Kristi Wooten (00:07)
Thank you. I'm excited to talk to you because it's been a while since we actually did an interview of any kind.
We're here today to talk about Dedicated to You, which is your new project on Blue Note and with Diane Reeves on vocals, and of course with Branford Marsalis Quartet, with Joey Calderazzo, Eric Revis, and Justin Faulkner. but
I want to go back to the very earliest conversation that we ever had, which was about who is John Coltrane. And you definitely are the person who introduced me officially to John Coltrane's music. And I was taking notes when we were doing our very first interview. And I think I was eighteen. I should have known better by then ...
Bran (00:52)
No, you shouldn't have.
Kristi Wooten (00:56)
... but I spelled John Coltrane's wrong on my notes. And I can't remember if it was you or Jeff Tain Watts who leaned over and said, nice spelling. And because I had gotten it wrong. So that was my trial by fire. I was like, holy crap,
Bran (01:06)
Oh my God [laughs].
Kristi Wooten (01:12) ... if I'm gonna write about jazz or do anything about jazz, I have to really know my stuff. You know, they're gonna they're gonna let me know. So I'm grateful for that. But tell me about your in your first memory of hearing John Coltrane.
Bran (01:26)
My first memory was like my dad and and Wynton loved giant steps. And I was not a fan. still not really a fan, to be honest, but my my initial instinct was no this is not it. And but Wynton would play it all the time. so I I learned the record because
We had one record player in the house and when it was Wynton's turn to play music, he would play Giant Steps. So I learned the whole record, not the solos, but just each song and I can sing the melodies and all of that. But the one that really that my dad owned that really got me going was Sun Ship which was like one of the more, I guess, outside or avant-garde records you would call it. But I was in high school and I played s Sun Ship and I was really struck by that. I was also listening to a
A Wayne Shorter record called The All Seeing Eye, where he was experimenting with the outside harmony thing. So for one year, like 1977, I was listening a lot to to Sun Ship and to the All Seeing Eye. it wasn't until I got to Berkeley in 1979, the Berkeley College of Music in Boston, that my my ear training teacher, Billy Pierce, who wound up
I wound up playing in Art Blakey's band with him. I was playing alto. He was playing tenor. And guys were talking about giant steps. And I just said, Yeah, I've never really, that's not my thing. It's not for me. And after class, he called me up. He said, Hey man, come up here before you go. He says, You know, since I know you, it makes sense that you wouldn't really like giant steps that much. Have you ever heard the quartet, the John Coltrane quartet? And I said, No. And he says, Well, you know, go around the corner and grab one of those copies of of any record by that group. We had a record store on Balston Street called Looney Tunes. And he said, go to Looney Tunes and get one. And they just happened to have for sale for about five bucks the very first one called Coltrane. And yeah, that that that blew my socks off. When I heard that, I was like, my God. And I was an alto player at that time. But that was so in in 1979, the the most
The four records I listened to over and over and over and over again was Miles Davis's records, Nefertiti and Miles Smiles, because my roommate, Marvin Smitty Smith, had those two. And then there was a Lester Young compilation that I stole from my dad when I went to Boston called Lester Swings. And Coltrane. That record with Inchworm and Out of This World and think the ballad was Soul Eyes. I could be wrong about that, but yeah, I I listen to I listen to that regular a lot. So that was my f first my first that was the first time I really went, yeah, this is I want a group like this. This is how I want my group to sound.
Kristi Wooten (04:38)
Yeah, and my second question that I wrote down was, did it change your choice of horns? Because you said you were playing alto and this was kind of the move that got you into soprano.
Bran (04:51)
No. No. My grandfather bought me a soprano in nineteen seventy eight as a birthday present And there was no use for it. I liked it for my seventeenth birthday. And I couldn't do anything with it because so I would just play duets with Wynton So I treated it like it was a clarinet. I could make it sound like a clarinet. I wouldn't use vibrato because Winton and I played duets when we were younger, and I still play a clarinet. So we would just play duets. And then when I Went to the Berkeley College of Music, the soprano was basically underneath my bed for the whole time. Except this one time that I played in my recital, I played a Michael Jackson song called Can't Help It. I don't know if that's the name of the song, Can't Help It, even if I could. There's the in but Grover Washington did a version of that song, so I played that on my recital.
