Taking the stage, he adjusted his saxophone neck strap, walked over to the microphone and in a low, disarming voice said, “Hello, Iowa.” The crowd stood up and welcomed the Branford Marsalis Quartet to a sold-out Englert Theatre on Saturday night. The concert was one of the many events held across Iowa City on April 3 and 4 as part of the Stop/Time Festival, a two-day, multi-venue, multi-artist spring festival produced by Hancher Auditorium and devoted to innovation and independence in contemporary music and the arts.
“We got off the plane and there was a slight difference of 30 degrees with New Orleans,” Branford Marsalis quipped. Before even playing the first note, he introduced the band members: Eric Revis on bass, Justin Faulkner on drums, and Joey Calderazzo on the piano.
Throughout the one-hour concert, Marsalis switched between tenor and soprano saxophones. After playing a few bars he would walk to the back of the stage and sit on a high stool, laughing and swaying his head while letting his band shine.
My first encounter with his work was in the late ’80s when he appeared in Sting’s first solo album The Dream of The Blue Turtles, and later in Nothing Like The Sun, playing amazing solos in songs such as “Fortress Around Your Heart” and “They Dance Alone.”
Years later, at the Belgian Royal Cinemateque in Brussels, I watched Michael Apted’s documentary Bring on the Night and was impressed by Marsalis’ skill. The doc shows the formative stages of the new band Sting had formed, and the playful determination a young Marsalis carried during rehearsals for the 1985 Sting concert at the Mogador theater in Paris.
At the Englert the band played a handful of legendary songs from the blues and jazz canon. During Ted Fisher’s “There Ain’t No Sweet Man That’s Worth the Salt of My Tears,” the band members took turns to improvise. They laughed and teased each other, having a good time. When his turned arrived, Revis scatted the same notes he played on his instrument without breaking a sweat. His brain had to both know what the next improvised note would be and reproduce it with his vocal chords. The audience was in awe.
The highlight of the evening for me was when they played Calderazzo’s “Conversation Among the Ruins,” which appears in the 2019 quartet’s album The Secret Between the Shadow and The Soul. The tempo is slow, somewhat nostalgic, which is enhanced by Faulkner’s use of brushes on the snare drum and cymbals. The motifs are exchanged between piano and saxophone, in a conversation that feels intertwined at every measure. It left me wishing they would play “Muldoon” or “The Lonely Swan,” soft jazz ballad pieces from their 2003 album Eternal.
Calderazzo is at the top of my list of soft ballad piano players, his delicate touch on the same level as Kenny Werner’s when he used to perform with the great master of the chromatic harmonica, Toots Thielemans. The quartet closed the evening with a tribute to Duke Ellington, and when the audience kept asking for more, the band came back on stage and gifted them with the 1932 Jimmy McHugh hit “On the Sunny Side of the Street” as an encore.
