Branford Marsalis reflects on Chadwick Boseman, ‘Ma Rainey’
Branford Marsalis had his work cut out for him with “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom.”
For the Netflix adaptation of Pulitzer Prize winner August Wilson’s acclaimed play, Marsalis – the Grammy-winning, Tony-nominated saxophonist, band leader and music historian – served as composer, arranger and executive music producer, tasked with bringing the 1920s blues at the heart of Wilson’s story to life.
But Marsalis didn’t have to worry about Chadwick Boseman. The actor, who found acclaim thanks to his cinematic portrayals of everyone from James Brown to Jackie Robinson to Marvel’s Black Panther, shines in the film as Levee, a haunted and ambitious cornet player backing Ma Rainey (played by Viola Davis).
The turn stands as the final role for Boseman, who died in August at the age of 43 after a four-year battle with colon cancer.
“Because he (Boseman) was an actor of the highest caliber, he didn’t really need my help,” said Marsalis. “I think in societies we create myths, and one of the great myths (is) people who are musicians are musicians first. But in fact all of us are people first and musicians second. Or whatever it is that we are, we’re people first.”
The role of Levee gave Boseman plenty to work with – it’s a part that earned Charles S. Dutton a Tony nomination and a Drama Desk Award in the play’s original 1984 to 1985 run.
“What made Levee’s story unique and compelling wasn’t his trumpet playing,” said Marsalis. “It was all of the conflict that he had inside of himself as a human, how he was able to navigate his life and the tragedies in his life and come to use music to overcome his tragedies and his feelings of disrespect.
“So all of these other ambitions were tied into his music, which was the thing that drove him to create new songs and push back against Ma Rainey, consider her old and out of touch – which, when you think about it, he sounds like the millennials we have today.”
“Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” now in select theaters and streaming on Netflix, is largely set over one hot afternoon in 1927 as Ma Rainey and her band convene in a Chicago recording studio.
Ruben Santiago-hudson wrote the screenplay adaptation of the play, part of Wilson’s 10-part “American Century Cycle,” with five-time Tony winner George C. Wolfe directing and Denzel Washington producing.
Marsalis was previously nominated for a Tony for his score to the 2010 Broadway production of Wilson’s “Fences” starring Washington and Davis.
For this film, part of his work was creating new arrangements of 1920s classics by Ma Rainey, the “Mother of the Blues,” including “Deep Moaning Blues,” “Hear Me Talking to You,” “Those Dogs of Mine” and the title song.
Rainey, a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee who died in 1939, was the only real person featured in one of Wilson’s plays. Marsalis knew he had to get the sound of the movie right.
“The hardest thing is to create an aura of authenticity with the music because I guess it would be similar to the amount of effort that one has to make to create a 1920s Chicago dialect,” Marsalis said. “If you’re not careful, it becomes a caricature, if you don’t have the ability to pay meticulous attention to detail.
“So it was a challenge for me to get the music right, where it sounded authentic and to convince the musicians that they had to play in a way that was almost 180 degrees opposite of the way that they normally play.”
The Louisiana native Marsalis, 60, saidthe musicians had to make do with fewer notes.
“Modern jazz, like modern everything else, is rather noisy and sometimes overly complicated,” he said. “And it’s (set in) an era where jazz is still popular music, so it’s dance music. So a lot of modern jazz players didn’t have the good fortune to actually play in dance bands like I did growing up, especially now that popular music is run by DJS and computers and machines.
“There are fewer and fewer opportunities to just be a teenage kid playing in a band making 20 bucks playing in a bar and stuff like that. ...And when you have a lot of musicians who are really accomplished instrumentalists as well, it can be a little difficult to convince them to go against the instincts that they’ve honed for a couple of decades because it doesn’t fit the style of the music. They have to change the tone of their instruments. They have to change the way that they feel the beat.”
Marsalis also provided Boseman with some musical guidance, writing up a chart of finger positions so the actor could convincingly look like he was playing the cornet while backing Ma Rainey, a role fulfilled in real life by the likes of Louis Armstrong.
“My job was just to make sure that he looked like a cornet player when he was on film,” Marsalis said. “I gave him a few subtle points, but he took that and ran with it because he was a consummate professional, (a) perfectionist.”