The most famous jazz musician since 1980, Wynton Marsalis
had a major impact on jazz almost from the start. In the early '80s, it
was major news that a young and very talented black musician would
choose to make a living playing acoustic jazz rather than fusion, funk,
or R&B. Marsalis'
arrival on the scene started the "Young Lions" movement and resulted in
major labels (most of whom had shown no interest in jazz during the
previous decade) suddenly signing and promoting young players. There had
been a major shortage of new trumpeters since 1970, but Marsalis' sudden prominence inspired an entire new crop of brass players. The music of the mid-'60s Miles Davis Quintet had been somewhat overshadowed when it was new, but Marsalis' quintet focused on extending the group's legacy and soon other "Young Lion" units were using Davis' late acoustic work as their starting point.
During his career, Marsalis
has managed to be a controversial figure despite his obvious abilities.
His selective knowledge of jazz history (considering post-1965
avant-garde playing to be outside of jazz and '70s fusion to be barren)
is unfortunately influenced by the somewhat eccentric beliefs of Stanley Crouch, and his hiring policies as musical director of the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra led to exaggerated charges of ageism and racism from local writers. However, more than balancing all of this out is Marsalis' inspiring work with youngsters, many of whom he has introduced to jazz; a few young musicians, such as Roy Hargrove, have been directly helped by Marsalis.
Marsalis'
trumpet playing has been both over-criticized and (at least early on)
overpraised. When he first arrived on the scene with the Jazz
Messengers, his original inspiration was Freddie Hubbard. However, by the time he began leading his own group, Marsalis often sounded very close to Miles Davis (particularly when holding a long tone), although a version of Davis
with virtuosic technique. He was so widely praised by the jazz press at
the time (due to their relief that the future of jazz finally seemed
safe) that there was an inevitable backlash. Marsalis'
sometimes inaccurate statements about jazz of the '70s and the
avant-garde in general made some observers angry, and his rather
derivative tone at the time made it seem as if there was always going to
have to be an asterisk by his name when evaluating his talents. Some
listeners formed permanent impressions of Marsalis as a Miles Davis imitator, but they failed to take into account that he was still improving and developing. With the 1990 recording Tune in Tomorrow, Marsalis at last sounded like himself. He had found his own voice by exploring earlier styles of jazz (such as Louis Armstrong's playing), mastering the wah-wah mute, and studying Duke Ellington. From that point on, even when playing a Miles Davis standard, Marsalis had his own sound and has finally taken his place as one of jazz's greats.
The son of pianist Ellis Marsalis, the younger brother of Branford and the older brother of Delfeayo and Jason (the Marsalis clan as a whole can be accurately called "The First Family of Jazz"), Wynton (who was named after pianist Wynton Kelly) received his first trumpet at age six from Ellis' employer, Al Hirt. He studied both classical and jazz and played in local marching bands, funk groups, and classical orchestras. Marsalis
played first trumpet in the New Orleans Civic Orchestra while in high
school. He went to Juilliard when he was 18 and in 1980 he made his
first recordings with the Art Blakey Big Band and joined the Jazz Messengers.
By 1981, the young trumpeter was the talk of the jazz world. He toured with Herbie Hancock (a double LP resulted), continued working with Blakey, signed with Columbia, and recorded his first album as a leader. In 1982, Marsalis not only formed his own quintet (featuring brother Branford and soon Kenny Kirkland, Charnett Moffett, and Jeff "Tain" Watts)
but recorded his first classical album; he was immediately ranked as
one of the top classical trumpeters of all time. His quintet with Branford lasted until late 1985, although a rift developed between the brothers (fortunately temporary) when Branford finally quit the band to tour with Sting's pop group. By that time Wynton was a superstar, winning a countless number of awards and polls.
Wynton Marsalis is an internationally acclaimed
musician, composer and bandleader, an educator and a leading advocate of
American culture. He has created and performed an expansive range of
music from quartets to big bands, chamber music ensembles to symphony
orchestras and tap dance to ballet, expanding the vocabulary for jazz
and classical music with a vital body of work that places him among the
world’s finest musicians and composers.
Always swinging, Marsalis blows his trumpet with a clear tone, a
depth of emotion and a unique, virtuosic style derived from an
encyclopedic range of trumpet techniques. When you hear Marsalis play,
you’re hearing life being played out through music.
Marsalis’ core beliefs and foundation for living are based on the
principals of jazz. He promotes individual creativity (improvisation),
collective cooperation (swing), gratitude and good manners
(sophistication), and faces adversity with persistent optimism (the
blues). With his evolved humanity and through his selfless work,
Marsalis has elevated the quality of human engagement for individuals,
social networks and cultural institutions throughout the world.
The Early Years
Wynton was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, on October 18, 1961, to
Ellis and Dolores Marsalis, the second of six sons. At an early age, he
exhibited a superior aptitude for music and a desire to participate in
American culture. At age eight Wynton performed traditional New Orleans
music in the Fairview Baptist Church band led by legendary banjoist
Danny Barker, and at 14 he performed with the New Orleans Philharmonic.
During high school Wynton performed with the New Orleans Symphony Brass
Quintet, New Orleans Community Concert Band, New Orleans Youth
Orchestra, New Orleans Symphony, various jazz bands and with the popular
local funk band, the Creators.
At age 17 Wynton became the youngest musician ever to be admitted to
Tanglewood’s Berkshire Music Center. Despite his youth, he was awarded
the school’s prestigious Harvey Shapiro Award for outstanding brass
student. Wynton moved to New York City to attend Juilliard in 1979. When
he started gigging around the City, the grapevine began to buzz. The
excitement around Wynton attracted the attention of Columbia Records
executives who signed him to his first recording contract. In 1980
Wynton seized the opportunity to join the Jazz Messengers to study under
master drummer and bandleader Art Blakey.
It was from Blakey that Wynton acquired his concept for bandleading and
for bringing intensity to each and every performance. In the years to
follow Wynton performed with Sarah Vaughan, Dizzy Gillespie, Sweets Edison, Clark Terry, John Lewis, Sonny Rollins, Ron Carter, Herbie Hancock, Tony Williams and countless other jazz legends. Wynton assembled his own band in 1981 and hit the road,
performing over 120 concerts every year for 15 consecutive years. With
the power of his superior musicianship, the infectious sound of his
swinging bands and a far-reaching series of performances and music
workshops, Marsalis rekindled widespread interest in jazz throughout the
world and inspired a renaissance that attracted a new generation of
fine young talent to jazz. A look at the more distinguished jazz
musicians to emerge for the decades to follow reveals the efficacy of
Marsalis’ workshops and includes: James Carter, Christian McBride, Roy
Hargrove, Marcus Roberts, Wycliffe Gordon, Harry Connick Jr., Nicholas
Payton, Eric Reed and Eric Lewis, to name a few. Wynton also embraced the jazz lineage to bring recognition to the
older generation of overlooked jazz musicians and prompted the re-issue
of jazz catalogs by record companies worldwide.
Classical Career
Wynton’s love of the music of Bach, Beethoven, Mozart and others
drove him to pursue a career in classical music as well. He recorded the
Haydn, Hummel and Leopold Mozart trumpet concertos
at age 20. His debut recording received glorious reviews and won the
Grammy Award® for “Best Classical Soloist with an Orchestra.” Marsalis
went on to record 10 additional classical records,
all to critical acclaim. Wynton performed with leading orchestras
including the New York Philharmonic, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Boston Pops, The Cleveland Orchestra, Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra, English Chamber Orchestra, Toronto Symphony Orchestra and London’s Royal Philharmonic, working with an eminent group of conductors including: Leppard, Dutoit, Maazel, Slatkin, Salonen
and Tilson-Thomas. A timeless highlight of Wynton’s classical career is
his collaboration with soprano Kathleen Battle on their recording Baroque Duet. Famed classical trumpeter Maurice André praised Wynton as “potentially the greatest trumpeter of all time.”
Record Production
Wynton has produced over 80 records
which have sold over seven million copies worldwide including three
Gold Records. His recordings consistently incorporate a heavy emphasis
on the blues, an inclusive approach to all forms of jazz from New
Orleans to modern jazz, persistent use of swing as the primary rhythm,
an embrace of the American popular song, individual and collective
improvisation, and a panoramic vision of compositional styles from
dittys to dynamic call and response patterns (both within the rhythm
section and between the rhythm section and horn players).
The Composer
Wynton Marsalis is a prolific and inventive composer. He is the
world’s first jazz artist to perform and compose across the full jazz
spectrum from its New Orleans roots to bebop to modern jazz. He has also
composed a violin concerto and four symphonies to introduce new rhythms
to the classical music canon.
Marsalis collaborated with the Lincoln Center Chamber Music Society in 1995 to compose the string quartet At The Octoroon Balls, and again in 1998 to create a response to Stravinsky’s A Soldier’s Tale with his composition A Fiddler’s Tale.
Several prominent choreographers embraced Wynton’s inventiveness with
commissions to compose suites to fuel their imagination for movement.
This impressive list includes Garth Fagan (Citi Movement-Griot New York & Lighthouse/Lightening Rod), Peter Martins at the New York City Ballet (Jazz: Six Syncopated Movements and Them Twos), Twyla Tharp with the American Ballet Theatre (Jump Start), Judith Jamison at the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre (Sweet Release and Here…Now), and Savion Glover (Petite Suite and Spaces).
Wynton reconnected audiences with the beauty of the American popular
song with his collection of standards recordings (Standard Time Volumes
I-VI). He re-introduced the joy in New Orleans jazz with his recording The Majesty Of The Blues. And he extended the jazz musician’s interplay with the blues in Uptown Ruler, Levee Low Moan, Thick In The South and other blues recordings.
Marsalis introduced a fresh conception for extended form compositions with Citi Movement, his sanctified In This House, On This Morning and Blood On The Fields.
His inventive interplay with melody, harmony and rhythm, along with his
lyrical voicing and tonal coloring assert new possibilities for the
jazz ensemble. In his dramatic oratorio Blood On The Fields, Wynton
draws upon the blues, work songs, chants, spirituals, New Orleans jazz,
Ellingtonesque orchestral arrangements and Afro-Caribbean rhythms —-
using Greek chorus-style recitations with great affect to move the work
along. The New York Times Magazine said Blood On The Fields “marked a
symbolic moment when the full heritage of the line, Ellington through
Mingus, was extended into the present.” The San Francisco Examiner
stated, “Marsalis’ orchestral arrangements are magnificent. Duke
Ellington’s shadings and themes come and go but Marsalis’ free use of
dissonance, counter rhythms and polyphonics is way ahead of Ellington’s
mid-century era.” Blood on the Fields became the first jazz composition
ever to be awarded the coveted Pulitzer Prize in Music in 1997. Wynton extended his achievements in Blood On The Fields with All Rise,
an epic composition for big band, gospel choir, and symphony orchestra –
a classic work of high art – which was performed by the New York
Philharmonic under the baton of Kurt Masur along with the Morgan State
University Choir and the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra (December 1999). Marsalis collaborated with Ghanaian master drummer Yacub Addy to create Congo Square,
a groundbreaking composition combining harmonies from America’s jazz
tradition with fundamental rituals in African percussion and vocals
(2006). For the anniversary of the Abyssinian Baptist Church’s 200th year of
service, Marsalis blended Baptist church choir cadences with blues
accents and big band swing rhythms to compose Abyssinian 200: A Celebration,
which was performed by the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra and
Abyssinian’s 100 voice choir before packed houses in New York City (May
2008).
In the fall of 2009 the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra premiered Marsalis’ composition Blues Symphony.
Marsalis infused blues and ragtime rhythms with symphonic
orchestrations to create a fresh type of enjoyment of classical
repertoire. Marsalis further expanded his repertoire for symphony
orchestra with Swing Symphony,
employing complex layers of collective improvisation. The work was
premiered by the renowned Berlin Philharmonic and performed with the
Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra in June 2010, creating new
possibilities for audiences to experience a symphony orchestra swing.
Wynton made a significant addition to his oeuvre with Concerto in D,
a violin concerto composed for virtuoso Nicola Benedetti. The concerto
is in four movements, “Rhapsody,” “Rhondo,” “Blues,” and “Hootenanny.”
With this masterful composition Marsalis celebrates the American
vernacular in ultra-sophisticated ways. Its fundamental character is
Americana with sweeping melodies, jazzy orchestral dissonances,
blues-tinge themes, fancy fiddling and a rhythmic swagger. Concerto in D
received its world premiere by the London Symphony Orchestra in
November 2014 and its American premiere by the Chicago Symphony
Orchestra at Ravinia in July 2015.
In December 2016 Marsalis again demonstrated his expansive musical
imagination and dexterity for seasoning the classical music realm with
jazz and blues influences with The Jungle, performed by the New York
Philharmonic along with the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra. “The
Jungle,” according to Marsalis, “is a musical portrait of New York City,
the most fluid, pressure-packed, and cosmopolitan metropolis the modern
world has ever seen.” The New York Philharmonic and the Jazz at Lincoln
Center Orchestra re-united to present The Jungle in Shanghai in July
2017.
