Notes from the Horn Section: A Conversation with NPG Saxophonist, Marcus Anderson
Peoples · Spectrum A Journal on Black Men · 2020
Notes from the Horn Section:A Conversation with NPG Saxophonist, Marcus Anderson Deirdre Guion Peoples and Marcus Anderson Recently, I had the pleasure of spending time with musician and performer Marcus Anderson. Marcus is the youngest of seven musically talented siblings originally from Spartanburg, South Carolina. This 33-year-old twin plays several instruments but was in the enviable position of playing saxophone with Prince and the New Power Generation (later known as NPG) for four years. What follows is a truncated version of our conversation. Deirdre Guion Peoples: After graduating from NCCU's (North Carolina Central University) jazz studies program, you travelled around doing lots of different things and people started to learn about you . . . how do you go from there to become a part of NPG? Marcus Anderson: Someone sent Prince one of my videos. . . I was very heavy into videos then. I remember an old manager of mine told me that I need not be focused on being seen so much. She thought I was very vain. My response to her was, "No, you're not understanding—people are visual." I remember back before social media I was posting pictures and videos. . . If you create just one video people can share it, they can view it and it can be seen across the world. This is going to create more opportunities for me. I was right, she was wrong. DGP: So. . .. she's no longer your manager? MA: Correct. I knew that I needed to do the video. So, I took the last little bit of money I had and put in it to getting this video edited. I thought, it's not going to be a quick return, it's going to be a slow return and that's exactly what it was. I put that out in the summer of 2011, by the next year I'd been hired by Sheila E and Prince, [End Page 189] in that order. First, Prince saw the video because someone sent it to him. . . And I remember getting a call from a colleague of mine saying, ". . . you know Prince loves your video he wants to hire you..." In the beginning when we were talking, he wanted me, Trombone Shorty, and Maceo Parker to play in the band. He wanted me to play tenor sax, Maceo to play alto, and Trombone Shorty to play trumpet and trombone. That was going to be the dynamic. Later, everything started changing and developing. Then he (Prince) did Welcome to Australia, but didn't bring me on right away. He brought me on shortly after that because I think he wanted to develop a new horn section. He got the idea to have younger guys. . .. So that's when other musicians in the band started reaching out to their friends. That's when one my other friends, Adrian Crutchfield, got asked and was invited to be in the band. He (Adrian) and I actually started helping to put together a horn section with younger guys who could dance and play. That's how we developed the 11-piece horn section (known as the hornz section of NPG). DGP: I was reading about that and thought, that's a BIG horn section! MA: It's a very big horn section. We ended up orchestrating a lot of things for the horn section. I was asked to be the section leader by Prince, but it didn't work with my schedule because while I was with him, I was still touring and performing on my own. So, Adrian had to take the role of being more of the section leader of the band. I was more like his assistant when it came to that. A lot of decisions that were made with the horn section came through me and Adrian—things like wardrobe and stuff. Prince would send an email to Adrian and we would talk about it and that would be it. DGP: As a section it sounds like you all had a fair amount of autonomy. MA: Yes, we really did. We created a lot of the horn arrangements too. DGP: Oh Wow! I'm surprised to hear that. Was that really how...