I played the soprano, but I really didn't play it that much. I didn't start playing the soprano until Wynton started his band in the early 80s. And Wynton was the person who forced me to play tenor. Because he says you should play tenor because you never really play in the upper register of the alto. And the middle register of the alto is kind of the upper register of the tenor, so you can go lower. And I said, Yeah, well, that's your opinion, man. You know, I'm not doing that. So when he was starting this band, he says, I need a tenor player. Can you find me one? And I said, You're an asshole. And I went out and bought a tenor. Yeah.
Kristi Wooten (06:39)
I have never heard that story before. That's a good one. and and tenor.
Bran (06:43)
Two weeks later I was forced to admit he was right. But at the time I was like, You're a jerk, man. You're
Kristi Wooten (06:48)
Because I always think of you, and I've told you this before, but especially for y in my life, for you and for Stevie Wonder, Stevie on harmonica and you on soprano are these two voices in my life that are just like other singing voices. You know, like that's so always thought of you as soprano forward, obviously,and tenor. So it's good to know the backstory about all of that.
Bran (07:09)
Yeah.
Bran (07:14)
Yeah, when I started playing soprano at Wynton's Band, everybody everybody was saying, Man, you have such a beautiful soprano sound. Well, you know, what do you do? I said, Well, nothing. It just sits in the corner until I play it. It do, you know. And and it was, I think, well, I played clarinet for seven years. So it's the embouchure is very similar to the clarinet. And I think because I d New Orleans is one of the few cities in in the country where people that play clarinet don't have to play in orchestras. So I just a a lot of my approach would be more clarinet oriented stuff than traditional like Coltrane-esque soprano things.
Kristi Wooten (07:52)
Right. That's interesting. So back on Coltrane thing, I was also gonna say you you say that you aren't the biggest fan of giant steps, but you have, you know, I know you've participated in a couple of versions over the years. I think there was one on that one that I was exposed to in the early nineties that was for that Red Hot and Cool album. You did a version or played on a version of that. And any you know, anything that sort of guru and gang star
All the Jazzmatazz stuff, all that sort of melds into my mind of stuff happening. And thus, what that was was probably a second awakening for society about giant steps and about Coltrane for a new generation, which would have been me. I mean, I know you're a few years older than me, but that was sort of that entree. So for yourself, had you, when did you hear this Johnny Hartman record?
Bran (08:42)
Sometime in my twenties. I was in my twenties, I was a voracious listener by then of jazz. I was always a voracious listener, but of more popular music than jazz in my teens. And I was kind of behind the eight ball jazz wise. I knew I wasn't really good at playing jazz or the saxophone. So I thought learning jazz was more important than learning the saxophone because New York was full of great saxophone players who played jazz terribly.
And I didn't I wanted to be a person who played jazz well and played the saxophone okay. And over time I would start focusing on the instrument as I got older. And and that's pretty much what I did. I just listened to a lot of music, a lot of music, a lot of early music, a lot of Wayne Shorter, a lot of John Coltrane, a lot of Billie Holiday eventually a lot of Louis Armstrong, Sydney Bechet Charlie Mingus. it was just I was just listening to all of these things.
Kristi Wooten (09:38)
So would you say because I know your love for Wayne Shorter, but would you say that Coltrane has chased you or you have chased him, or neither?
Bran (09:51)
Well I mean any student of his music would be chasing Coltrane. I mean he's certainly not chasing me. I'm not who the hell am I?
Kristi Wooten (10:01)
No, I meant in a haunting way...
Bran (10:05)
His music doesn't doesn't haunt. I mean it's
Kristi Wooten (10:09)
Yeah.
