Don Braden

Saxophonist Don Braden is a Harvard-educated computer engineer who’s also happened to be one of the best tenor saxophone players in the world over the last 36 years. Raised in Louisville, Braden picked up the tenor sax at 13 and two years later was playing gigs. Accomplished scholastically and musically as a prep, Braden earned acceptance to Harvard to study engineering and was also named first chair of the McDonald’s All-American High School Jazz and Marching bands. In college, he played in Harvard’s Jazz Combo Initiative, a group several decades later he’d lead for three years as interim conductor. As a junior at Harvard, and at a crossroads about whether to pursue computers or music full time, Braden took a leave from school and moved to New York City. “I look back on that today,” he told JazzTimes in 2017, “and I see that the universe was telling me that I was obviously on the right path.” He picked up early gigs with Dr. Lonnie Smith and Betty Carter, recording on the latter’s Grammy-winning Look What I Got (1988), and, not lacking for chutzpah, cold-called Wynton Marsalis. “I said, ‘Mr. Marsalis, my name is Don Braden and I want to play with you,’” Braden recounted in 2017. “That October, when Branford [Marsalis] left Wynton’s band to join Sting, Wynton called me and said ‘Come make some music with me.’” Braden ended up playing with Marsalis for two years. The experience must’ve been positive because he kept playing in groups led by trumpeters: Freddie Hubbard’s quartet from ’89 to ’91 and Tom Harrell’s bands from ’93 to ’97. He debuted as a leader in 1991, with The Time is Now, which featured Harrell and a young Christian McBride on bass. The next year, Braden met Dutch bassist Joris Teepe, the start of a nearly 30-year working relationship. Their most recent albums together are 2016’s Conversations and the recently released In the Spirit of Herbie Hancock (2020), recorded live in The Hague. As a composer and bandleader, Hancock has been an inspiration, as have Miles Davis and Art Blakey. As a saxophonist, Dexter Gordon, George Coleman, and Bennie Maupin are among those after whom Braden’s modeled his playing. JazzTimes has called Braden, “A musical omnivore with a sound that is both contemporary and evocative of classic midcentury tenormen.” The omnivore part is dead-on; Braden’s output is rooted is straight-ahead post-bop, but his oeuvre includes forays into funk, Brazilian music, and even pop. His most recent release as a standalone leader is 2018’s Earth, Wind, and Wonder, new arrangements of tunes made famous by Earth, Wind, and Fire and Stevie Wonder, performed in the modern jazz style. The melodies and harmonies of rock, pop, and soul are what first attracted Braden to music as a child. So while he pays tribute to the greats of his instrument—The Voice of the Saxophone (1997)—he does the same for acts like Steely Dan, Chaka Khan, and Pat Metheny—Don Braden Presents the Contemporary Standards Ensemble (2000). “My musical attitude is like Duke Ellington’s,” Braden told JazzTimes, “there’s good music and bad music.” In addition to teaching and conducting at Harvard, Braden also led the jazz studies program at Montclair State University for two years and has served as the music director of Litchfield Jazz Camp in Connecticut for nearly twenty. He’s also composed music for film and television, most notably for CBS and Nickelodeon programming; it’s something he began doing for film and dance projects while at Harvard. Braden also just happens to be the perfect artist to feature during the run-up to Thanksgiving; one of the most memorable cuts off of his 2015 album, Luminosity, is a funky clucker called “Jive Turkey.” -Matt Silver

Photo Credit: Lindsey Victoria Photography