Marsalis’ rich and expansive body of music for the ages places him among the world’s most significant composers.
Television, Radio & Literary
In the fall of 1995 Wynton launched two major broadcast events. In October on PBS he premiered Marsalis On Music,
an educational television series on jazz and classical music. Written
and hosted by Marsalis, the series and was enjoyed by millions of
parents and children. Writers distinguished Marsalis On Music with
comparisons to Leonard Bernstein’s celebrated Young People’s Concerts of
the 50s and 60s. That same month National Public Radio aired the first
of Marsalis’ 26-week series entitled Making the Music. These
entertaining and insightful radio shows were the first full exposition
of jazz music in American broadcast history. Wynton’s radio and
television series were awarded the most prestigious distinction in
broadcast journalism, the George Foster Peabody Award. The Spirit of New Orleans,
Wynton’s poetic tribute to the New Orleans Saints’ first Super Bowl
victory (Super Bowl XLIV) also received an Emmy Award for Outstanding
Short Feature (2011).
Wynton Marsalis has won nine Grammy Awards®
in grand style. In 1983 he became the only artist ever to win Grammy
Awards® for both jazz and classical records; and he repeated the
distinction by winning jazz and classical Grammys® again in 1984. Today
Wynton is the only artist ever to win Grammy Awards® in five consecutive
years (1983-1987). Honorary degrees have been conferred upon Wynton by
over 30 of America’s leading academic institutions including Columbia,
Harvard, Howard, Princeton and Yale (see Exhibit A). Elsewhere Wynton
was honored with the Louis Armstrong Memorial Medal and the Algur H. Meadows Award for Excellence in the Arts.
He was inducted into the American Academy of Achievement and was dubbed
an Honorary Dreamer by the “I Have a Dream Foundation.” The New York
Urban League awarded Wynton with the Frederick Douglass Medallion for
distinguished leadership and the American Arts Council presented him
with the Arts Education Award. Time magazine selected Wynton as one of
America’s most promising leaders under age 40 in 1995, and in 1996 Time
celebrated Marsalis again as one of America’s 25 most influential
people. In November 2005 Wynton Marsalis received The National Medal of
Arts, the highest award given to artists by the United States
Government. United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan proclaimed
Wynton Marsalis an international ambassador of goodwill for the Unites
States by appointing him a UN Messenger of Peace (2001).
Marsalis was honored with The National Humanities Medal by President
Barak Obama in 2015, in recognition of his work in deepened the
nation’s understanding of the humanities and broadened American
citizens’ engagement with history, literature, languages and philosophy. In 1997 Wynton Marsalis became the first jazz musician ever to win the Pulitzer Prize for Music for his epic oratorio Blood On The Fields.
During the five preceding decades the Pulitzer Prize jury refused to
recognize jazz musicians and their improvisational music, reserving this
distinction for classical composers. In the years following Marsalis’
award, the Pulitzer Prize for Music has been awarded posthumously to
Duke Ellington, George Gershwin, Thelonious Monk and John Coltrane. In a
personal note to Wynton, Zarin Mehta wrote:
“I was not surprised at your winning the Pulitzer Prize for Blood
On The Fields. It is a broad, beautifully painted canvas that impresses
and inspires. It speaks to us all … I’m sure that, somewhere in the
firmament, Buddy Bolden, Louis Armstrong and legions of others are
smiling down on you.”
Wynton’s creativity has been celebrated throughout the world. He won
the Netherlands’ Edison Award and the Grand Prix Du Disque of France.
The Mayor of Vitoria, Spain, awarded Wynton with the city’s Gold Medal
– its most coveted distinction. Britain’s senior conservatoire, the
Royal Academy of Music, granted Mr. Marsalis Honorary Membership, the
Academy’s highest decoration for a non-British citizen (1996). The city
of Marciac, France, erected a bronze statue in his honor. The French
Ministry of Culture appointed Wynton the rank of Knight in the Order of
Arts and Literature and in the fall of 2009 Wynton received France’s
highest distinction, the insignia Chevalier of the Legion of Honor,
an honor that was first awarded by Napoleon Bonaparte. French
Ambassador, His Excellency Pierre Vimont, captured the evening best with
his introduction:
“We are gathered here tonight to express the French government’s
recognition of one of the most influential figures in American music, an
outstanding artist, in one word: a visionary…
I want to stress how important your work has been for both the
American and the French. I want to put the emphasis on the main values
and concerns that we all share: the importance of education and
transmission of culture from one generation to the other, and a true
commitment to the profoundly democratic idea that lies in jazz music.
I strongly believe that, for you, jazz is more than just a musical
form. It is tradition, it is part of American history and culture and
life. To you, jazz is the sound of democracy. And from this democratic
nature of jazz derives openness, generosity, and universality.”
Jazz at Lincoln Center
In 1987 Wynton Marsalis co-founded a jazz program at Lincoln Center. In July 1996, due to its significant success, Jazz at Lincoln Center
(JALC) was installed as a new constituent of Lincoln Center, equal in
stature with the New York Philharmonic, Metropolitan Opera, and New York
City Ballet – a historic moment for jazz as an art form and for Lincoln
Center as a cultural institution. In October 2004, with the assistance
of a dedicated Board and staff, Marsalis opened Frederick P. Rose Hall,
the world’s first institution for jazz. The complex contains three
state-of-the-art performance spaces (including the first concert hall
designed specifically for jazz) along with recording, broadcast,
rehearsal and educational facilities. Jazz at Lincoln Center has become a
preferred venue for New York jazz fans and a destination for travelers
from throughout the world. Wynton presently serves as Managing and
Artistic Director for Jazz at Lincoln Center. Under his leadership Jazz
at Lincoln Center has developed an international agenda presenting rich
and diverse programming that includes concerts, debates, film forums,
dances, television and radio broadcasts, and educational activities. The
JALC mission is to entertain, enrich and expand a global community for
jazz through performance, education and advocacy, and to bolster the
cultural infrastructure for jazz globally.
Jazz at Lincoln Center has become a mecca for learning as well as a
hub for performance. Their comprehensive educational programming
includes a Band Director’s Academy, a hugely popular concert series for
kids called Jazz for Young People, Jazz in the Schools, a Middle School
Jazz Academy, WeBop! (for kids ages 8 months to 5 years), an annual High
School Jazz Band Competition & Festival that reaches over 2000
bands in 50 states and Canada.
In 2010 the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra established its first residency in Cuba
with a rich cultural exchange of performances with Cuban musicians
including Chucho Valdes and Omara Portuondo and education programs for
kids.
Education
In 2009 Wynton created and presented Ballad of the American Arts
before a capacity crowd at the Kennedy Center. The lecture/performance
was written to elucidate the essential role the arts have played in
establishing America’s cultural identity. “This is our story, this is
our song,” states Marsalis, “and if well sung, it tells us who we are
and where we belong.”
In 2011 Harvard University President Drew Faust invited Wynton to enrich the cultural life of the University community.
Wynton responded by creating a 6 lecture series which he delivered over
the ensuing 3 years entitled Hidden In Plain View: Meanings in American
Music, with the goal of fostering a stronger appreciation for the arts
and a higher level of cultural literacy in academia. From 2015 to 2021
Wynton will serve as an A.D. White Professor at Cornell University. A.D.
White Professors are charged with the mandate to enliven the
intellectual and cultural lives of university students.
Giving Back
Wynton Marsalis has devoted his life to uplifting populations
worldwide with the egalitarian spirit of jazz. And while his body of
work is enough to fill two lifetimes, Wynton continues to work
tirelessly to contribute even more to our world’s cultural landscape. It
has been said that he is an artist for whom greatness is not just
possible, but inevitable. The most extraordinary dimension of Wynton
Marsalis, however, is not his accomplishments but his character. It is
the lesser-known part of this man who finds endless ways to give of
himself. It is the person who waited in an empty parking lot for one
full hour after a concert in Baltimore, waiting for a single student to
return from home with his horn for a trumpet lesson. It is the citizen
who personally funds scholarships for students and covers medical
expenses for those in need. Immediately following Hurricane Katrina,
Wynton organized the Higher Ground Hurricane Relief Concert and raised
over $3 million for musicians and cultural organizations impacted by the
hurricane. At the same time, he assumed a leadership role on the Bring
Back New Orleans Cultural Commission where he was instrumental in
shaping a master plan that would revitalize the city’s cultural base.
Wynton Marsalis has selflessly donated his time and talent to
non-profit organizations throughout the country to raise money to meet
the many needs within our society. From My Sister’s Place (a shelter for
battered women) to Graham Windham (a shelter for homeless children),
the Children’s Defense Fund, Amnesty International, the Sloan Kettering
Cancer Institute, Food For All Seasons (a food bank for the elderly and
disadvantaged), Very Special Arts (an organization that provides
experiences in dance, drama, literature, and music for individuals with
physical and mental disabilities) to the Newark Boys Chorus School (a
full-time academic music school for disadvantaged youths), the Hugs
Foundation (Help Us Give Smiles – provides free life changing surgical
procedures for children with microtia, cleft lip and other facial
deformities) and many, many more – Wynton responded enthusiastically to
the call for service. It is Wynton Marsalis’ commitment to the
improvement of life for all people that portrays the best of his
character and humanity.
Honorary Degrees
Brown University (Doctor of Music, 1988 )
Southern University at New Orleans (Doctor of Music, 1988)
University at Buffalo – State University of New York (Doctor of Music, 1989)
Boston University (Doctor of Music, 1992)
University of Miami (Doctor of Music, 1994)
Hunter College (Doctor of Humane Letters, 1995)
Manhattan School of Music (Doctor of Music, 1995)
Princeton University (Doctor of Arts, 1995)
Yale University (Doctor of Music, 1995)
Brandeis University (Doctor of Humane Letters, 1996)
Columbia University (Doctor of Music, 1996)
Governors State University (Doctor of Humane Letters, 1996)
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (Doctor of Fine Arts, 1996)
University of Scranton (Doctor of Fine Arts, 1996)
From Louis Armstrong to Ornette Coleman, the trumpeter picks breaks
down tracks and albums that exemplify different aspects of a great
American art form
“It’s self-explanatory,” Wynton Marsalis
says, pointing toward the papers in front of him. “Basically, if you
look at what I wrote, that says everything you need to know.” The trumpeter had entered only about 30 seconds before, walking into a small conference room at the New York offices of Jazz
at Lincoln Center. Impeccably dressed in a gray suit, he leaned in for a
quick hug by way of a greeting. If Marsalis seemed a tad impatient, he
had a point: The document he’d prepped did in fact speak for itself.
It was a two-page list of essential jazz recordings, containing 50 entries. Marsalis had assembled his choices in conjunction with new biopic Bolden,
out Friday, which tells the story of Buddy Bolden, the legendary
unrecorded first hero of New Orleans jazz, and which Marsalis both
executive-produced and contributed music to. Preparing for his meeting
with Rolling Stone, he went deep, listing not simply artists
and titles, but also characteristics explaining why he’d picked each
one: “Insightful integration of the blues with disparate elements,”
“Making a horn sound exactly like someone singing” and so on. Marsalis
made it clear that his list was an inventory of “recordings” rather than
albums, since so many of the early masterpieces of jazz arrived before
the LP era.
He
may have felt that his work was done in advance, but nevertheless he
had plenty to say. For the next 45 minutes, he held forth to RS on
12 of his picks, frequently singing musical passages by way of
illustration. Marsalis’ own written descriptions of what sets each
recording apart appear in italics before the entries. (For consistency,
titles below are listed according to date of recording rather than
release.)
King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band with Louis Armstrong, “Snake Rag” (1923)
Otherworldly display of flatfooted improvisational skills
To be given an accompanying part and
to hear it and play thematic material that fits in with the material
that you’re given with that degree of sophistication, insight and nuance
is a great display of skill. It’s very uncommon. Louis Armstrong played second cornet
to King Oliver — it means he’s interpreting internal harmony parts which
have to resolve a certain way. He’s playing the alto part basically.
King Oliver’s playing the melody. So, no written music: He’s improvising
on a complex form: “Snake Rag.” He makes up an unbelievable part. When
you listen to it, how clear and logical it is and how beautiful the
resolutions are of internal harmony, and he also improvises a second
harmony part to King Oliver’s improvised trumpet breaks. That’s an
unbelievable display of reflexes, musical understanding and ability to
hear.
So, you’re making up something and I’m
accompanying you while you’re making it up and I’m also playing an
internal part to a part that you’re improvising. The accuracy of his
parts and the clarity that he plays with in an accompaniment role is
still astounding after all these years. The speed and the quickness and the
reflexes, it’s not believable. But it’s what he could do and that’s why
he’s Louis Armstrong.
Duke Ellington, “Daybreak Express” (1933)
All-time baddest MF
All-time baddest motherfucker. OK?