Bran (10:10)
You know, I I when we joined Wynton's band, one of the things we wanted to do was. It was a two-tiered thing. We were really checking out the harmonic information and the musical stuff that the Miles Davis group with Herbie Hancock, Tony Williams, and Ron Carter was doing. And Tain and I said, Well, we need to really learn how to play this music. But so the foundational basis of the music harmonically would be that Miles Davis band, but sonically it would be the Coltrane band. And that was the thing we wanted to do was to play all of this really, really, you know, kind of complicated, different things that they were dealing with, but attack the music in a very different way. So it feels less cerebral.
Kristi Wooten (11:02)
I like the word "attack" because I I'll circle back to that in a little bit about kind of the approach to when you're doing songs that were written in the thirties and forties, sort of resurrected in the sixties and are making their way back now, especially on the Johnny Hartman collaboration record, you cannot look at it the same way and even if you tried to play it just like they played it.
It's going to be so different because of the weight of the world that has built up
Bran (11:33)
Right.
Kristi Wooten (11:34)
since that time. Some of those, you know, some of those tracks on that record almost have like a post, you know, tin pan alley lightness to them. They're just they feel obviously they have depth, but I think adding the modern touch and we'll get onto all that in a second. But tell me where the idea came from for this record to happen in the in the last year or so.
Bran (12:04)
My manager suggested, you should join the the litany of like, you know, San you know, gold rush forty-nine and rushing to make a Coltrane record during his centennial. And I said, Yeah, okay, we can do that, but what to do? And I just wanted to avoid all of the obvious low-hanging fruit stuff. So we set I settled on this idea. Well, yeah, we we could do the the Hartman record, the Coltrane Hartman record. Well, who are you gonna get? So there's a couple of people I'm I'm I'm thinking about. Let's let's see who's available and
Well at some point couple of days later.
My manager said like so you gonna get? I said, I don't know that I'm gonna sleep on it. I'll just I'll just and I woke up and the first name that came up was Dianne So I called her and said, Di I texted her, I said, Dianne Reeves, get her. And that's how it happened.
Kristi Wooten (13:02)
And Dianne you know, I I feel that I don't know enough about her. Obviously, I know her and listen to her and she's been part of the fabric. But this record just it blows me away. She is so amazing on this record. I mean this record is just hitting me personally at the right time. So you did a good job of getting not the low-hanging fruit. I think that this is something that people are gonna be like, wow.
When you go back and listen, this is the very first side-by-side comparison I've ever done of anything you've recorded, literally listening to the song, then listening to Coltranes. And it made me appreciate it even more because the quartet, as I've known it, has morphed over the years. But to hear all the players, especially Joey on this one, because on the vocal tracks where Diane is there, Joey's, you know, heavily featured.
And to hear that and hear this choices that Joey is making on how much to play within a measure and and when to be quiet and it is it's really cool to think about it, being totally fresh but also as a series of new choices.
Bran (14:17)
Yeah, well when the John Coltrane was getting to this place, the things he was hearing were getting more complicated and faster. So on that particular record, there's that thing in music called the two-fill where the two feel the music feels twice as fast as it actually is. So in a regular tempo you go one, two, three, four, and they're going one and two and three and four and one and two and three and four.
When the solo comes, they're playing there. Ding, ding, dang, ding. That's a two-fill. It sets up getting to a faster meter. And one of the things that that I said when we started talking about this record is we're not gonna do two-fills. We might do one, but we're not gonna have the songs constantly, we're not gonna constantly hint at the two-field. The songs will be played in the temple where they are. And so the solos will have to change. Because when
you're playing, in lower meter, the songs you just can't it doesn't have that jump, that bounce that we like. And you can't it doesn't really make sense to play a lot of fast stuff when when solos are like that. So we we had to I mean not really rethink because we don't do that. We just had to adapt to what what it was and and play the songs where they are.
Kristi Wooten (15:53)
Talk about the recording process because Spivey Hall was involved, right? And I I believe I was at that show that you referred to in 2012 that made you think about a room like that. Can you talk about the recording process?
