Blues Without the Dues From the Brothers Marsalis : <i> Items are rated on a scale of one star (poor) to four (excellent).</i> : ** BRANFORD MARSALIS “I Heard You Twice the First Time” <i> Columbia</i>

Strange, strange. Here are two gifted artists--Marsalis brothers Branford and Delfeayo--with a promising premise, an album devoted to the blues. How could they have fallen so short of the mark?

Producer-annotator Delfeayo Marsalis finds a need to legitimize the blues by dragging in arcane references to Chinese sages Confucius and T’ao Ch’ien. At one point he tells us that this is “not a blues album in the academized sense,” yet later we learn that one track is “an excellent example of . . . academizing music.”

Almost half the cuts are not strictly blues. Among these are a nine-minute, quasi-free improvised opening track and a closing number with split tones and squawks, both by Branford on tenor sax. Another tune is a Dixieland-type rouser, totally non-blues-related.

Of the guest singers, John Lee Hooker comes off best while B. B. King sounds uninvolved, singing unoriginal lyrics. Linda Hopkins is saddled with a minor lament that’s light-years away from the authenticity of the Broadway show she starred in, “Me and Bessie.” One number, “Berta,” isn’t played at all--it’s an old chain-gang holler and is sung a cappella by the leader and actors who performed it onstage in August Wilson’s “The Piano Lesson.”

Despite moments of discovery by the leader and his sidemen, there is here a sad sense of overintellectualization--something that blues has never needed. Maybe he hasn’t learned the lesson brother Delfeayo points out in his notes: You gotta pay dues to understand the blues.