Have Horn, Will Dialogue

Branford Marsalis carries his saxophone across the Middle East divide.

Marsalis in mid-solo at the ZOA House’s basement Zappa Café in Tel Aviv last week. In addition to playing in Israel, the leading saxophonist played in Ramallah and had a video conference with musicians in Gaza. Joshua Mitnick

by Joshua Mitnick
Israel Correspondent

Tel Aviv – After an eight-city European tour crammed into 11 days, it might have been simpler to call it quits at the North Sea Jazz Festival and head home. Instead, with his tenor saxophone doubling as an olive branch, Branford Marsalis took his quartet to the Middle East for consecutive engagements in Beirut and Tel Aviv.

While Israelis, Lebanese and the entire region were embroiled in a prisoner swap that reopened the emotional scars the 2006 war, Marsalis — one of today’s most compelling jazz figures and part of the jazz world’s first family — took his group across the armistice line, so to speak. Armed with Duke Ellington, Thelonious Monk and Dizzy Gillespie, he won multiple ovations in Tel Aviv and Beirut,

and there was even time for a side trip to Ramallah and a video conference with musicians in Gaza.

Condi Rice, the peripatetic U.S. secretary of state, couldn’t have scripted it better. Chalk another one up for jazz diplomacy. (Over the years jazz musicians from Louis Armstrong to Gillespie have served as cultural ambassadors, spreading the gospel of jazz across the world.)

After wrapping up a meeting with aspiring Israeli jazz musicians, Marsalis rode a U.S. Embassy van through Tel Aviv’s noonday bottleneck and reflected on gigging across the Arab-Israeli divide.

“I don’t think anyone wants to go after a saxophone player,” he told The Jewish Week, saying that friends’ jokes about Hezbollah kidnappings didn’t deter him from playing in Lebanon. “Grabbing some jazz musicians really isn’t going to do anything,” he said. “I don’t think I’m being naïve.”

Marsalis, 47, is no rookie to cultural diplomacy. He was an up-and-coming saxophonist with Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers when the State Department sponsored the group as jazz ambassadors to Cold War Eastern Europe.

“I remember I was a 20-year-old kid, going to these places, going to these restaurants, hanging out and arguing about communism versus democracy,” he said. “It was one of the best times of my life.”

In the volatile Middle East, the mere existence of major cultural performances carries a certain political significance. The day before Hezbollah handed over the bodies of two Israeli soldiers in return for an arch terrorist, Marsalis’ quartet played near Beirut in the Beiteddine Music Festival — revived for the first time after war and domestic instability forced a three-year hiatus.

According to a concert review in Lebanon’s Daily Star, as jazz fans in the festival’s Chouf mountain venue outside Beirut discussed the impending national celebration of the Hezbollah prisoner swap, they also knew Marsalis was headed to the Jewish state. Still, the only awkward moment Marsalis faced in Lebanon was on his way out.

“The [Lebanese] officials — and I think it’s that they didn’t want any grief on their end — strongly suggested that we didn’t say we were going to Tel Aviv, and that we were going to Amman,” he said.

His Tel Aviv performance — the first since sharing a bill with tenor saxophonist Joshua Redman at the Mann Auditorium nine years ago — was sponsored by the U.S. Embassy to honor Israel’s 60th birthday and the establishment of diplomatic ties between the Jewish state and the U.S.. But, the gig rankled some Palestinians, and several weeks before the concert Marsalis got an e-mail requesting him to boycott the Israel show.

Instead, Marsalis added a visit to Ramallah to meet with Palestinian youths. He also spoke with Gazan musicians by video link.

“It was never my consideration to not play the [Tel Aviv] concert,” Marsalis said. “I thought about what I could do. My road manager said we should release a statement, but I hate those statements. What are you going to say, that ‘Music is about love and we repudiate this? I said the best statement I can make is by doing something.”

But ultimately, Marsalis’ expertise is music rather than geopolitics. (His brother Wynton, a trumpet player, is the jazz world’s biggest star; his other brothers, trombonist Delfeayo and drummer Jason, are A-list players, and his father, Ellis, is a gifted pianist.) In the musical realm, too, he keeps his cultural chops sharp and tailors his concerts accordingly.

“In Beirut, I assumed that a show with songs that are rhythm-heavy with string melodies would work better than traditional modern jazz, which focuses on harmony more than anything else. That was, indeed, the case,” he wrote in an e-mail.

“In Israel, I didn’t think that would be much of a problem, since a majority of the residents have roots in either Europe or the U.S., where virtually all of our sound comes from. We stayed away from the hyper-energetic stuff (ala late John Coltrane), since that didn’t go over so well the last time, and stuck with songs that have good melody.”

One area on Marsalis’ diplomatic wish list but absent was Gaza. This time around, it was simply too politically provocative. Maybe next time, he said. “It’ll happen. One day it will happen.”

Westchester Jewish Conference

Westchester’s Jewish Community Relations Organization