Bran (16:07)
Well the recording process is just very old school. Everybody shows up and we play and we go home. none it's we have baffles up. We have a series of baffles because in modern popular music, electronic music works in isolation. It's astounding that it does. And it does. Acoustic music is terrible in isolation. That's why the records always sound so dead.
I guess there's a lot of musicians who are like afraid of making mistakes. So they always want to be in an environment where they can correct things after they record. I've never really I haven't ever really done that. I haven't thought about that ever. I wanted to make records that are reflective of the records that I love the sound of, and it's all the old stuff. So you go in.
To a room and you use baffles to redirect the sound. You don't want isolation. You want leakage of all the other musicians into the other microphones. You know, so the saxophone is in the bass, the bass is in the piano, the drums are everywhere, and Dianne is everywhere. Now, when you record like that, it's kind of like that Frank Sinatra record is a record called Frank Sinatra on air. And there's all these radio broadcasts. And it's amazing to listen to an hour and a half or two hours of music with absolutely no mistakes and it was all live and direct. And it was just a great thing when musicians were put in a position where they couldn't make mistakes. They didn't. And now in your mind you're always thinking, I can fix that later. So I'm gonna go for this because you know we can always fix it later. And I'm like, well, whatever we do, we're not fixing it later. So it allows us to record in a way that maximizes the sound of the musicians in the room. So it's just there's microphones on each person, and there's microphones in the back of the room. And we have this reverb unit that we were using that does samples. It samples great rooms. And so the reverb unit we use was a sample of Spivey Hall. So it was Spivey all the way. It was it was it was
Kristi Wooten (18:30)
I love that. I love that. Talk about okay, we talked about attack and this is where I wanted to talk with you because I went back to listen to Big Nick and the and and listening to that and kind of the difference in the readiness of the tones and your version is very bright with attack. And that's very much the way the quartet has been in recent years, probably always, but specifically this sounds so much like y'all.
Bran (18:59)
Mm-hmm.
Kristi Wooten (19:00)
I would never know that this was a, you know, something that was recorded years and years ago. So tell me about that. And there's there's two versions on the record, right? There's gonna be a extra version. So talk about Pic Nick and the
You know, playing that.
Bran (19:18)
I just thought it was a great song. it was great that John wrote it for Big Nick, who was a great and garrulous fella. He was about six foot six with a very deep voice. And Big Nick was a hey young fella. was it? When I wait when you meet me, whenever you see me, the greeting shall be, I'm gonna look at you and say, Opelakum. And you have to say, Deedle- um. You got it? I said, Yes, sir. And then he would say, Hey, Marsalis Opelakum Deedle um I mean, so he he was this really amazing personality and he knew Trane really well. And Trane wrote a song for him. And it's on the the the the Duke Ellington record. So again, rather than go for the obvious, overcomplicated stuff, we just decided to, you know.
Yeah, let's play Big Nick. And we weren't sure. We did a version with piano, then we did a version without piano. And then we did another version with piano. And I said, all right, we're good. We'll we'll figure it out later.
Kristi Wooten (20:31)
You won't admit it if you got emotional or not. But some of these things, I couldn't tell if it was the blend of sort of, you know, there's Rodgers and Hart, there's all these sort of classic songs that are part of the American songbook. And what does the American songbook mean now? And why, when we capture it in music today, performance today, that not only adds that extra weight but makes us question why they were great in the first place and what did it mean to be part of an American songbook in America. I'm not talking about politics. I'm just talking about that music sometimes will give you a lump in the throat.
Bran (21:12)
Right.
Kristi Wooten (21:12)
It's just that post World War Two, it's this, you know, it might be a vision or something that was never going to come true, but it's that hope that there will be a more perfect union that's captured in some of that music in my opinion. I didn't know if you had an opinion on that.
