Marsalis and Reeves put their own distinctive take on a John Coltrane tribute

John Coltrane’s impact on jazz is immense, and with this year marking the centennial of his birth, Branford Marsalis knew that there would be an equally large amount of tributes to his music, especially among saxophonists. Coltrane’s bracing advances during the 1960s — from incredible tempos to revolutions in harmony — have left musicians awestruck as they try to catch up with his questing velocity. So Marsalis chose a different side of Coltrane to highlight for his new album, “Dedicated to You” (Blue Note), with vocalist Dianne Reeves.

Rather than delve into Coltrane’s role as a free-form trailblazer, Marsalis’ quartet and Reeves revisit the 1963 album “John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman.” On that recording, Hartman’s baritone voice blends with Coltrane’s majestic tone on a stunning set of ballads. For “Dedicated to You,” Marsalis and Reeves bring their own personalities to these songs though subtle changes, which present their own challenges for musicians who express their individuality through Coltrane’s music. Marsalis and Reeves will perform tracks from this disc on Oct. 16 at Orchestra Hall.

“I thought there’s going be a hundred records of this nature coming out,” Marsalis said of Coltrane centennial tributes. “Funk versions, hip-hop versions, jazz versions, modern versions, so I said, let’s just play against type. We’ve already recorded [Coltrane’s] ’A Love Supreme’ [on ’Footsteps of Our Fathers’ in 2002], so let’s go in another direction.”

Marsalis chose Reeves to contribute soon after he decided to take on this project. They had never worked together previously, although she almost joined trumpeter Clark Terry’s big band when Marsalis was a member of the ensemble in 1980. He said her duo with guitarist Romero Lubambo in particular showed him what he finds most important in a singer who collaborates with his group. Recording “Dedicated to You” confirmed it.

“She’s a singer of song,” Marsalis said. “A lot of singers want to think of themselves as a saxophonist, and I’m already a saxophonist. I don’t need a second saxophonist onstage. None of what I wanted was to scat, she just sang the songs, and it was great.”

That emphasis on the sound of the songs, rather than using them to assert improvisational prowess, means that Marsalis’ directive is, in his words, “to learn now 100 years of music sonically, not harmonically.” As an example, he refers to how a chamber ensemble could revisit Coltrane’s 1963 album.
    

“We need to think more like a string quartet,” Marsalis said. “We need to be dependent on one another, and all parts should to be interdependent on everything else that’s going on. Once we agree on that general philosophy, then all things are possible at that point. It was the perfect time for us to do a record like this because none of us are hung up on technique anymore. On most of the songs on the original record, Coltrane was leaning to play more and more notes, so all the songs had a double time feel, when the tempo is doubled when the singer is not singing. Which leaves a lot of maneuverability for the soloist to play fast notes, and it creates a motion that I wanted to stay away from. We wanted to just keep it ballad tempo and explore it sonically. Not to try to use each song as a vehicle for our own personal solos.”

That concept also directed how the group developed new ideas together while respecting the emotional integrity of the compositions’ earlier versions. One example is the band’s introduction to “Autumn Serenade.”

“[Bassist Eric] Revis said, ‘I can play this bass line,’” Marsalis said. “He’s been listening to Israel ‘Cachao’ Lopez from Cuba — he had fantastic bass lines. So it was one of these Cachao things, he played it, and I said, ‘Yeah, that’s the vibe.’ Once that’s set, then the whole song becomes a different song. We didn’t have to talk through the rest of it. It was [drummer] Justin Faulkner’s decision to use hands rather than sticks. It was part of the natural organic music-making process. We don’t over-arrange, overthink or overwrite.”

Since “John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman” contained six songs, its roughly half-hour playing time was not enough for today’s era of CDs and streaming. So the quartet brought in three other Coltrane pieces, including pianist Joey Calderazzo’s idea of interpreting “Central Park West” as an introspective saxophone/piano duo. The intention was to embrace tunes that have not been performed so often.

“Everybody’s going to play ‘Impressions’ and ‘Giant Steps’,” Marsalis said, referring to two of Coltrane’s signature songs. “We’re not doing any of that.”

Along with Marsalis’ high profile in jazz, he worked in an R&B band as a teenager and combined that idiom with hip-hop and jazz in his 1990s group, Buckshot LeFonque. That background echoes Coltrane’s time playing blues in the late 1940s with musicians such as vocalist/saxophonist Eddie “Cleanhead” Vinson. Marsalis said that such disparate experiences enhance one’s musical personality.

“Everything you learn, you keep,” Marsalis said. “You don’t have to think about it — it’s there. I can listen to people who are starting to play jazz, and I can tell if they went to a gospel church or a Catholic church just by how they approach the sound, how they approach the notes. When I get them to start listening to jazz records, they’ll say, ‘I’m going to lose my gospel chops’ and that’s what I tell them: Everything you learn, you keep. It never goes anywhere.”