A new Tonight Show host means a new Tonight Show Band, and Jay Leno recruited a hesitant Branford Marsalis to lead an overdue overhaul. Signing on after turning down the job at first, Marsalis made good on a promise from Leno: that he could play "whatever he wanted to play." Jazz progressed quite a bit from the Big Band sound the Tonight Show had been playing for nearly 40 years, and Marsalis used his encyclopedic knowledge of jazz to show where the genre was now and where it had been to get there. Branford's reverence for jazz history is a family affair that stems from pater familias and jazz pianist Ellis Marsalis. Along with brother Wynton Marsalis, the three were Side A on the album Fathers & Sons released in 1982 on Columbia Records.
Led in part by the Marsalis family (particularly Wynton,) the 1980s saw a resurgence in straight-ahead jazz. The sub-genre got its start two decades earlier as a reaction to the opening avenues of free jazz and jazz fusion. The latter adopted the electrification of a traditionally acoustic genre while combining with the pop of the era (rock, funk, R&B,) while the former challenged the very foundations of jazz itself. Straight-ahead became from artists dubious of these new and potentially destructive developments. Exactly what it delivered isn't original but more a collation of the established sub-genres and forms of jazz up until, essentially, the last explorations of John Coltrane. When the Marsalis brothers hit the scene, they became heralds (alongside jazz critic Stanley Crouch who wrote the liner notes for Fathers & Sons) of straight-ahead jazz or the homophonic "neo-bop."
Besides the basic tenets of straight-ahead jazz (a sub-genre akin to a setlist where every song is a different mixture of older jazz sub-genres,) neo-bop is also defined extra-musically in its concern for the elevation of jazz in popular, scholarly and historic tastes (think "America's classical music.") It is buttoned up, drug-free, upper middle class. Branford Marsalis playing for The Tonight Show or Wynton Marsalis and Stanley Crouch narrating Ken Burns's Jazz documentary made them (biased) jazz spokespeople to mass audiences. The reverence for the past makes it fitting that one of the earliest neo-bop recordings would be collaborations between jazz fathers and their jazz sons. Side A has Ellis Marsalis (piano) leading Branford (tenor sax,) Wynton (trumpet,) Charles Fambrough (acoustic bass,) and James Black (drums.) Side B is another session with Von Freeman (tenor sax) leading his son Chico Freeman (tenor sax,) Cecil McBee (acoustic bass,) Kenny Barron (piano,) and Jack DeJohnette (drums.)
Both Sides A and B start off with egalitarian manifestos: Ellis Marsalis's hard bop "Twelve's It" and Von Freeman's swinging "Jug Ain't Gone." The combos are clear and practiced and each player takes a solo (but for Charles Fambrough who can't go without notice anyway.) The jazz is fun and welcoming and a throwback, seemingly perfected. The sons get their chance to shine. Branford and Wynton play at sibling bickering on "A Joy Forever" and Chico Freeman takes the album its furthest down the path towards free jazz ("Time Marches On") with a rhythm section that has been there before. (Note: I don't know enough about Von and Chico Freeman to declare the difference between their tenor sax styles, but I'm guessing that Von plays a cooler sax to Chico's more staccato and wailing one.) Ellis and Von are veteran jazz educators and their solos casually bring in disparate influences and color that show how inventive neo-bop can be. The only two songs not written by the "fathers" are each side's closing numbers: Ellis Marsalis, alone, plays Billy Strayhorn's "Lush Life" and Chico Freeman composes a toast in "Tribute to Our Fathers." The sons make way for their fathers.
The overall product and the real effect of neo-bop at large is a jazz reclamation project. Where jazz in the popular consciousness had been alienated by free jazz or numbed by smooth jazz, the standard bearers of a "classical" form of jazz, through their polished Scholasticism, reminded listeners what made the music the dynamic and revolutionary sound of the first half of the 20th Century. Even if the Marsalis and Freeman families aren't writing the future of jazz, they do their part to underline its past.
Here is Fathers and Sons complete discography:
Fathers & Sons
"Rib Tip Johnson" by the Tonight Show Band
(Also, be sure to revisit Leno's first episode in the last entry for a great first performance by Branford and the Tonight Show Band.)
"Tribute to Our Fathers" by Fathers and Sons
Pass the Headphones!!
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