That’s reserved for somebody like Bach. I could’ve picked anything, but I
picked train pieces, because I love trains. [Note: Marsalis’ list also
included four other train-themed pieces by Ellington: “Choo Choo” from
1924, “Happy Go Lucky Local” from 1946, “Track 360” from 1959 and “Loco
Madi” from 1972.] I tried to get one from each decade. We’ve played most
of these [with the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra]. That level of sustained engagement,
that level of technical achievement, the sophistication of what he’s
doing, the way he gets the harmonies to sound like trains, the
conception of different grooves and moods, the
intelligent use of form, the playfulness of it, the diversity of ideas,
the understanding of the instruments in their registers.
Young musicians in your band are gonna
work hard enough to play stuff that’s that difficult accurately, [like]
“Day Break Express” and the early-Thirties stuff? [Exhales for emphasis] Fantastic.
Mary Lou Williams with Andy Kirk and His Twelve Clouds of Joy, “Walkin’ and Swingin'” (1936)
Manifestation of genius and unparalleled set of unique achievements (playing, composing, arranging, mentoring)
[Marsalis cited examples of each of the above, but he says this piece shows off Williams’ composing and arranging.]
“Walkin’ and Swingin'” — she writes unbelievable soli with trumpet
leading the reed section. Unusual voicing, unusual pairing. One trumpet
with reeds [sings]. It’s so lyrical and beautiful that the bridge becomes the basis of one of Monk’s songs: “Rhythm-A-Ning.” [Sings] That part is so hard to play. Man, every time I have to play it, I look at it like, “Shit.”
It’s unbelievably difficult to play. We laugh in our trumpet section. We go back and forth on who’s gonna play it [laughs]. ‘Cause when you play it, you can’t help but look at it because it has the beginnings of bebop, it’s in the Swing Era — you could go on and on about it. The diversity in that arrangement, the
call and response. She was very forward-thinking at all times. She was a
mentor to the bebop players. Her house was like a salon. “In the Land
of Oo-Bla-Dee” is an example of bebop music she wrote that Dizzy
[Gillespie] recorded. They would go to her house, Dizzy,
Bird [Charlie Parker], all the heavyweights talked to Mary Lou. Monk,
they loved her. She taught them about arranging, she had concepts, she
was very philosophical. She’s unsung as a person who really influenced
them and when you talk to them — I talked to Dizzy, any musicians from
that time — they always say, “Man, Mary Lou, she taught us a lot.”
Benny Goodman, The Famous 1938 Carnegie Hall Jazz Concert
Most meaningful concert
[In this concert] Benny Goodman is
setting out his concept of what we need to do as a country. He plays his
music; he deals with the history of his band; he features virtuosic
playing. He brings all the people of different races together at a time
of segregation and deep ignorance.
He brings members of Count Basie and
Duke Ellington’s band out, he does American popular song, he does
original jazz songs. He has a section that covers the history of jazz.
He plays the hell out of the clarinet. He has a small group; he has a
big band. He covered a lot of ground on that one concert. That’s also the most meaningful
concert because he made Carnegie Hall give him rehearsal time. He was
like, “No, no. I have to rehearse this much to get my music right.” It
was in America’s premiere concert hall at that time. It signaled a
movement away from a type of prejudice that, at that time, there was no
way to remove it because prejudice survives all evidence. But at that
time, it was a very strong statement from someone. Very powerful to make
that statement.
You get your space in the premier concert hall and you make that type of encompassing statement — it’s very powerful.
Dizzy Gillespie with Charlie Parker, “Shaw ‘Nuff” (1945)
Two people who did a lot of practicing (individually and together) Charlie Parker and Dizzy. It’s one
thing to practice yourself; it’s another thing to practice with somebody
else. To be able to play parts with that type of clarity and
togetherness. Dizzy always said Bird was the other side of his
heartbeat. To this day, I don’t know if two horns have equaled that
degree of complexity, nuance, sophistication and absolute togetherness. Fire, virtuosity.
When it happened, people knew it was something spectacular. Time has proven to us, yes.
Ornette Coleman, “Peace” (1959)
Uncommon psychological complexity while maintaining a lyrical intention
I was very close with Ornette. Ornette was a shaman. Man, I’d go to Ornette’s house at 1 o’clock in the morning. He said, [imitates Coleman’s reedy voice]
“Hey man, pull your horn out, man,” and literally, I would sit across
from him and play, with no talk, for two, three hours. Just playing
phrases back and forth. Then when he’d tell you stuff, it was always something so insightful about human beings. This solo, “Peace,” it’s like, you
know how you be talking and you raise your eyes, and you have many
gestures, you go up and down, you have a landscape of emotions and
thoughts and feelings? It’s hard to do that improvising. That’s in that
solo.
[Sings] Just the areas he’s
gonna take you in and the psychological complexity of his phrasing and
what he’s saying and his ability to change the mood and intention in his
sound — very complex.
Ben Webster and Harry “Sweets” Edison, “Better Go” (1962)
Destination: Soul
The cover of that album [Ben and “Sweets”] is so soulful,
that’s all you need to know. You just put that up as a poster, it just
says it all. That’s a swingin’ record. It’s just blues they’re playing.
Veterans playing some blues at grown folks’ tempo. That’s about being
grown. Kids, stay at home, suck your thumb, play with some video games.
This is grown folks.
Charles Mingus, “Meditations on Integration” (1964)
Great consolidator of all past and present (after bebop)
What happens with people is they
generally fall into the misconception of their generation. Like, when
[Giovanni Pierluigi da] Palestrina was writing music, he’s writing a lot
of really thick counterpoint. Five-voice counterpoint, very complex. The next generation wrote very simply, and then that style becomes old-fashioned because you wanna compete with the style. Now, who can come in the era of simplification and add complexity from the past? That’s the question.
Now you’re in America during the
middle of the youth movement, the first time you’re able to sell stuff
to kids that’s for adults. You’re making a lot of money and you’re going
as far away from anything adult as you can go. But
you also have the Civil Rights Movement going on at the same time and
you are engaged with a lot of stuff in your generation that’s real that
did not happen before that because it could not happen. Why
would you, in the middle of that, reach back into something that is
being discredited, was a source of pain and shame for a lot of people
who didn’t know what it was, and bring that into your sound, as you also
reach further in the direction that your generation is going in? That’s
two reaches. That’s a yoga position.
That’s what Charles Mingus did with
all those records he made in the mid-to-late Fifties into the Sixties
and Seventies. He has the avant-garde with people talking and playing
music; it was considered to be free. He has New Orleans musical pieces
like “My Jelly Roll Soul.” He has ballads of unbelievable depth and
complexity.
He has long-form pieces like
“Meditation on Integration” that gives you the African 6/8. He has
traditional bebop songs, he has ironic songs, “Gunslinging Birds.” He
has church music. All these elements, folk elements, everything he’s
putting in his music. Theatrical elements, and he’s not segregating
himself from the music.
What does that mean? That means the
harmonic progression is as sophisticated as the melody. Very difficult.
Sometimes you have a really great melody and the harmonies are not up to
the melody.
“Infant Eyes”: haunting melody. It’s
almost like it’s written on one mode. It’s not, but it sounds like that —
like something you would sing to a child, like a lullaby. Harmony, very
sophisticated.
When you look at the harmonic
progression, where he goes, he’s a master of harmony anyway, but he goes
to places in the harmony and the harmony is cyclical. It’s the way that
the cycle works. I could explain it, but it’s not gonna translate on
the page.
But just suffice to say that, if
you’re looking at a math equation that’s beautiful as an equation, since
math can be lyrical and beautiful, and you look at it and say, “Damn,
that’s how the math of this works?” That’s how these songs all are.
John Coltrane, A Love Supreme (1964)
Unprecedented improvised development with least amount of thematic material Trane set out with A Love Supreme to give as a little thematic material as possible and improvise. So most of what’s on A Love Supreme is
like cells, like a minor third and a whole step. So you invert it as a
fourth, as a fifth; it covers a lot of different intervals. [Sings themes] Out of the kind of pentatonic sound that connects you to the East. The exception is the second part. But even that eight-bar form, an
unusual form for blues, went back to an earlier form. By then, people
were playing 12-bar blues, 14-bar blues, blues with longer forms. Trane
went back to the earlier folk form of eight-bar blues on A Love Supreme.
That’s a tremendous achievement not just for the depth of engagement
that it’s known for but how little thematic material it is, how much
improvisation goes on.
Eddie Harris, “1974 Blues” (1969)
A boogaloo church shuffle in a funky 7 — damn!
It’s a boogaloo church shuffle but
it’s in seven [7/4 time]. Not only are you playing a boogaloo — which is
a rhythm in four — you’re playing it in a church shuffle feel, so you
got the secular and the church, and then you’re playing it in seven but
the seven is funky. It’s not a
kind of awkward beat drop in seven, or a seven that’s like you’re trying
to be Eastern European music but you’re always failing because you
didn’t grow up dancing to it. It’s like an organic seven. He understood something. The way that they do it is slick too
because the same riff recurs. A groove is based on repetition, so the
question of the repetition is when do you go away from it? It’s
kind of like what Louis Armstrong does with King Oliver. The key to the
syncopation is when they decide to syncopate phrases.
So it’s like the balance of when
you’re going to not repeat. This has a brilliant use of repetition in
the groove. It accounts for the fact that the seven is an odd meter, so
the seven itself is something that will create turmoil in the
repetition. You can repeat a lot more without becoming boring.
Betty Carter, “Bridges” (1992)
Sounds of protest throughout time
[Note: Marsalis also cited Louis Armstrong’s “(What Did I Do to Be
So) Black and Blue,” Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit,” Max Roach’s We Insist! and several other recordings in this category.] This is
the sound of protest for our time. [These are] people who decided they
were gonna make a statement of protest in music and how the different
forms of protest were formed. Louis Armstrong did “Black and Blue”, but
the bridge says “I’m white inside, but that don’t help my case.” [Betty Carter’s “Bridges” is] only
scat singing, but the power, the virtuosity of it, the diversity of what
she’s singing, it speaks for itself. It speaks on the power of
instrumental music. It’s extremely virtuosic in a very free and strong
and progressive way. At one point, she goes into an African 6/8, she’s in four [sings].
The way she spells out the rhythms. So she’s taking us on a journey
through different rhythms, and it’s the force of her sound. It is a
statement. Because when I say protest, it’s also sounds of freedom.
This year marks the 30th anniversary of the Jazz at Lincoln Center
Orchestra operating under the leadership of New Orleans trumpet great
Wynton Marsalis, who co-founded the program in 1987 (the Orchestra was
started the following year) and serves as both its managing and artistic
director. And during that time, the JLCO has established a body of work
that’s explored some of the deepest aspects of American history, from
the country’s oldest Baptist church to New Orleans’ Congo Square to the
roots of the nation’s most beloved children’s songs. Between
2003 and 2007, Marsalis and his legendary septet hosted some of the
biggest names in pop, rock, blues, country and R&B at the Jazz at
Lincoln Center Spring Galas. Within that five-year stretch, the Wynton
Septet jammed with an unparalleled cast of talent that included such
names as Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton, Willie Nelson, Natalie Merchant, Lyle
Lovett, John Legend, James Taylor, Lenny Kravitz, Susan Tedeschi and
Derek Trucks and, in one of his final appearances onstage, the late Ray
Charles. United We Swing collects the cream of these gala
performances for an album whose proceeds are going to Jazz at Lincoln
Center’s much-needed educational programs. And much like his work with
the JLCO, these songs -- when sequenced together across this 16-track
collection -- tells the crucial American tale of the union between jazz
and the blues, and the way by which both genres have served as spiritual
turbines propelling the people’s history of this country through the
generations. Marsalis took the time to speak with Billboard about
releasing an album like United We Swing in a time when our nation has never felt more divided. You
recently played a concert at Jazz at Lincoln Center that revolved
around classic nursery rhymes and children’s songs, which have
historically been on the frontlines of the American protest movement
when the music of Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger began getting integrated
into children’s education curriculum. Was that where you were coming
from in the context of these arrangements?
Yeah. I love
folk music, which I call American root music. Root music is very
crucial. It’s important to jazz, important to improvisation. It’s
important for so many reasons. It’s hard to have improvisers in a
certain style if they don’t know root music or if they don’t have a
relationship to root music. That’s one of my big things and I have a
real belief in that. I’m always insisting with my students of the
importance of that style of music. The real folk music, it comes from
the soul, from the people. In New Orleans, we have a lot of root music
that’s a deep part of our culture. And when you’re growing up, you take
it for granted. But as you get older, you begin to understand the
importance of that church music, the hymns and things like that. The
Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra under your direction turns 30 this
year. Did you have a template for how you wanted to lead this band when
you first stepped into the position? Duke Ellington’s band: our founding members included folks who were
in their twenties and early thirties from my generation, members of the
Thad Jones/Mel Lewis Orchestra who were in their forties and fifties and
members of the Duke Ellington Orchestra who were in their sixties and
early seventies. But it was that Ellingtonian way which was at the root
of what they did. I didn’t grow up listening to Duke Ellington’s music.
