Sean Mason: Eight Arms to Hug You

A protégé of jazz/classical luminary Branford Marsalis, Sean Mason first came to wide attention with his 2023 release, The Southern Suite. But the Juilliard-trained pianist, composer and band leader had already established himself as a vital part of the jazz community. His music has a distinctively melodic character; that quality arose naturally thanks to Mason’s formative years.

“I love melody,” he explains. “I grew up singing in church, and I also grew up with popular music.” He notes that in his younger years, his friends and classmates didn’t listen to jazz. “Who wanted to listen to jazz?” he asks rhetorically, and with a laugh. “I didn’t want to go to school and be like, ‘Hey man, you heard these Coltrane records?’ Nobody cared about those kinds of things!”

But Mason did care. “I’m thankful to have parents who introduced me to that music,” he says. At home he’d hear the music of Duke Ellington and Ray Charles; for Mason, the latter represented a bridge between jazz and popular music. And unlike his friends, he willingly, enthusiastically listened to jazz. “I remember being 13 or 14 and having my headphones on at school,” he says. He was spinning some Miles Davis. “The trumpet was so loud that they could hear it through the ‘phones. And my friends were picking on me.” Mason says that it was “a journey” to develop the confidence to admit liking jazz.

Mason says that as he listened and studied the form, it was the music’s melodic qualities that drew him in. “So when I had the opportunity to write and record my music, I wanted to make sure to honor those values,” he says.

Mason encountered one of his inspirations when he was an 18 year old student at UNC Greensboro. “I met Branford Marsalis when he was an Artist-in-residence at North Carolina Central.” Once a semester, Marsalis gave a lesson to students at other colleges. When he visited UNCG, he met Mason. “He really took a liking to my playing,” Mason says. Not long after, Marsalis took the young pianist on the road with him.

Marsalis enlisted Mason to play piano on his soundtrack for the Academy Award-winning 2020 film Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom. Set in 1927 Chicago, the film features both period music from Rainey and additional pieces composed by Marsalis. Mason says that his mission for the pandemic-era sessions in New Orleans was a specific and challenging one. “Musically, I had to pretend that 1930 and after didn’t happen,” he explains. “The only thing that happened was the ‘20s and before.” That meant clearing his piano style of any influences that came from most of the 20^th century and beyond.

“It took a lot of studying piano playing of the 1920s,” Mason says. He had to dig deep into the music of the 19^th century as well. “Because that’s what they were listening to,” he says. “It made me get down into classical music as well as [exploring] the differences between ragtime and traditional jazz.”

That experience informed Mason’s solo debut. Featuring all original material, The Southern Suite has a character that once again displays Mason’s emphasis upon melody. He says that the album’s eight pieces “all come from the same melodic and harmonic family; they’re just different branches of that tree.” He believes that sense binds the songs together as a cohesive whole. “They feel like eight different arms, all hugging you.”

He believes that rather than sporting a Southern “sound,” the album as a whole instead has a Southern sensibility. “I think the Southern tradition instilled some traditional values in me as a person,” he says, “values that then I can portray in my music.”

Central among those values, Mason believes, is a respect for one’s elders. “There’s a lot to learn from them,” he says. “And the South has taught me that history repeats itself.” He says that studying music of the past and honoring his roots has brought a certain character to his original work. With The Southern Suite, he aimed to express his own musical voice while remaining rooted in tradition. “I grew up with that sound, that soul, that spirit,” he says. “It’s something that I don’t think you can get many places elsewhere. And I’m grateful for it.”

Both pieces – playing the music of others, composing and playing original works – fit together seamlessly for Sean Mason. “Some people are only composers, and some are only interpreters; we see that a lot in classical music,” he says. “I love the discipline of both: trying to master the art of interpretation – which is its own art form: getting into the composer’s head and understanding what he or she may want in the composition – and then also trying to master the art of composition.”

Mason’s Quartet and Quintet play a bit of music by other composers, but he says that the groups mostly focus on his original music. And it all comes from inspiration. “Music can’t come from itself,” he says. “I believe that artists have to be inspired by something,” Mason says. “Otherwise art can’t be created.”