Imagine holding one of the most lucrative jobs in entertainment, bandleader for The Tonight Show, where all you have to do is play great music and fake a big smile at every joke. Branford Marsalis was incapable of faking it. This episode follows him from the Marsalis dynasty in New Orleans, where his father Ellis was a pianist and professor and his mother Dolores a jazz singer and teacher, through a high school R&B cover band called The Creators, studies with Alvin Batiste at Southern University and at Berklee, and touring with Art Blakey while still a student.

The conversation covers his years alongside brother Wynton in the Jazz Messengers, his 1985 departure to join Sting on The Dream of the Blue Turtles and Live Aid at Wembley, the saxophone cover of Lift Every Voice and Sing that opens Do the Right Thing, unrehearsed jams with the Grateful Dead, the Tonight Show years from 1992 to 1995, and the hip-hop project Buckshot LeFonque with DJ Premier. It then turns to the death of pianist Kenny Kirkland in 1998, the founding of Marsalis Music in 2002, the post-Katrina Musicians’ Village built with Harry Connick Jr., classical debuts with the New York Philharmonic, a Drama Desk Award for the Broadway revival of Fences, and his 2024 return to New Orleans to lead the Ellis Marsalis Center for Music.

• Why the soprano saxophone’s unforgiving intonation demanded a different embouchure
• How he answered the jazz police who accused him of selling out
• Why a viewer’s misreading of his serious demeanor became a rumor he hated Jay Leno
• How syncopation let a fluid saxophone line lock into a rigid hip-hop grid
• His idea of defensive playing and why decades of trust let his quartet take risks