When I came to New York, I started to meet all the heavyweights like
Ralph Ellison, Arthur Miller, Stanley Crouch and that group of
intellectuals, and they were all listening to Duke. Me being a product
of urban education, even with my father being a jazz musician himself, I
didn’t really know what that tradition was. I remember not wanting to
play in a big band. But then I talked to Dizzy Gillespie and he told me,
and I’ll never forget what he said, “You have to remember: To lose
one’s orchestral conditioning should not be considered an achievement.”
And he told me to get that big band and keep it together. But then we
started to establish our own traditions from the Ellington traditions.
And by the time you hear it now, we have ten arrangers and we have a
whole canon of music we’ve created ourselves. We are all working on
music all the time and we are always writing. It’s quite interesting to see an album out there like United We Swing
in a time when patriotism has been such a weaponized word in the hands
of the right wing establishment in this country. What do you think of
the word patriotism in 2018? I know what you’re saying,
but we don’t actually recognize it. I don’t look at it like these are
the wings or whatever. You gotta get Ralph Ellison’s book Invisible Man. If
you read that book, there’s a lot on it about the kinda everyman.
Anytime there’s group thinking, be it an institution or a group, it’s
doing something to you. It’s the allegiance to groups that he goes
through in the book, and groups that are opposite. Every time you
encounter this type of mass thinking, this brainwashing in adapting
these philosophies like blaming Washington, it actually doesn’t have
anything to do with your real experience. It kinda forces you into a
position that’s right or left, but that’s not what you’re living in. My
theory about patriotism is this: I live in this country. I believe in
the truth of democracy. But the truth of it is you have to figure out
how to construct your life from a reality with which you are familiar,
not some philosophical concept you don’t live. Willie Nelson is
patriotic. Ray Charles was patriotic. They both believe in America, but
that doesn’t mean that they believed that the minimum wage shouldn’t be
raised or that people should be replaced at their jobs by robots. People
who are debating the issues and feel strongly about either side can
also be patriotic. I agree with you that lately there seems to be only
one definition of patriotism. But in fact, there are many definitions. How far do you go back with Ray Charles? My
little brother played with Ray, but I didn’t really know him until he
came and did the show. Most of the artists who came to play at these
galas I didn’t really know, but we had a lot of really interesting
connections. Like, for instance, Lyle Lovett’s bus driver was a friend
of our bus driver. And our bus driver, Harold Russell, we love him like
family and we were on the road all the time, and he would always talk
about Lyle and how much he loved Lyle. "Man, that’s a good guy," he used
to say. "That was my man!" So when I called Lyle, we talked all about
Harold Russell (laughs). And with Jimmy Buffett, it was because he’s
associated with the Gulf region and New Orleans, so we had that
Louisiana connection. One of the things that makes United We Swing so special, in fact, is hearing the likes of a Jimmy Buffett or a James Taylor in a jazz light…
The
proof of all of it, just in the rehearsals, exists in the type of love
that everyone showed for the music and the seriousness that was
exhibited. Everybody was for real, man. For Eric Clapton, it wasn’t just
about the songs that he loved; it was about the music itself. Everybody
was curious about it, and they wanted to play in the feeling of jazz.
We’d have a little party at my house afterward, and everybody was very
cool. And everybody donated their time and energy for our education
programs, which we have 12 of them now. This year alone, we’re gonna
have 3 million people view our Jazz Academy website
and interface with our faculty. There’s a free competition for high
school bands called Essentially Ellington and a summer camp coming up.
We’ve had so many things that were enabled by musicians. It’s
great to hear, because it seems like the future funding for music
education is going to be saddled solely by the public and musicians such
as yourself if this current administration has its way about cutting
PBS and the NEA from the budget. It always seems like federal funding
for the arts is always on the chopping block, right? Yes,
and that’s because of ignorance and lack of understanding. They value
the arts as a commercial product, not as something crucial to the
importance of our mythology. But again, I don’t think so much in terms
of Democrat or Republican when it comes to the arts. It comes down to
the person. And if you look at the funding for the NEA over the last 20
years or 25 years, it’s not necessarily like a Democrat comes in and
there’s a big $300 million windfall for the arts. Someone like Willie
Nelson if you look at all the stuff he does with Farm Aid and all his
charities. He’s always doing something for people. You have to love him
if you know him. When I heard about him and Ray Charles talking about
1951 when they first met, that was unbelievable. They loved each other
and had a long-term relationship as friends and colleagues. Even
though they played different forms of music, they really were kindred
spirits, Willie Nelson and Ray Charles, huh? The soul they projected in
their music, I’m talking about. Hey, if you think about
Willie Nelson, Ray Charles and Louis Armstrong, the three of them have
something in common, which is that all three of them are credible in the
blues, they could swing the gospel tradition, they can sing from the
Great American Songbook, they can play jazz and improvise incredibly and
they can sing country songs. It’s incredible. One of the highlights of United We Swing
is your version of Bob Dylan’s “It Takes A lot to Laugh, It Takes a
Train to Cry." What inspired you to choose that song from his catalog? He chose the song first, because it was American mythology. Trains, you know? Do you think Dylan’s music lends itself well to jazz? All
the music that has blues in it is related to jazz. When somebody is
singing "I ride on a mail train," that’s the blues. “Don’t the moon look
lonesome, shining through the trees.” That’s Count Basie and Jimmy
Rushing from 1938. That’s blues mythology. That’s what it is. Blues is
the root of everything. But once jazz put a rhythm section together,
everything that has a rhythm section on it comes out of jazz. And the
artists we played with on this album recognized that, which is why there
wasn’t a problem. I enjoyed arranging these songs.
You can definitely hear that in the version of Lenny Kravitz’s “Are You Gonna Go My Way?” on United We Swing, for sure.
I
was coming from a New Orleans vibe with a Coltrane-esque feeling and
the kind of apocalyptic thing that Lenny was talking about. It’s also
good to have Herlin Riley and the New Orleans rhythm section, because
they can translate all these rhythms into a certain thing that relates
to jazz; because in New Orleans, we play a lot of different styles of
American music.
Another genre that has been entangled in
jazz over the last 25 years or so has been hip-hop, which currently
through the likes of Chance the Rapper and Kendrick Lamar is bringing
young people back into listening to jazz. Do you see that?
Well
for me, especially back in the '80s, what I represented being a black
guy who was serious and young and not wanting to be a part of the whole
gangsta/pimp mentality, and that caused a lot of problems for people.
And it was because for those people, they wanted the mythology that they
had grown up with. Again, I think a lot of it is in the Ralph Ellison
book Invisible Man. I didn’t want to be equated with all these
things that had nothing to do with me. Part of the whole thing is to
create a fake identity of something and attack that. The things they
were willing to craft were not based in reality, and they didn’t drag me
in because I didn’t want to go along with it and capitulate to their
view of the world where they put the Negro second or third, or fifth. It
was a problem. But again, that was a '80s thing. Now that I’m 56, a lot
of those people are not even in the music business anymore. Those
positions have shifted. Now, it’s not so much of a problem, because what
they were trying to do back then has been done. Are we still gonna
acknowledge that we have people calling themselves n---as and bitches
and hoes, and they got the certain level of absurdity that they wanted.
What else did they want to do?
The #MeToo and Time’s Up movements seem to be killing off some of the "bitches and hoes" talk.
Well,
I hope you’re right, because I don’t see it yet. Why? I don’t know
why. But speaking for myself, I was always against that. And back then, I
was seen as conservative. If that’s what it is, then so be it. I don’t
wanna call people bitches on a record. And if I am conservative because
of that, so be it. I don’t want to be called a n---a on a record. If you
wanna use the word n---a and say it along with all this other shit you
feel like saying, then great. It’s like what my mama thought about the
movies that were being made to celebrate a pimp. She didn’t think shit
about it, but we loved it. What do you think about what Ice Cube said about the N-word on Real Time With Bill Maher, where he said that African-Americans use it as a means of claiming the word as their own? I
don’t agree with that. I don’t care what anybody says. It’s a 19th
century pejorative term. It’s not a default cultural position. And for
some reason, it’s met with this great national celebration. Then why are
you black, then? It means the same as it did in the 19th century. This
is not the first time a predominantly popular music used the word
“n---er” all the time. There was a good 70, 80 years of that with the
minstrel shows. I’m from the Civil Rights Movement era. I don’t believe
in that. I don’t want it as part of our mythology. It’s not a default
position. It’s not a mainstream cultural position. And neither is bitch,
and neither is ho. You don’t wanna raise your kids with that as the
default position in America.
Ethan Iverson, Andre Guess and Wynton Marsalis (from left) discuss jazz and race (photo by Lawrence Sumulong/JALC)
At the inaugural Jazz Congress, co-produced by Jazz at Lincoln Center and JazzTimes
in New York City on Jan. 11-12, among the most anticipated events was a
conversation on jazz and race featuring JALC managing and artistic
director Wynton Marsalis and Ethan Iverson, a founding member of the Bad
Plus, an important jazz blogger and a pianist with a deep reverence for
jazz history. Moderated by artist manager/consultant Andre Guess, the
hour-long conversation in JALC’s the Appel Room moved swiftly through
ideas and anecdotes while never losing its feeling of diplomacy and
mutual respect. Here are some highlights:
ANDRE GUESS: We know historically that, in
jazz’s heyday, the country was dealing with race in a much different way
than it is right now. So I want you both to respond to [these
questions]: When we were a segregated society, how did jazz help to move
forward the conversation on race, and then, conversely, in a
contemporary setting, what if anything is jazz doing to not advance the
agenda?
ETHAN IVERSON: No problem, I got this. [audience laughter] Thank you, Wynton, for inviting me into your house, by the way. A couple of my friends were like, “What are you doing?” [laughter from audience and panel]
To respond to the question, I think jazz was the greatest
20th-century music. I’m actually fairly adept at music that has more of a
European framework. I know it pretty well; I’ve played Schumann with
Yo-Yo Ma. I’m not at Wynton’s level at dealing with that stuff, but I’ve
dealt with it, and I’m a composer. The older I get, the more I think,
man, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis, John
Coltrane—those were the best. It was the best music of the 20th
century, and almost always, the best musicians of this greatest music
were black. End of story.
WYNTON MARSALIS: I want to start by saying
something about “black.” First, “black” is not anthropological; it’s
social and it’s political. Once they decoded the genome, it’s
clear—that’s the science. So the concept of race itself is not real. And
jazz symbolically is a unifier, the result of hybridization of
cultures. You cannot separate Irish jigs and forms of European music,
theme and variation—those things cannot be taken out of jazz or
diminished because it also adds African sounds. Those things came
together in our music. For us to try to separate them is like punching
water.
So I think that, for our purposes, we’re not talking about
whether a musician is black or not. Your chance of playing like Charlie
Parker is zero whether you’re white or black. [audience laughter]
My father used to make this point to me when we were growing up: “Who
somebody is is always more important than what they are.” And you don’t
know what they are anyway. So I want us to consider the fact that maybe
race might be something that’s only made real by the politicization of
it in our country. GUESS: In Eddie Glaude’s book Democracy in Black: How Race Still Enslaves the American Soul,
he coins two phrases. One is “the value gap” and the other one is
“racial habits.” The value gap is the fact that in America white people
are valued more than non-white people, and racial habits are the things
that we all do—white, black, yellow, red or brown—to perpetuate that,
knowingly or unknowingly. Wynton, you’ve been on a crusade of dealing
with swing as the foundational aspect of jazz, rhythmically. Why is
there no consensus that swing is the foundational rhythm of jazz, and is
there a value gap or racial argument inside of that as to why that may
not be the case? MARSALIS: It’s always interesting what you get
taught in a school. I had the benefit of a lot of really good teachers,
but I know that with some teachers it was always “Don’t learn what Louis
Armstrong played.” Or the choice of music that we would play—we’d say,
“Why don’t we play one of these?” “We don’t need to play that music.” It
was always kind of selective along racial lines. We have not only taken the swing rhythm out of our culture, which
was a mistake, but also the ability to dance. In the ’90s, when I went
to schools, the schools I went to, which would have to be close to a
thousand, were always black or white; every now and then you’d see an
integrated school. One thing that I would do with the white kids was ask
them, “Can white people dance?” And they would say, “No.” [laughter from audience and panel]
And I’d say, “Why? The United States was one of the most dancing
countries in the world. Why do y’all think now, 30 or 40 years later,
white people can’t dance? Is it a racial thing? Is it cultural?” “Oh, we
don’t really know.” “Do y’all think it’s important to be able to
dance?” “Well, no. Maybe. Yeah, I guess.” Why are we not teaching them?
