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o w n t p u FU
“I apologize, let me look at the calendar man,” the warm and amicable Marsalis says with a laugh, rifling through pages before locating the gig with the Naples Philharmonic Jazz Orchestra. “Sure enough it says Naples on March 1. Yeah, we’re going to break out a couple of the Mardi Gras songs. The main question is to make sure if we can have the right vocalist for that. But it’ll be a good combination of some New Orleans tunes, some original music and some riff-based tunes.
“They say when I play it’s like a feel good experience. That’s just what we do. So that’s going to leave the folks in good spirits and having a good time.”
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Marsalis, one of the esteemed members of America’s first family of jazz, brought a bevy of uplifting, feel good songs to the new album. He says the inspiration came from creating a non-profit organization during the pandemic called Keep New Orleans Music Alive (KNOMA) and speaking with a variety of “the big chiefs and the members of the Indian tribes here in New Orleans.”
The performer says the conversations planted the seeds for songs such as ‘Big Chief,’ Willie Tee’s song ‘Big Suit’ and Al Johnson’s ‘Carnival Time’, among others. Marsalis also says the effort to get the personnel in a relatively short time period might have been the biggest challenge.
“It’s a lot of moving parts and it took a long time,” he says. “For sure, playing the music was enjoyable, but the process of putting together a CD with that many parts is fairly difficult. When you hear the album it is all cohesive, but we had musicians in different places. Especially with the rhythm section, we had a number of different drummers and we had to match them up with different bass players.”
While there was nothing left on the cutting room floor over the three days of recording in the fall of 2022, Marsalis says of the dozen offerings perhaps the title track was the hardest to nail down.
“The main reason was we had Davell Crawford and he’s playing the really unique, distinctive New Orleans style of piano,” he says. “And we had the horn parts. So it was a matter of trying to make sure it had the right flow and wasn’t too cluttered. He did two or three different passes of the piano part. So what we did was take different sections from different takes. Putting that together was a little tough. Then we had one drum track and then [drummer] Herlin Riley came in and changed it.”
Another intangible was finding a balance between Mardi Gras standards, which primarily rely on a small