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How Branford Marsalis Found Ma Rainey’s Sound

Updated: Mar 28, 2023

The jazz icon on finding the perfect singer to voice Viola Davis’s title character, working with the late Chadwick Boseman, and a career filled with unexpected twists and turns.



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.)


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