Speaking specifically of the swing rhythm, I think that there’s
something in it that the nation has been against. IVERSON: You know what? I just left the Bad Plus
and I have some more time on my hands. And one thing I said to my wife
was, “Finally! Let’s take some swing-dancing classes, ’cause I want to
learn how to dance.” It feels like there’s the personal and then there’s the
institutional. I’ve gotten to know some jazz masters: I’ve gotten to
talk to Ron Carter, play some gigs with Billy Hart; there was one night
here in your house [JALC], at Dizzy’s, that I got to talk to Frank Wess
for a bit. If you’re in the presence of someone who actually played this
music for real, all the questions sort of vanish. There I’m totally on
your side: Race is a construct, it’s just about the language, and this
sort of stuff. But that’s the personal level, and then there’s this
institutional level. I think you [Marsalis] must have had some very
interesting experiences going into institutions that only dealt with
European music, and you’re there having to be like, “OK, guys, you want
me to talk about the shuffle?” I don’t know how you have the patience
for it, frankly, ’cause every time I’m around some of those cats and
jazz comes into the conversation, it’s like a brick wall. It’s probably
better now than it was 20 years ago, but still—just getting
institutional respect for the most beautiful and esoteric elements of
jazz is difficult. MARSALIS: Well, in my neighborhood, all my
friends were the most ignorant group of people about jazz that I ever
encountered in my life. So if I go to my real experience, the truth of
what we [African-Americans] all know about our music is very thin. When I went to Juilliard—first, for me, just to be here [in New
York] … I mean, New Orleans had one skyscraper at that time, and it
wasn’t really a skyscraper; it was like a … scraper. [laughter]
And to be at Juilliard, I had come from playing only funk, so it was
enlightening for me to be around that many serious students. I didn’t
really care whether they knew about jazz. I was used to being in an
environment where nobody knew about the music. I’m from New Orleans.
What did we know about the music? Nothing. I had less of an excuse
’cause I had a father who would say, “Listen to Louis Armstrong.” Did
any of my friends ever listen to Louis Armstrong? We didn’t know; he was
just a guy with a handkerchief. It’s like what you said about taking
swing-dance classes with your wife. Can I swing dance? Hell no. My
brother would laugh at me just for my funk dancing. He’d be like, “Damn,
man, you gonna get out there with that?” [laughter]
And we had dance rehearsals once a week. So it’s just for us to come to
grips with the absoluteness of the ignorance of our form. For years I would try to beat the students over the head with the
swing, which they weren’t going to accept anyway, ’cause they had the
kind of attitude about the funk and the pop like we all had. They grew
up with it; it’s easy for them to play. So I just went through a roll
call of rhythms in the beginning of the class. I said, “If I ask y’all
to sing a clave, what would that be?” They were singing it. I said, “New
Orleans march.” I said rock, funk, hip-hop, bossa nova—they started
playing all these rhythms. Then I said, “OK, what’s the rhythm of jazz?”
Once we got to that rhythm, they realized that that rhythm was going to
have to be swing. I took the funk and the rock and the hip-hop from
them. They enthusiastically sang all those rhythms, and then when they
realized swing was the rhythm, this is what they did. [turns head to the side and looks sheepishly at the floor, to much laughter from the panel and audience] So then I asked them a question. I said, “If we were in Brazil,
and this was a group of Brazilian musicians, and I asked, ‘What is the
rhythm of samba?,’ would they drop their heads? If we were in New
Orleans and I asked a group of musicians, ‘What’s the rhythm of New
Orleans?,’ would they drop their heads? If we were in Cuba and we
started talking about their music, would they drop their heads? Why
y’all dropping your head?” IVERSON: I have something to say related to this
that I’ve been thinking about lately. This anecdote might already be
outdated, ’cause jazz education has come a long way, in no little part
thanks to Wynton Marsalis. MARSALIS: Thanks to a lot of us. IVERSON: When I was a kid trying to learn about
the music in Wisconsin in the ’80s, the one textbook that seemed
universally to be the secret text you needed to find was something
called The Real Book. Now The Real Book is still around; people still have it. In fact, last night I played a gig and the cat was playing “Turn Out the Stars” from the Real Book chart. It’s fine; the chart’s accurate. But The Real Book
sort of came into existence around the same time [the 1970s] as a
certain movement in jazz education centered on Berklee in Boston, and
some really brilliant musicians too: Gary Burton, Pat Metheny, Steve
Swallow, Carla Bley. But it’s striking that, if you look at the
[original] book, sort of notey, even-eighth, “compositionally advanced”
white-people composers are perfect: just like the record, an absolute
gateway into understanding something about complexity and writing a
thorny piece of modern jazz. And if you look at the charts of Thelonious
Monk or Duke Ellington, Wayne Shorter, Bobby Hutcherson, they’re
essentially worthless: totally inaccurate, and they’ll give you no help
in trying to understand how to play that music. I think jazz education, the focus of it, people always have their
personal fiefdoms. Apparently, when the Lenox Music Inn started in the
’50s, Max Roach said, “We shouldn’t teach anybody this stuff,” because
he was worried about it just becoming a vehicle for people to have their
fiefdoms and make some money as educators. And Stan Kenton, God bless
him, great musician, great band, some very important jazz—there’s a sort
of thing that goes into North Texas State [now the University of North
Texas] and a certain way of thinking about the music which is … it’s not
about swing, not really. They might be trying to do it sometimes, but
they’re far more confident with “music of the future” than with the
music of New Orleans. And then with Berklee and that Real Book,
I think it’s telling about some mistakes that were made in the ’60s,
’70s and ’80s: There was too much confidence from people in power [who
said], “Yeah, we’ve got this,” rather than being like, “Well, what does
Ron Carter actually have to say about this? What does someone who’s a
consecrated, confident musician in all sorts of genres, what would they say is important to learn about jazz?” GUESS: That leads me to a quote by Harold Cruse, from his book The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual:
“Without a cultural identity that adequately defines himself, the Negro
cannot even identify with the American nation as a whole. The fact of
the matter is that American whites as a whole are just as much in doubt
about their nationality, their cultural identity, as are Negroes. Thus
the problem of the Negro cultural identity is an unsolved problem within
the context of an American nation that is still in the process of
formation.” He wrote that 50 years ago. In essence, what he’s saying is
nobody knows who they are, this country’s so young, and until you begin
to understand that you’re inextricably tied culturally, then we cannot
move forward. I want both of you to respond, starting with Ethan: [Tell
us] whether you agree with this or not and how you think jazz can bring
this problem of identity to a head. IVERSON: I feel like I need to come out here and
say we’ve gotta deal with black music. That’s part of my job, and it’s
part of my job as an educator when I’m talking to my white piano
students. At the same time, man, it’s the mixture of all the
stuff that made this music that I personally think is the greatest
20th-century stuff. … I can love myself as a white Wisconsin boy better,
you know what I mean? I can have some pride in where I’m from. … It’s American music. MARSALIS: I grew up in absolute segregation. I
remember we went to some white people’s house. It was a piano player;
his name was Chuck Berlin. Now to kind of put you in the South, the
level of segregation was so absolute, we had never actually been to any
white person’s house. Maybe I was nine years old then, or 10. And I was
like, “Why are we going to his house?” My mama said, “That’s your
daddy’s friend.” I said, “My daddy got a white friend?” So we went to
the man’s house. It was a house. It had toilets [laughter], a
TV, you know. It wasn’t like our house necessarily, but it was a house.
And then he came to our house, and one of my friends said, “Man, is your
daddy in trouble? [laughter] I saw that white man came to y’all house. Is he going to jail?” Now we’re laughing at it, because it’s funny. But the fact that
race is a construct and that it’s not real doesn’t mean that we don’t
live in the non-reality of it. There are always stand-ins for reality,
and those stand-ins then become what we misconstrue as reality, so it
becomes difficult for us to get back to reality. People who can play
come from anywhere. But this kind of desire to take the achievements of a
few people and make it be a representation of a group—now all these
groups are gonna battle. I’m just gonna tell y’all a couple of stories, funny things that
stuck out in my mind. Me and Gerry Mulligan—you know, I always loved him
and we would always argue about race. He’d say, “I notice you got all
black guys in your band.” I’d say, “I notice you got all white people in
your band.” [laughter] He’d say, “Man, why would I
get some black guys who can’t play in my band to tell me I can’t play
’cause I’m white?” I’d say, “Why would I get some white dudes that can’t
play in my band because they’re white?” He said, “I want you
to listen to this recording of Adrian Rollini.” I said, “Adrian Rollini?
Psssh.” He said, “You ever heard him play?” I said, “No, but I know
he’s white.” [laughter] He said, “Well, can I ask you a
question?” I said, “Yeah.” He said, “Are you a better musician because
you don’t know who he is?” Now, that’s a good story, and he was right. I
listened to Adrian Rollini, and damn, he could play vibes, he could
play bass saxophone. But did I have a white person in my band and did he
have a black one? No. Albert Murray, I would always have stories for him when I was
growing up about white people I fought with, racism, teachers that
cheated me out of stuff, stuff that I had to go through that I didn’t
like. One day he said, “Man, of all the experiences you had that you
didn’t like, that I’ve heard you chronicle for the last 15 years ad
nauseam, did a white person ever do something that you liked? [laughter]
Who was your teacher?” I said, “Oh yeah, George Jansen. I loved him.”
He said, “Why is he not ever a part of these stories you’re telling me?
Why is the actual totality of your experience never a part of how you’ve
decided to construct your view of the universe?” So the question for
America is, why is this universe never inclusive of all the things black
people contributed to this country? GUESS: Ethan, have you experienced a value gap
for yourself or other white musicians playing this music that is
considered to have come from—that does come from—the Afro-American experience and is born out of slaves and the descendants of slaves? IVERSON: The Bad Plus had this incredible
breakthrough in 2003. We got signed to a major label and sold 100,000
copies of our first record. And it was stylistically diverse. There were
influences that were non-jazz. And I stand by that music. But once I
had a platform that I felt had some light on it, I thought, “I want to
make sure that anyone who’s following me knows that other people built
this house that I’m living in now.” Which is why I started writing about
the music, with an emphasis on people I considered jazz masters and who
were often black. I think when you’re young and you’re good, you want
to emulate the people you feel like you can be. So I have to turn the
question around on you a little bit. I’ve never seen a creative, good
white jazz musician questioned about whether they can play or not. In
fact, it’s a tragedy to look at a DownBeat from the 1950s and ’60s. I actually wrote a letter one time to DownBeat
because I was thinking about doing a story about who’s on the cover and
who’s in the advertisements. It’s straight-up racist. Not that they
aren’t all worthy musicians, but all you need to know is that [Dave]
Brubeck was the first [jazz musician] on the cover of Time [actually the second, after Louis Armstrong]. I’m pretty sure that Wynton and I don’t share the same tastes in
this music. There’s a lot of stuff that doesn’t sound like jazz to him
that I think is great. It’s “improvised music,” whatever. [Marsalis laughs]
But I think part of what I’m here to do, in my role as a writer or as
an educator, is to be like, “I hear you, I’m glad you’re checking out
Bill Evans and Keith Jarrett and this kind of thing, but you should also
make sure to check out James P. Johnson and Thelonious Monk and Sonny
Clark and Kenny Kirkland. Just because this feels good to you and you
feel like, ‘Oh, I can see myself in the image of Brad Mehldau more
easily than in the image of Marcus Roberts,’ that doesn’t mean you
should just take that and run with it to the exclusion of thinking about
the whole parameter of this American music.” GUESS: I’m not a musician; I’m a lover of the
music. But when I hear the blues, when I hear the turnaround, the
turnaround to me is the most palpable sense of hope in the blues. And
where we find ourselves as a country, with the line of demarcation
that’s being drawn for us to make a false binary choice, Obama in 2008
symbolized the turnaround—the aspect of hope for the country in general
and for blacks in particular. What do you guys think? Is the turnaround
coming? [laughter from panel and audience] MARSALIS: Let me tell you, I don’t see it. But I believe in it, and sometimes that belief is seeing it. IVERSON: Well, the blues is strangely
optimistic. [And although] there’s this adolescent period when you’re
really into sad music—you think Mahler has all the answers or something…
MARSALIS: Mahler? Who’d he play for? [laughter]
GUESS: Bob Mahler, the reggae guy? [laughter] IVERSON: I do believe in optimistic music. And
frankly, most of the music I consume as a fan, I do feel optimism from
that. One of the beautiful things about classic jazz is that there’s a
lot of complex textures. The blues is a complex texture. A lot of music
can be straight-up—it’s just telling you what this is and this is how
you’re supposed to feel. But the blues, man, there’s warp and woof in
that. And the jazz masters that I’ve gotten to talk to—I’ll say some of
the same names again, Ron Carter, Billy Hart, Tootie Heath—whatever they
say, it’s complicated. It’s funny, it’s sad, it’s the whole thing, in
these sort of pronouncements about life. It’s circular. One of the greatest, perhaps the greatest book on jazz for me is Notes and Tones
by Arthur Taylor. It’s really the only time the cats spoke to each
other. ’Cause in interviews where some white critic is talking to them,
it’s OK, but this is the people that really made this music
talking to a great drummer. And maybe I’ll just close my part here with
something about the complex emotion of this music, and how there’s
optimism in the blues moment. [picks up book and opens it] This is Don Byas talking, and Don Byas was one of the greats, a key person for harmony. Anyway, Art Taylor says [reading from book],
“Have you ever felt any kind of protest in your music?” Byas says, “I’m
protesting now. If you will listen, you will notice I’m always trying
to make my sound stronger and more brutal than ever. I shake the walls
in the joints I play in. I’m always trying to sound brutal without
losing the beauty, in order to impress people and wake them up. … My
form of protest is to play as hard and strong as I can. In other words, you did this and you did that, so now take this!” [applause]
MARSALIS: That’s great. I always say that, with
Gerry Mulligan and Marcus Belgrave and Lew Soloff and all the
unbelievable, great musicians I knew like I was a part of the family,
people like Elvin Jones and John Lewis … I feel like we want to create
the world they were trying to create. They were people of great reality,
like what Ethan read of what Don Byas said. They weren’t like, “OK, we
had this history in the country, we got messed over, but let’s all smile
and have a Coke and it’s gonna work out.” We had eight years of that,
hope and change. Now we see what that led to. So we’re not saying
non-constructive engagement, we’re saying constructive engagement.