Bran (21:27)
Yeah, just at the end of the day musicians play music and and we're not, very few of us are Pollyanna about these things. They wrote Broadway show tunes. And they had to have those songs to be effective had to have a certain emotion or the potential for emotion because... I guess the best way I can put it is I was talking to to my classical teacher, Harvey Patel, once. And he was not very fond of Baroque music that I'd started listening to. He says, Yeah, I'm not I don't really like that. And I would talk to other people and they said, I don't really like that. I'm not really a fan of Baroque music. And I'm like, why wouldn't they like this music? And there's a flutist named Berthold Koikin plays the Baroque flute. And I went to a masterclass of his and he was talking to a student. And Baroque music has a lot of motion, you know, bum bum bum bum bum. So he he so Berthold, who's Belgian, he says, you you really love your eighth notes, don't you? And the guy says, Well, well, they're on the page, and he says, Well, yes and no. He says, for instance, if I told you if I asked you what is the value of a dotted quarter note, what would you say? And for the listeners who don't know, a quarter note is worth one beat. The dot increases the length by one half of a beat. The next note is called a half note, that is worth two beats. So Berthold says.
So the the the the student says, Well it's it's one and a half and he says, Well, suppose I told you that a dotted quarter note is a note that's longer than a quarter note, but shorter than a half note. And when he said that, it was just like the little explosion in my brain, like, this is the secret to everything in music.
What makes these songs emotional is how the musicians that play them deliver the song.
I've heard those songs a lot of times and they weren't good by other musicians and they certainly weren't emotional because sometime in the in the in the late fifties, solos became more important than melodies. And it was or you know, maybe it was before that. Yeah, probably the late forties. The solo became the preeminent thing. And if you're playing a song and thinking of the song as a vehicle for your personal improvisation, the melody doesn't stand a chance.
So I think that with all of us listening to traditional music in the 40s, some in the 30s, me a lot in the 30s and the 20s, and a lot of classical music, we all understand the importance of expression and the importance of emotion through sound because of the people that we've been listening to for decades. So I think that
The songs are great, but the songs are only as great as the people who are playing the songs. The songs have the potential for all of the stuff you're talking about, but the musicians have to be cognizant of that possibility and then they have to exploit it. They have to deliver it. And that's the hard part.
Kristi Wooten (25:03)
Well, it's like writers with words. I mean words are just notes and it's how you use them. And you know, talking about the difference between a dotted quarter and a half, you know, that could be transferred to something about writing as well. But but some of these songs like You Are Too Beautiful, obviously Lush Life has been done by everybody, but the one that got me was my one and only love.
For some reason, it's been done by so many people. I went to look it up. I mean, it was done by Frank Sinatra, Ella, Sarah, Dean Martin, Paul McCartney redid it a couple years ago.
Bran (25:29)
Right.
Kristi Wooten (25:41)
That is the one that got me, and I think the recording's less than three minutes or something like that. It's a very short and sweet thing. and it just I don't know. I think it was sonically the spareness of it.
And then just Diane, I mean, I can't say enough that it's just that tone, that recording with you guys.
Bran (26:08)
She really carried in that room. That room suit her perfectly. She just stood at the front of the stage and belted it out. And it was Joey's idea. He says, Hey man, I think this would be really effective if we just did this duo. And I said, Not only would it be effective, it it's it's it breaks up the monotony. So yeah, it's a great idea. And they rehearsed it and then they did one take.
That's the take. And then we kept it moving.
Kristi Wooten (26:37)
Awesome. Well, it reminds me too of when you and your dad [Ellis Marsalis] did the record together and then that live performance. I don't remember what
Bran (26:45)
Yeah, loved ones.
Kristi Wooten (26:46)
Loved ones and I don't remember what year
Bran (26:49)
1996
Kristi Wooten (26:50)
But it's got "Maria" on it.
Bran (26:52)
Yeah.
Kristi Wooten (26:53)
just it reminded me of that, that feel just beautiful. So congrats on that.
Does music get in the way for you of your life?
Bran (27:11)
You gotta be more specific.
