Branford Marsalis Stretches Into Avant-Garde

Saxophonist Branford Marsalis, like tennis star Venus Williams, bears the burden of having a high-achieving younger sibling--in his case, the Lincoln Center’s influential trumpeter and Music Director Wynton Marsalis. And one wonders if that familial reality has had anything to do with Branford Marsalis’ mercurial musical nature, with his history of moving through a changing series of creative guises.

The Marsalis who turned up at UCLA’s Royce Hall Thursday night in front of an all-star quartet, which also included pianist Joey Calderazzo, bassist Eric Revis and drummer Jeff “Tain” Watts, was different from the Marsalis who has recently worked with just a trio, from the Marsalis who once led the band on “The Tonight Show With Jay Leno,” from the Marsalis who toured with Sting.

This Marsalis seemed, for the most part, to be determined to stretch much of his playing into the frontier areas of the avant-garde. In several lengthy improvisations, he probed the outer limits of his horn, dredging up multiphonics, rapid-fire runs, high harmonics and other, indefinable combinations of sounds. And he did so while retaining constant contact with a solid sense of swing; even in the wilder moments, his solos were driven by a propulsive forward movement.

But Marsalis’ musical elusiveness never quite slipped away. Just when he seemed on the verge of establishing a pattern--however complex the sounds he was producing may have been--he would shift gears, move in another direction, refuse to be pinned down stylistically. It was the work of an extremely adventurous musical mind. And, to his credit, despite the lack of focus in some of his wild forays, there was no absence of creative ideas.

Always a potential major voice on tenor and soprano saxophones, Marsalis, at 39, once again seemed to suggest that he was on the verge of delivering on that promise. Given his often quixotic musical temperament, however, there are no guarantees that he will continue to move in any single direction. And he raised a whimsical warning flag to caution against any specific expectations by climaxing his set with a honking, blues-infected solo draped in the cloak of rhythm-and-blues tenor-saxophone legend King Curtis. He might as well have closed with Cole Porter’s “Don’t Fence Me in.”