Image: Ethan Iverson, Andre Guess and Wynton Marsalis (from
left) at Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Appel Room in January. Credit:
Lawrence Sumulong/Jazz at Lincoln Center
Marsalis speaks to PopMatters about The Absynnian Mass, his inspirations, compositional techniques, and the reason he plays music.
The Absynnian Mass
Label: Blue EngineUS Release Date: 2016-03-18
Jazz today reflects the culture, as it ever did. Just like television, radio, and music in general, jazz has a huge array of small, targeted ways of reaching an audience. It seems like none of them will ever reach a huge audience, though, much as a late night satire show on cable or Hulu will probably never become the next The Tonight Show.
However, just as pop music has just a select few giants who are household names, jazz hasWynton Marsalis. People who don’t know or don't think they like jazz recognize his name. Inside the art, he and his organization, Jazz at Lincoln Center, are unavoidably central.
Here, PopMatters interviews Marsalis about his latest recording, a two-hour live documentation of his Absynnian Mass, written a few years ago and taken around the world courtesy of the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra and the Chorale le Catheau, some 80 voices strong. At once a “full mass” in form, from “Devotional” through “Benediction” and “Amen”, it's also an anthology of all the music that has ever mattered to Marsalis -- and maybe to jazz as a whole, from Bach to gospel, from swing to Ornette Coleman.
Inevitably, the work is superficially vulnerable to the criticisms Marsalis has faced for the last 25 years, mainly a certain pretension and fetishizing of Ellingtonian grandeur. Like his Pulitzer Prize-winning oratorio Blood on the Fields, The Absynnian Mass is expansive and ambitious without being ground-breaking in any obvious way. But even a basic listening reveals great joy and beauty, an unusually rich shuffling of influences that makes The Abyssinian Mass one of the composer’s greatest achievements.
It's brilliant and stirring, utterly without irony or modern cheekiness. Indeed, it's hard to imagine a jazz recording from 2016 that I will want to revisit more often. A comprehensive summary or review would have to run a few thousand words in order to fully cover the breathtaking, genre-spanning vocal harmonies on “The Lord’s Prayer”, the hip blue-funky-strut that underpins the beautiful solo vocal interplay on “The Beatitudes”, the sumptuous romanticism of “Offertory: The Father”, and the gospel-soul groove of “Come Join the Army”, which puts you in a Sam Cooke-meets-Fats Domino mood.
In conversation, Marsalis is passionate and encyclopedic, a teacher, an admirer of others, scatting passages from his music, and leaping to the philosophical when it makes sense. He laughs and turns serious on a dime. He's exuberant about music and about what it can do for our culture and people.
The Absynnian Mass is explicitly about bridging divisions. When the preacher asks us in “Sermon” what unites us all, the answer is "prayer" but I first thought he was going to say "music". How are they the same?
They both require a certain type of mental isolation. A lot of music is party music. When you really listen to music, like a ballad or slow song that you like, there’s space for reflection. So the preacher was talking about the need to reflect and to express gratitude. And I think that music has a great deal of expression of gratitude, and of reflection and concentration -- the things that are in the realm of the invisible. It allows us to achieve a type of emotional and mental comfort in the world. It gives us the chance to reflect on all sides of things and come to a harmonious or balanced understanding -- or an understanding that we can live with, even if it’s not balanced.
This work feels emphatically participatory. The listener feels invited in to be a part of it: the choir claps along with the band, the preacher invites the congregation to sing and speak. Please tell us about that impulse in this work and in the jazz tradition.
Even in the early part of my career in the early- to mid-‘80s, audiences would get to hollering and screaming and participating. In DC we used to play at Blues Alley and we did an album there in 1986 [Live at Blues Alley on Columbia, a two-CD set recorded with Marcus Roberts on piano, Robert Hurst on bass, and Jeff “Tain” Watts on drums] and even on that record you can hear the level of participation. I can’t tell you how many nights we played and had people hollering and screaming in clubs, even people dancing. And then with the big band, we’ve played a lot of dances. We have heard how music is very participatory. It’s something I really believe in and like.
I’m from New Orleans, and I like to write songs that have clapping and grooving. As early as Uptown Ruler [from 1988 with a quintet featuring his new rhythm section of Herlin Riley on drums and Reginald Veal on bass] there was always something with clapping. In This House, On This Morning (1993), an earlier piece I wrote in the form of a complete mass, had an “Invitation” with a clap and stomp that people just loved to join. In The Marcia Suite I wrote a piece called “Sunflowers”, and I still remember that when we would start that 5/4 clap how the people loved to start clapping and chanting, going crazy along with it.
It’s an integral part of how I experience jazz, even as I was growing up. Even the style of music my father used to play, though there wouldn't be people dancing like that to the funk band I was playing in during high school, but there was often somebody verbally cosigning like they were in the church. When my dad and his friends, who were jazz musicians, would sit and listen to Bird or Frog [Ben Webster] or Lester Young, even on the radio, they would be cosigning, “Yeeeahh”, you know, making comments about what they heard.
The Absynnian Mass is drenched in different varieties of “call and response” devices. In the "Pastoral Prayer", for example, there are call and response figures between solo singers and choir, between the choir and the band, between preacher and congregation, and so on. Can you talk about that as an organizing principle in your music generally?
Call and response is central to most ensemble music. Even in the Beethoven symphonies you have call and response. You have all those instruments, they have to do something, so they’re going to speak to each other. For me, I love that -- people speaking to each other and speaking across different cultures. Bringing this together at the bottom where you can see a common root and allowing people the space to do their thing up above.
I always put a lot of information in my longer pieces. I do a lot of research on them, and I try to get a lot of vernacular things in there. It’s not only Afro-American music, there are a lot of Anglo-American sources, too. For example, I’ve listened often to the “Bristol Sessions” [a famous 1927 recording in Bristol, Tennessee, made by the Victor Recording Company that was the debut for country music stars such as Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter Family] and to Shostakovich symphonies to figure out how to put things together and how things are the same.
For “Pastoral Prayer” I went through a litany of gospel recordings, and I wrote down the different types of devices they use to develop material. So I had in a notebook maybe 100 things that could happen -- someone talks and a band plays, a theme is played and it modulates up a half step -- and on “Prayer” I connected three or four of those things. First was a recitative, someone saying the prayer, and then different people in the band speak as the band is responding to that, then there’s a solo for the alto and we are responding to her, and the choir is responding as well. The orchestra was like a Greek chorus, removed, responding to the action, but then we became more in the action like someone at a church service.
I studied different spirituals, different gospel pieces, different folk sources from a technical standpoint and considered which musical devices would work best for each part of the mass. I took what others did and then modified it using my musical language.
Among the devices you use frequently here are various Latin rhythms. People might not be expecting that if they see this as a gospel-inspired piece of music.
The music is all connected. Latin music is connected to American music through the African clave, and through harmony and through a shared experience -- the experience in Cuba and in South America are the same as experiences in New Orleans. We have a commonality though the habanera rhythm, which is really a universal rhythm [sings the beat]. You hear that in music everywhere.
There is some writing here that very explicitly sounds like classical, western harmony, such as the writing for the choir in the "Glory to God” anthem. At the same time, that piece reminds me of the harmonies of Coltrane’s “Giant Steps."
Those kinds of harmonies are like Bach’s motion of ii-V-I just moving around. Bach is the father of a lot of things in Western music -- the ten-finger way of playing the keyboard, the consolidation of all 12 keys. Having studied at the New Orleans Center for the Creative Arts, I studied with a great theory professor. I love African music, I love Afro-American music, I love Anglo-American music -- all of that is a part of our tradition, so I don’t separate anything from my education or my playing out of my tradition.
I love Bach’s music. Many of the European masters gave us a language and a way to develop material that was unprecedented and is still something to strive for. I come to that material with tremendous respect and try to incorporate it into an overall vision because it’s a part of our overall lives.
There's an incredibly rich variation in the colors and timbres possible with a choir of 80 vocalists in this piece. It seems like relatively new territory in your writing, at least at this scale.
Damien Sneed was our conductor for this piece, and he picked all the singers and the voices for the particular parts. I’ve known him since he was in high school. I’ve been very fortunate to work with musicians whom I have known since they were kids. The type of feeling and love they bring to working on music and with me is familial. It’s not just a job.
Damien came into the project in 2013 and made a tape for every singer who couldn’t read music of him singing their part. He sang the entire mass, every part: soprano, alto, tenor, and bass. The commitment he brought to this piece is not something you could pay somebody to do. I’m eternally grateful for that.
The same thing goes for the musicians, like Ali Jackson or Carlos Henriquez. I knew them when they were 13 and 14 and, at this point, they’ve taught me a lot. It’s a labor of love. They play my music, and I play their music. We’re very supportive of each other as we all try to get to a higher level of musicianship and make a deeper statement.
There's some magical vocal work here. I love the sound of the male vocal in unison with tenor saxophone on “Invocation and Chant”. It’s like nothing I’ve ever heard before.
That is Vincent Gardner, our trombonist. He sings, too. He grew up in the church where his momma is a choir director and his daddy is a jazz trumpet player. He grew up with the music. He sings that line, which is a very abstract and difficult one [sings the exact melody]. It’s a way of approaching triads where you use the last note of a triad to construct the next triad, so all the notes are connected even though they’re not in the key of the root. So the chorus is singing open intervals like ancient, early church music, and Vincent and Walter [Blanding, JALC Orchestra tenor saxophonist] are playing this line through this open fourth sound.
That’s a hard line to sing, but what I love is what he plays on the trombone right after -- so Vincent is calling and responding to himself. He plays some completely abstract stuff on the trombone. There’s no way I could have written anything like that. He just was hearing inside the orbit of those sounds. I’m sure that, truly, there hasn’t been any trombone playing like that in the history of jazz.
Talk about the versatility of the classic, 17-piece jazz orchestra as form within which to compose. There are moments here where it sounds like we're hearing a guitar, an orchestral percussion section, or a cello.
Yeah, it’s a great instrument. You know, we have masters who show us different ways to work and, of course, Duke [Ellington] is supreme. But there are many other masters, too. We tend to talk about Duke because of his genius at combining colors.
For me, I have the luxury of this band. Bands generally don’t congratulate themselves -- band culture tends to be cynical. I’ve been in bands my entire life and very seldom have I been in a band where it’s like, “We’re really playing.” But this band knows it's special. It has been together for a long time and we have a roll call of musicians who were with us who were great before the musicians we have now.
I have to say, I don’t know that there’s ever been a band like this in terms of the capability, the range. They can play, and they can play many different styles. Like [bassist] Carlos Henriquez, he makes us play Latin music with a dedication to the truth of the music and not a cliché. Ali [Jackson, drummer] knows so many different grooves and plays with control.
We play all the stuff: New Orleans music, swing era music, modern music. We're all writing music that expresses our conception of the music of the day. Ted Nash, Vincent Gardner, man, I just look across the band and I see heavy hitters that are dedicated to playing. Ryan Kisor, man, I’m sitting next to one of the greatest trumpet players ever. Marcus Printup and I have been in the section for 20 years together. It’s a way of life for us.
We just came off a six-week tour of Asia and Australia and the last gig was in New Zealand. It was one of our member’s birthdays and the band stood on the stage and started to hug each other. We didn’t have the type of dysfunction you almost always have. I’m not against dysfunction -- that’s part of being a band -- but this particular band is different from any other. Every cat in the band hugged each other. It’s so unusual for a band to have that type of feeling, and I think you hear that on the recording -- the type of love they play with. They are for real, and I tell them that. It’s been a great opportunity to play with this band.
