Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom is a story in which the music has to be authentic and the details need to be correct. It requires the musical oversight of someone who has this history in his blood. It requires Branford Marsalis.
While George C. Wolfe’s new adaptation of August Wilson’s classic play isn’t a biopic per se, Viola Davis does play real-life “Mother of the Blues” Ma Rainey during a stressful, fictionalized recording session in Chicago in the late 1920s. Chadwick Boseman, representing the next step in jazz’s evolution, is the eager horn player Levee, who butts heads with Ma, the rest of the group (Glynn Turman, Colman Domingo, and Michael Potts), their not-quite-righteous record producer (Jonny Coyne), and Ma’s harried manager (Jeremy Shamos).
Marsalis wrote the film’s score and produced the tracks we hear being recorded in it, giving vocalist Maxayn Lewis (who performed most of the title character’s singing) the unenviable task of sounding like Ma Rainey without mimicking her. Marsalis was more than up for the task: the three-time Grammy-winning saxophonist and composer shot to notoriety in his early 20s and has spent the last three decades exploring various genres (straight jazz, fusion-pop, Western classical, even jam-band-style grooves) with starry collaborators like Sting, Gabriel Prokofiev, and his brother Wynton, another member of jazz’s first family. (Their brother Delfeayo plays trombone; their brother Jason plays drums; their father, Ellis, who died earlier this year from COVID-19 complications, was a pianist and educator after whom the Ellis Marsalis Music Center for Music in New Orleans is named.)
Below, we speak with Marsalis about his work on Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (and other matters) as the film makes its bow on Netflix.
Vanity Fair: How familiar were you with the play when you came aboard Ma Rainey?
Branford Marsalis: I’ve been aware of it for 30 years, but I never had an opportunity to see it. When it came out I was 22, and not a lot of 22-year-olds are hanging out at the theater, unless they’re actors. I didn’t do a lot until my mid-30s. That’s when I started paying more attention to the wider world. Never too old to learn.
Was the plan always for you to both do the score and produce the tracks we see being recorded, or did one lead to another?
George wanted the combination, but he is a minimalist. He doesn’t want a lot of underscore. He comes from theater and believes in the sanctity of the written and spoken word. Also, he wanted me to consult with the actors so they could look like musicians physically.
The tracks you produced include covers of historic songs in the world of jazz and blues. I don’t want to suggest this was intimidating—you did recently perform your version of “A Love Supreme”—
[Warmly] Yeah, I am a few decades past being intimidated…
But a track like “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” is still a biggie. What’s your strategy to re-record something so well-known?
I have an advantage. It was well-known, but it isn’t well-known now. After that, it’s a matter of listening to the song to find its sonic intent. Many times we pass off a song’s intent by the lyrics, but there’s always an inherent conflict. If you listen to that first Alanis Morissette record from the ’90s, the word at the time was, she’s writing fiery, pro-women, “angry” songs, when in fact, she was writing fiery, pro-women, “angry” lyrics. But with very happy, traditional, poppy [melodies].
It was that combination. If the songs had lyrics like Nick Cave and sounded like Nick Cave, it would be received like Nick Cave—for the hard-core fan, not the casual person. I was also somewhat hamstrung by August Wilson. In the play, there are only four musicians, whereas on the original version, there’s at least eight. So you have to find the right musicians and the right singer.
Maxayn Lewis is not a household name. Then you look at who she’s worked with—Bonnie Raitt, Van Morrison, Smokey Robinson, Donna Summer—and it’s, “wow!”