The Jazzman and the Jokester : Celebrated tenor saxophonist Branford Marsalis, now seen on ‘The Tonight Show,’ will appear Saturday at UC Santa Barbara.

Depending on who’s talking, the man with the horn either could be referred to as “The Tonight Show’s” Branford Marsalis or “The jazz world’s young lion,” Branford Marsalis.

In fact, of course, he is both. By day, Marsalis hustles around the set at NBC in Burbank, preparing music for the 5:30 taping of the late-night talk show. But by night, the real Branford Marsalis, one of the finest tenor saxophonists in jazz, comes out to play.

At 32, Marsalis is the eldest sibling of the illustrious New Orleans jazz family whose name is synonymous with the current jazz scene.

If his career as a bandleader has been eclipsed by that of his more compositionally inclined brother, trumpeter Wynton Marsalis, the saxophonist sibling has nonetheless built up an intriguing, varied discography.

And it is on the promotional trail of his latest album, “I Heard You Twice the First Time,” that the jazz world’s Branford Marsalis will come to the UC Santa Barbara Events Center this Saturday. Joining Marsalis’ regular band will be blues belter Linda Hopkins and blues guitar legend Albert Collins.

In the past, Marsalis has used the forum of his albums to experiment with different formats and styles. His latest project is his most encyclopedic yet, an ambitious sampling of the prominent threads of African-American musical experience:

Besides a strong whiff of the blues--guests include Hopkins, B. B. King and John Lee Hooker--the album also features a tribute to the pre-swing early jazz of Sidney Bechet, a slave-era work chant; a free-jazz-like social tirade called “Simi Valley Blues”, and tunes more typical of his recent trio music with bassist Bob Hurst and drummer Jeff Watts.

In spite of its all-over-the-map variety, the album has zoomed up the jazz charts to the top position. No doubt, the fact that Marsalis appears nightly on a television near you hasn’t hurt his public visibility.

So far, on the job at “The Tonight Show,” Marsalis has succeeded in injecting a rare degree of musical integrity and diversity into the cracks of the program--those brief segues in and out of commercials. He slips in jazz standards and rarities--putting little bugs in the public’s ear, if only for 5.5 seconds at a crack.

“The thing that’s great about Jay (Leno) is that he recognizes that music isn’t his forte, at all,” said Marsalis, sitting in his office and headquarters at NBC. “He doesn’t really pass an opinion on what music we should play. We work well as a team.”

Although he said he had trepidation about signing on with the show when the call came from Leno almost a year ago, once committed, Marsalis got into the spirit of creating a new late-night entity.

“Music has had an extremely low priority in the history of television,” he said. “This isn’t anything to slag off Johnny (Carson). If you think about television shows, it’s like ‘we’ve got a joke, boom, bam. Oh, we’ve got nothing here. Hey, put some music in there.’

“I never thought the show could go wrong, from day one,” he asserted. “There was never a second when I thought any problem we might have could be the result of the product.

“Jay and I both share the same philosophy and I read the newspapers enough to know about current events and to know that there are a lot of people out there who share the same philosophy. I knew it couldn’t go wrong.”

Much has been made of the contrast between the Marsalis brothers. Wynton has maintained a focused, purist attitude toward jazz, resisting crossover moves into pop. Branford, on the other hand, was Sting’s right-hand horn player, plays on pop records, gets paychecks from NBC and admits to having broad musical tastes.

Take, for instance, jazz-rock fusion.

“Fusion left a big impression on me,” he said. “Weather Report, Jan Hammer, George Duke/Billy Cobham band, the Headhunters, (Frank) Zappa--’Apostrophe’ was my favorite record.” It’s not surprising that ‘70s fusion music can often be heard tucked into those “Tonight Show” segues.

Strangely, Marsalis has earned a certain reputation for nuzzling up against extra-jazz aspects of show biz. But his own favored mode of musical expression has been a kind of free-flowing hard-bop, with roots in the work of sax icons such as John Coltrane, Sonny Rollins and Ornette Coleman.

Not long after Marsalis relocated to Los Angeles from New York last spring, he began booking club gigs, often playing at the Luneria in West L. A., where he still performs. In that open forum, his band can embark on extended improvisational forays that are the antithesis of the sound-bite aspect of his TV job.

Marsalis’ nights out bring a degree of expressive intensity to a normally more staid, laid-back scene in Los Angeles. He’s not always happy about the playing environment.

“Jazz music serves a different purpose here than in some of the clubs in New York,” he said. In L. A., he added: “It’s just background music. There are clubs like that in New York too, but we don’t play those clubs.

“For people to spend that kind of money to come in, and then just chatter through our music, is funny to me. I guess we’re part of the in crowd now: ‘Hey, I went and heard Branford the other night. Well, I didn’t really hear him. I talked through his show.’ ”

Before Marsalis brought along his grab-bag approach to presenting music on television, saxophonist David Sanborn also attempted to stretch standards with the brave, since-canceled “Night Music.”

Did that show have an influence on Marsalis?

“ ‘Night Music’ was a great idea in one way and a bad idea in another way,” he said. “The only way that eclecticism works is when it’s natural. It was funny to see Sonny Rollins with Leonard Cohen, but it wasn’t anything that I thought would bring forth any hip musical ideas.

“When it did happen, it was almost by accident,” he said. “It was almost as if someone was sitting around with a Sears chemistry set and said, ‘What would happen if we put this with that? Maybe it will blow up, maybe it won’t.’ I definitely dug the concept of the show, though.”

Still, listening to his new album or his song selection on “The Tonight Show,” Marsalis obviously has a belief in the power of the E-word.

“Eclecticism comes naturally,” he insisted. “That’s the way I grew up. I joined Sting’s band long before ‘Night Music.’ My idea was not just to be a jazz sax player in a rock band, but actually bring something to that idiom that hadn’t been there in awhile. That took me about eight months to get it right.

“This show is an extension of that,” he said. “It’s still a work-in-progress. That’s what makes it so great.”

* WHERE AND WHEN

Jim Carrey, Branford Marsalis with Albert Collins and Linda Hopkins, UC Santa Barbara Event Center, 8 p.m. Saturday. Tickets: $20, $30 and $40. For more information, call 688-6628.