Let’s talk about "The Holy Ghost”, which feels to me like a circle, a strip of paper connected at both ends. You have some writing that evokes Jelly Roll Morton and early Duke, and then there's also an element that seems like it’s out with Ornette, all in the same tune. This is an art where the old and new do swirl around together.
Ornette Coleman lived with Herlin Riley’s uncle in high school in New Orleans. My father [pianist Ellis Marsalis] and Ed Blackwell all played with Ornette in the '50s. The orbit of Ornette’s music was part of my family.
I played with Dewey Redman when I first came to New York -- that Texas sound. Ornette told me that my father and [clarinetist] Alvin Batiste drove all the way to California to see him and they said, “Man we just drove out here to see what you were doing.’” and they were in their 20s. I grew up listening to Ornette Coleman’s music. I loved Don Cherry. That stuff would not be something that is foreign. I know I feel it.
I went to Ornette Coleman’s house once, and I got there at 11:30. He pulled out his horn and we played -- just being in a room sitting across from each other -- until 3:00. We didn’t say one word.
“The Holy Ghost" is three riffs and one written line for the baritone. The trumpet play [sings] “The Ho-ly Ghost” in half-steps, the saxophones play [scats a crazy, atonal figure], they're the Holy Ghost, that’s something where you don’t know what it is, but it’s out there. And the trombones cosign the trumpets, “The Ho-ly Ghost!”, and they’re in triads in plunger mutes, while we’re in those half-steps creating dissonance, and the saxophones are up there in the nether-sphere, and the bass is playing a vamp that’s in three but it sounds like it’s in four [sings the bass line low and funky].
Then we sing “Gimme that old-time religion” because it’s really modern and futuristic because it’s all by cue -- it’s not even on a form. I really believe that time is a cycle, so I don’t really believe in the division between the old and the new.
"The Glory Train" is in a grand tradition of tunes with a locomotive groove. It's my favorite of your songs in this mood because I love the figure for flute that rises above the singing a few times. Tell us about your writing here for the non-saxophone winds.
I've written a lot of orchestral pieces like “All Rise”; I wrote a “Swing Symphony”; I wrote a “Blues Symphony”, a violin concerto, and all these pieces require flutes, oboes, clarinets, and bassoons. Dealing with the flutes and instruments that normally are not equated with jazz is something I started doing in the '90s. “All Rise” was from 1999, and over the years I’ve dealt with them more and more.
Ted Nash [who plays the flute on “The Glory Train”] is a virtuoso on every instrument he touches. To have a person with that level of virtuosity and skill and clarity is an advantage. His father was one of the greatest trombonists ever, playing that high, sweet trombone, and his uncle played in Les Brown’s band and was a great saxophonist, so he comes from that type of musical tradition.
I put the flute in there because that song is based on the Antonio Carlos Jobim song, “The Waters of March”, one of my favorite songs. If you listen to the recording Jobim did with Elis Regina, she sings this high part, which brings to mind the flute. That tune gave me the progression and the way “The Glory Train” is laid out. It’s a circular progression, and The Glory Train keeps the same route, it’s just always going up and down -- it’s going up to heaven and then coming down to earth.
This also relates to the lyrics of “The Waters of March” -- it’s a list of things, but it concludes with “It’s the love in your heart”. And that’s the deepest part of religion: Don’t judge people, just come with some love. When we get to the bridge, the singing is simple and almost childlike [and this is the part where the harmonies from Jobim are most obvious], and I felt that the flute and piano lend themselves to something that is light-hearted and sweet.
So, I didn’t use the bossa-nova rhythm here, but I used the chord progression and the psychological impact of that progression, which is unusual because it goes somewhere but it’s not really going anywhere.
I couldn't help noticing a Maria Marsalis in the choir on this recording.
Yeah, that’s my niece.
I live in DC and we see jazz thriving and dying simultaneously. We have Jason Moran running the Kennedy Center jazz program, and it’s never been better, but at the same time the legendary Bohemian Caverns jazz club just closed (again), and Blues Alley, where you once regularly appeared, is mostly mostly home now to weak R&B. Give me hope!
You are the hope. We are the hope. My father used to say, man, we are living and dying at the same time. Which meant, what are you gonna do? Look at our democracy, it’s living and dying too. So get out here and participate in it.
There’s so much great music out there now. I know the business of music has not been great lately -- the collapse of the record industry among many other things. But if you spend one week in New York, you hear that the variety in the music has never been more amazing. But I know that’s harder to make money doing it.
Yeah, it’s always been hard. It’s always been hard. It’s hard for the arts. It was hard for Bach to make money. I mean ... it’s hard. If you’re a filmmaker and you come to New York, are you going to make films? Maybe, but ... It’s uphill in this time, but it’s been uphill for a lot of things. It’s incumbent on us to create the world that we envision.
I assume that’s why you are so engaged with the education side of music.
Yeah, all sides : education, performance, the advocacy that we do at Jazz at Lincoln Center, working through an institution rather than just working on my own. Yes, to create interest around the music, using music for what it’s designed to do: to uplift our culture and who we are as people. Ultimately to uplift people’s spirits and consciousness.
In the past thirty years, I have had the good fortune to teach
thousands of bands and an incalculable number of students in diverse
settings. Though each situation is unique, students share many of the
same concerns in pursuit of a more profound relationship with music and
with life through music. Every style of music presents distinct
challenges which demand the development of different skills. Jazz
requires creativity, communication and community. Through improvising we learn to value our own creativity; through
swing we coordinate our communication with others; and through the blues
we learn to find and celebrate ‘meaning’ in the tragic and absurd parts
of life that afflict every community. Certainly three things worth
learning. I believe jazz revolutionized the art of music by vesting the
individual musician with the authority to ‘tell their story’ and by
positing that an even larger ‘story’ could be told, by choice, by a
group of equally empowered musicians. Our educational system has yet to
be retooled to accommodate that revolution. Of course there are some
educators pointing the way, but many still view this music as exotic,
mysterious and unteachable. Some jazz lovers believe the music can’t be
taught in schools when, truth is, it can’t be taught THE WAY we are
teaching it. How many decades must we watch these faulty methods fail? It’s time
to begin an earnest national effort to teach our kids the glories of
jazz. Not a way to play scales on harmonies, or some jazzy
misrepresentation of rock tunes, but an engagement with the stories,
songs, rhythms, and the lives of those who made this music so vital—
from the inspired dancers who blanketed this country in the 1930’s to
the many earnest and eager kids now in jazz programs all over the world,
to the local musicians playing their hearts out in small clubs
everywhere.
Jazz is life music and education is not anti-life.
To achieve greater success in producing students who play inside the
reality of this music, the modern teacher should consider combining
various methods of instruction: 1) The gradual, graded, literature-based method employed in most
traditional music education. Students should perform music of the great
composers and arrangers, from Bill Challis to Don Redman, Duke Ellington
to Gil Evans and Charles Mingus and so on. A selected and graded canon
makes the compositional victories of the music obvious and provides a
practical way to assess progress; performing the ‘best of’ of all eras
creates a more informed, sophisticated, and technically proficient
musician who is better equipped to influence the tastes of listeners as
well as develop and defend a comprehensive art. 2) A method that focuses on the substance of all periods of jazz
instead of segregating them by decade and arbitrarily assigning greater
value to later styles. In this way, free expression (which encourages
experimentation and the focusing of personal intentions) and early New
Orleans music (which is rich in melody, danceable groove, and triadic
harmonies) is taught concurrently to beginners. More structured and/or
rigorous harmonic and thematic material is covered later. The initial
instruction should be entirely aural in imitation of how we learn to
speak our mother tongue. (By the time we study the mechanics of English
we have employed them for years). Teaching jazz is sometimes confused
with teaching theory. Instead of learning what scales to play on which
chords, we should be thinking about HEARING ideas in the context of
harmonic progressions and understanding what those ideas mean. 3) A method that teaches vernacular grooves and dance as integral to
jazz. For example: a New Orleans two groove is different from a Texas
two, or the Kansas City two or a Nashville two. The 12/8 blues-rock
shuffle is different from the Afro- American church 12/8…. on and on.
Each groove has its own characteristic, meaning, and dance. I call this
‘root groove’ teaching. Many of these grooves were achieved after years
of distillation. It’s a shame to discard cultural victories in lieu of
grooves that machines can play, or old-timely, corny reductions of the
actual groove, or no groove at all. A jazz musician should be able to
convincingly play a wide cross section of American vernacular music.
Let’s teach our kids how to play the most essential part of our
music—-the rhythm—-with authority and feeling and lets encourage all
kids to improvise. Of course most are shy at first because it sounds so
bad, but any activity (playing ball or singing or doing almost anything)
takes time for little ones to develop. The seeds are always there. It’s
up to us to tend to them with love, concern and intelligence. In all of my years of teaching, I have encountered all types of
directors. Regardless of philosophical differences, I have found them to
be principally concerned about the education of their students. They
often ask me to comment on the most common problems confronting the
modern jazz ensemble (after improvisation). These are a few suggested
solutions to issues I have encountered with bands throughout the world:
1) Implement good listening habits. If students don’t listen to the
type of music they play in band, there is no way they will sound good
playing it. You want your students to develop their musical taste as
well as their playing. At the beginning of each rehearsal have the
students listen to a great piece of music. Assign weekly listening and
put aside time to discuss what was heard.
2) The band is just too loud! The median volume of a jazz band today
is a soft f. It should be an intense mp, with a powerful and dramatic
f. Rehearse the band at pp so they become accustom to hearing each other
while playing. Also, the acoustic bass and rhythm guitar are a great
check to balance the power of drums. Checks and balances in the rhythm
section were developed over decades of playing. Why should they be
discarded so easily for a less favorable result? Jazz is constant
communication. Above a certain volume communication becomes very
difficult.
3) TEACH a piece of music when rehearsing. Students should know how
we get from one theme to the other and what musical devices are used for
what effect. Knowledge of form and function lead to a much more
listenable performance. Furthermore, improvised solos require detailed
listening because you are required to respond with some degree of
appropriateness to music as it’s being invented. After playing a piece,
ask members of the band to recall what the soloists played, then have
the soloists explain what they were doing.
4) Embrace the dance beat orientation of jazz. There is such a
proliferation of non-swinging styles bearing the name of jazz; it’s hard
to know what to teach. Samba has a principal rhythm, mambo has a
rhythm, rock has a rhythm, Jazz has one too: Swing! It is such an
elegant, supple, and dynamic rhythm constantly evolving; it must be
tended to with care in the same way the most serious Latin musicians
tend to the clave.
5) How to make students want to learn…hmmm…. My father used to say,
ʻYou can bring a horse to water but you can’t make him thirsty.’ The
best way I’ve found to combat the haze of uninspired participation that
engulfs some of our young is for the director to be aggressively
Inspired. Yeah, that’s what we need to do out here: stay inspired no
matter what.
And encouraged that we are not alone. Wynton Marsalis
For
two decades Wynton Marsalis ruled the jazz universe, enjoying virtually
unqualified admiration as a musician and unsurpassed influence as the
music's leading promoter and definer. But after a series of sour
notes—he parted from his record label, has been caught up in controversy
at Jazz at Lincoln Center; and has been drawing increasing fire from
critics and fellow musicians alike for his narrow
neotraditionalism—perhaps the biggest name in jazz faces an uncertain
future. Just like jazz itself
Manhattan
is empty during the last week of August, and the kind of emptiness it
achieves is like that of the mind during meditation—a temporary,
unnatural purity. On a Tuesday evening in late August of 2001 I was
wandering around Greenwich Village and ended up at the Village Vanguard.
After sixty-some years of business the illustrious little jazz haunt
hasn't changed; it remains one of the inexplicable constants of the
Manhattan landscape. Its midtown cousin, Birdland (named for the bebop
saxophonist Charlie "Yardbird" Parker), closed down decades ago and was
replaced by a strip joint, Flash Dancers, which has been in business
longer than Birdland was; a theme nightclub near Times Square now uses
the Birdland name. There's still a Cotton Club in Harlem, but not in the
original location, and now it's a seedy disco. The Vanguard has somehow
survived in its primordial basement and has retained all the bohemian
eccentricities that have always helped make it cool: the fence-post
marquee, with performers' names handwritten vertically; the
treacherously angled stairwell; no food served; no credit cards
accepted. Lorraine Gordon, the Vanguard's owner and the widow of the
club's founder, is a Medici of the jazz world, a patron and king-maker.
Among jazz fans and musicians the Village Vanguard is clearly a paragon
of the music's own kind of purity—one that's neither temporary nor
unnatural.
This article appears in the March 2003 issue.
I
walked in on a set in progress and took the next-to-last seat on the
burgundy-leather banquette that runs along the east wall. The end table,
Lorraine Gordon's, was vacant, indicating that Gordon was probably in
the kitchen, where she does the books and where musicians congregate
between sets. (Although foodless, the Vanguard has one of the most
venerable kitchens in New York.) A small combo was running through the
bebop classic "Blue 'n' Boogie" at a duly vertiginous speed. There was
no mistaking the bandleader: Charles McPherson,
an alto saxophonist who was a protégé of the late bassist and composer
Charles Mingus. McPherson is a venturesome musician who upends the jazz
repertoire on the bandstand, and he composes pieces built on surprise,
as Mingus did. Although he is a superior talent, he's not a top jazz
attraction, which is why he was scheduled for the last week in August.
