It’s quite a statement that for their first album in five years and their debut on the Blue Note label The Branford Marsalis Quartet have chosen to exclusively record someone else’s music. But as Branford explained to me in a conversation I had with him last week “everybody writes songs these days, nobody cares, nobody remembers. You throw a rock you’ll hit someone calling themselves a composer …. sometime in the ’90s I realised I just wanted to play great songs, not just my best songs. Much like everything else I’ve ever done, my writing improves when I steal from people who are great at it!”
For Belonging that great writer is Keith Jarrett and the songs are those that filled both sides of his 1974 album of the same name with what became known as his European Quartet with Palle Danielsson on bass, Jon Christensen drums and Jan Garbarek saxophones. It’s said that the joyful tunes on the album which features classics The Windup and Long As You Know You’re Living Yours were written with Garbarek in mind and they certainly have a folk-tinge. But the triumph of this re-imaging is it’s neither a re-make, nor a tribute. Somehow this superb quartet manage to stay respectfully close to the compositions while both opening them up and making them their own.
Marsalis’ Quartet is a rare beast – a working band that have decades of touring and recording in the tank. With the passing of Wayne Shorter we are left with very few long-haul bands of this kind. Joey Calderazzo is Branford’s long-term right hand man on piano, with Eric Revis on bass and newcomer Justin Faulkner ( he only joined in 2009!) on drums. The hours, months and years spent playing together are reflected in the spell-binding tightness and all out funky-swing of the band. The ballads build and fade rising in peaks of moving solos from all.
It’s a brilliant album that finds one of the world’s great jazz bands re-imagining a landmark recording that sounds box-fresh fifty years on.
You can hear my conversation with Branford Marsalis on One Jazz over the next few weeks.
This is our album of the week for the week commencing 31st March 2025