Kristi Wooten (27:14)
Does it ever keep you from doing what you want to do? I'm not talking about time wise. I'm talking about mentally. Do you feel like it's ever in your way?
Bran (27:24)
Mm, no. I have to think about that. I'm in its way, I guess, more than it's in my way. But I when I wake up at three thirty in the morning, I immediately put in in one in one of these air pods or one of these headsets and I listen to a podcast because if I don't, music will start flooding the zone and I will never be able to go back to sleep. And it's like random stuff. Pop songs from the seventies, Baroque tune. It could be anything. And it just I and sometimes I when I don't
It'll be five thirty in the morning or something and I'll get up and say, Why in the hell did my brain go there? And I I don't have an answer to that, but the music thing is always it's always there. I'm either singing a song or hearing the song. And I do other things. I mean, I watch a lot of sports. That keeps me away from dealing with music.
I try to be more involved in my my kids' lives now that we're older because I'm not traveling with the same ferocity that I well, I will be this year, but generally speaking, it hasn't been this this intense in a long time. So I missed a lot of their growing up. But yeah, I mean it it's always yeah, the music, it's always there. And I'm always listening to things. I'm constantly I listen all day long. I don't
Kristi Wooten (29:08)
If you had
Bran (29:08)
study all day long, I listen all day long.
Kristi Wooten (29:10)
Yeah. If you had one musical do over, what would it be? One thing you could do over.
Bran (29:18)
I don't know. I really don't.
I mean, just about all those records in the eighties I could do over because I just wasn't that I wasn't that good.
But then those records allowed me to be here. Hmm?
Kristi Wooten (29:31)
I like that's record.
Royal Garden Blues.
Bran (29:36)
No, it was terrible. But
but I know why it was terrible. It it you but it was a moment in time. I was twenty six years old, you know, and I didn't pl play jazz as a younger person. I was kinda like
Five years, six years, six years into playing jazz with a year and a half of it playing with Sting, which allowed me to learn two Ben Webster records front to back on a cassette tape. So I was in the process of learning all of these things and I wasn't anywhere near being fully formed. So but I wouldn't do it over. But if I had to do it, there are a couple of records where I say, yeah.
Like to get another crack at that. But I wouldn't wanna all the things you do and everything that happens to you influences who you are now. And, you know, you start trying to tinker with that, the butterfly effect takes over. So who knows what would happen.
Kristi Wooten (30:39)
And we're still being formed now.
Because when I talk
Bran (30:41)
Exactly.
Kristi Wooten (30:42)
to you, when we're looking at each other, I'm young and you're young now, even though we not
Bran (30:48)
No honey. I am not young. I am not young.
Kristi Wooten (30:53)
... but we are in our minds. It's all still there. And that's the way music is.
Bran (30:55)
I'm constantly studying. I mean, that's just a long time ago, or in my in my mid or late my late twenties, I'd say. I I I was talking to my friends and there was a lot of rhetoric about innovation and it was then that I realized I'm just gonna be a student for the rest of my life. Where because they were like, Well, man, you know, I I I wanna get to my own thing, you know, I wanna get like a couple of things that identify me. And that's a very like kind of business- minded approach to actually playing music. And I I mean I wasn't gonna argue against it. I was like, okay, yeah, interesting. But that was never gonna be me. So I'm I'm still learning music and still listening to things.
Kristi Wooten (31:40)
Lifelong student and curiosity, I think, is what keeps people alive. If you meet a hundred year old, they're still curious. So that's that's what we do.
Bran (31:47)
I agree. I agree.
Kristi Wooten (31:49)
Thank you, Branford. the album is dedicated to you. It's on Blue Note with Diane Reeves and the Branford Marsalis Quartet. And it'll be out on September eighteenth. If not, I will correct that day. And I know
Bran (32:03)
Thank you, dear. It's great to see you.
Kristi Wooten (32:06)
Be safe.
See you later. Bye.
Bran (32:07)
All right, Kristi. Bye. See ya. Bye.
Comments