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  ...