For his second tune after my arrival McPherson, in homage to his mentor,
played Mingus's homage to Lester Young, "Goodbye Pork Pie Hat." The
performance was languid, and my eyes drifted, settling eventually on the
trumpet player, because he was turned away from the audience and even
from the rest of the band, staring at the floor. Although I couldn't
place him, he looked vaguely familiar, like an older version of Wynton
Marsalis.
During
the third song, Charlie Parker's "Chasin' the Bird," the trumpeter
stepped to the center of the bandstand to take a solo. "Excuse me," I
whispered to the fellow next to me (a jazz guitarist, I later learned).
"Is that Wynton Marsalis?" "I very seriously doubt that," he snapped back, as if I had asked if it was Parker himself. Stylishly
dressed in an Italian-cut gray suit, a dark-blue shirt, and a muted
blue tie, the soloist had the burnished elegance that Wynton Marsalis
and his musician brothers have been bringing to jazz for two decades. If
this man was not Wynton, he looked like what "Marsalis" means—but older
and heavier, and not just in appearance. There was a weight upon him;
he didn't smile, and his eyes were small and affectless. I could barely
reconcile the sight before me with the image of youthful élan that
Wynton Marsalis has always called to mind.
The
fourth song was a solo showcase for the trumpeter, who, I could now
see, was indeed Marsalis, but who no more sounded than looked like what I
expected. He played a ballad, "I Don't Stand a Ghost of a Chance With
You," unaccompanied. Written by Victor Young, a film-score composer, for
a 1930s romance, the piece can bring out the sadness in any scene, and
Marsalis appeared deeply attuned to its melancholy. He performed the
song in murmurs and sighs, at points nearly talking the words in notes.
It was a wrenching act of creative expression. When he reached the
climax, Marsalis played the final phrase, the title statement, in
declarative tones, allowing each successive note to linger in the air a
bit longer. "I don't stand ... a ghost ... of ... a ... chance ..." The
room was silent until, at the most dramatic point, someone's cell phone
went off, blaring a rapid singsong melody in electronic bleeps. People
started giggling and picking up their drinks. The moment—the whole
performance—unraveled.
Marsalis
paused for a beat, motionless, and his eyebrows arched. I scrawled on a
sheet of notepaper, MAGIC, RUINED. The cell-phone offender scooted into
the hall as the chatter in the room grew louder. Still frozen at the
microphone, Marsalis replayed the silly cell-phone melody note for note.
Then he repeated it, and began improvising variations on the tune. The
audience slowly came back to him. In a few minutes he resolved the
improvisation—which had changed keys once or twice and throttled down to
a ballad tempo—and ended up exactly where he had left off: "with ...
you ..." The ovation was tremendous. Lorraine Gordon had come in shortly before the final notes. Leaning over to me, she said, "What did I miss?" That
was a good question, and I had others. What was Wynton Marsalis,
perhaps the most famous jazz musician alive, doing as a sideman in a
band led by a little-known saxophonist in the slowest week of the year?
Where were the scores of fans who used to line up on the sidewalk
whenever Marsalis played, regardless of whether he was billed and
promoted? Why did he look so downtrodden, so leaden ... so different
that he was scarcely recognizable? How could his playing have been so
perfunctory (as it was for most of that evening) and yet so transcendent
on one bittersweet song about loss and self-doubt? What happened to
Wynton Marsalis?
That
may be like asking What happened to jazz? For twenty years the fates of
Marsalis and jazz music have appeared inextricably intertwined. He was a
young newcomer on the New York scene at a time when jazz seemed
dominated and diminished by rock-oriented "fusion," marginalized by
outré experimentation and electronics, and disconnected from the youth
audience that has driven American popular culture since the postwar era.
Extraordinarily gifted and fluent in both jazz and classical music, not
to mention young, handsome, black, impassioned, and articulate,
especially on the importance of jazz history and jazz masters, Marsalis
was ideally equipped to lead a cultural-aesthetic movement suited to the
time, a renaissance that raised public esteem for and the popular
appeal of jazz through a return to the music's traditional values: jazz
for the Reagan revolution. In 1990 Time magazine put him on the
cover and announced the dawn of "The New Jazz Age." Record companies
rediscovered the music and revived long-dormant jazz lines, signing
countless young musicians inspired by Marsalis, along with three of his
five brothers (first his older brother, Branford,
a celebrated tenor saxophonist; later Delfeayo, a trombonist; and
eventually the youngest, Jason, a percussionist) and his father, Ellis
(a respected educator and pianist in the family's native New Orleans).
By the 1990s Wynton Marsalis had become an omnipresent spokesperson for
his music and also one of its most prolific and highly decorated
practitioners (he was the first jazz composer to win a Pulitzer Prize,
for Blood on the Fields,
his oratorio about slavery)—something of a counterpart to Leonard
Bernstein in the 1950s. He took jazz up and over the hierarchical divide
that had long isolated the music from the fine-arts establishment; the
modest summer jazz program he created won a full constituency at Lincoln
Center. In 1999, to mark the end of the century, Marsalis issued a
total of fifteen CDs—about one new title every month. In
the following two years he did not release a single CD of new music. In
fact, after two decades with Columbia Records, the prestigious and
high-powered label historically associated with Duke Ellington,
Thelonious Monk, and Miles Davis, Marsalis has no record contract with
any company. Nor does his brother Branford, who just a few years ago was
not only one of Columbia's recording stars but an executive consultant
overseeing the artists-and-repertory direction of the label's jazz
division. (Branford recently formed an independent record company.) Over
the past few years Columbia has drastically reduced its roster of
active jazz musicians, shifting its emphasis to reissues of old
recordings. Atlantic folded its jazz catalogue into the operations of
its parent company, Warner, and essentially gave up on developing new
artists. Verve is a fraction of the size it was a decade ago. In
addition, jazz clubs around the country have been struggling, and the
attacks of September 11 hurt night life everywhere; New York's venerable
Sweet Basil closed in the spring of 2001, after twenty-five years in
operation, and later reopened as a youth-oriented world-music place. In
the institutional arena, Carnegie Hall discontinued its in-house jazz
orchestra at the end of the 2001-2002 season.
For
this grim state of affairs in jazz Marsalis, the public face of the
music and the evident master of its destiny, has been declared at least
partly culpable. By leading jazz into the realm of unbending classicism,
by applying the Great Man template to establish an iconography
(Armstrong, Ellington, Parker, Coltrane), and by sanctifying a canon of
their own choosing (Armstrong's "Hot Fives," Ellington's Blanton-Webster
period, Parker's Savoy sessions, Coltrane's A Love Supreme),
Marsalis and his adherents are said to have codified the music in a
stifling orthodoxy and inhibited the revolutionary impulses that have
always advanced jazz. "They've done a lot to take the essence of jazz and distort it," the composer and pianist George Russell told The New York Times in 1998. "They've put a damper on the main ingredient of jazz, which is innovation." A
former executive with Columbia Records who has worked intimately with
five Marsalises says, "For many people, Wynton has come to embody some
retro ideology that is not really of the moment, you know—it's more
museumlike in nature, a look back. I think as each day passes, Wynton
does lose relevance as a shaper of musical direction. He's not quite the
leader of a musical movement any longer. That doesn't mean he's not
remarkable, or without considerable clout, or that he's not the leader
of a cultural movement. But within the record industry the Marsalises
are no longer seen as the top guys." Six
weeks after he played in Charles McPherson's band at the Village
Vanguard, Wynton Marsalis turned forty. (His publicists will have to
come up with a nickname to replace "the young lion.") Marsalis has been
struggling, clearly. In addition to the rest of his troubles, he and his
fiancée broke off the engagement that might have brought stability to
his notoriously mercurial romantic life (he has three sons by two single
women, one on each coast), and Jazz at Lincoln Center
suffered a setback shortly after Marsalis's birthday, when the chairman
of its board of directors was murdered in his home. This February,
Marsalis returned briefly to the spotlight, when he, his three musical
brothers, and their father joined forces on their first CD together, The Marsalis Family: A Jazz Celebration—released on Branford's new label, Marsalis Music,
and supported by a high-profile PBS special and a brief national tour
starting a few days later. But this effort to celebrate the Marsalis
legacy is seen by some in the jazz world as just another exercise in
nostalgia. It's a criticism that familiarly echoes the one that has
bedeviled jazz as a whole for some years. Yet if the lives of this man
and America's great indigenous music are indeed entwined, their
predicament calls for fuller scrutiny and better understanding. It's too
easy to dismiss Marsalis's condition as a midlife crisis.
Every
icon needs an origin myth. Born in the same city as jazz, Wynton
Marsalis was blessed with a signifying provenance. "I'm from New
Orleans," he has told an interviewer, as shorthand for his musical
background. "We don't need a concert hall for jazz." In many ways
Marsalis's story is so neatly connected to jazz history that it defies
credulity. Had a screenwriter created Wynton Marsalis, a cynical
producer would have sent back the opening scenes for rewrite: too
perfect. Not only did he come from the cradle of jazz but he plays the
trumpet, the instrument that originally defined the music. "The first
jazz musician was a trumpeter, Buddy Bolden," Marsalis once said, "and
the last will be a trumpeter, the archangel Gabriel." Moreover, Marsalis
rose to prominence in the mid-1980s, just as jazz was approaching its
centennial. "There's a tremendous symbolic resonance that has always
been a part of what Wynton's about," says Jeff Levenson, a veteran jazz
writer who also worked as an executive at both Columbia and Warner Bros.
Records. "This kid emerges who's a hotshot ... and the whole thing has a
kind of symmetry to it. Louis Armstrong starts things off—trumpet
player, New Orleans, turn of the century. Wynton closes it out—a trumpet
player from New Orleans." Dolores
and Ellis Marsalis still live in the house Wynton left when he moved to
New York on a scholarship to Juilliard, in 1979. It is a nice, modest
house of green-painted clapboard, in a neighborhood that used to be
nicer. To enter the house one goes through an iron gate and past a patch
of lawn with manicured shrubbery and a statue of a black madonna in the
center. The interior looks large without six boys frolicking in it at
once. (Only thirty-two-year-old Mboya, who is autistic, lives at home
now.) Dolores Marsalis keeps the house, her husband tells me with a
pride they obviously share: everything is just so, and communicates to
the visitor in a gracious way. The chairs have pressed crocheted doilies
pinned to their backs: they are not for horseplay. The walls are
covered with paintings and graphics portraying African-American themes:
they are not decorations but art. The table next to the front door holds
a display of photographs of women in the family: everybody counts. Ellis
Marsalis is a sturdy man, sixty-eight, who moves with a deliberate
bounce. A lifelong educator who has taught music on every level from
elementary school to college, he held a chair in jazz studies endowed by
Coca-Cola at the University of New Orleans until his retirement, in
2001. When he speaks, his words have the measured authority of a lesson.
Wynton Marsalis is very much like his father in the way he holds
himself (hunched a bit, as if he were reading from a music stand), sits
(legs spread), gestures (forward and in tempo), and speaks (with a
disarming touch of New Orleans patois).
To
Ellis Marsalis, the work ethic his own father taught by example is
primary to success, be it in commerce or in art. "When I was teaching
[high school]," he says, "I used to see a lot of talent that didn't
particularly go anywhere, and at first it was really mysterious to me. I
couldn't really understand it—I mean, to see a seventeen-year-old kid
who's a natural bass. Those are born. You don't learn to do that. And to
hear coloratura sopranos who couldn't care less. I was forced to
reappraise what my understanding of talent is. Then I eventually began
to discover that talent is like the battery in a car. It'll get you
started, but if the generator is bad, you don't go very far."
A
musician by aspiration who took up teaching by necessity, Ellis Marsalis
was ambivalent about his own decision to stay in New Orleans and raise
his children, rather than to pursue a big-time career in New York. "At
the time Wynton was growing up, I still had a lot of anxiety about going
to New York," he recalls. I asked him if he thought Wynton had
recognized his frustrations and had set out to aim higher by making New
York his home base. Was he trying to fulfill his father's dream? "Could
be," Ellis said, nodding slowly. "It could be."
In The History of Jazz
(1997) Ted Gioia wrote, "[Wynton] Marsalis's rise to fame while barely
out of his teens was an unprecedented event in the jazz world. No major
jazz figure—not Ellington or Armstrong, Goodman or Gillespie—had become
so famous, so fast." The facts are impressive even twenty years later:
while still at Juilliard, Marsalis was invited to join another kind of
conservatory, the Jazz Messengers, a band led by the drummer Art Blakey;
soon after, he was appointed the group's musical director, at age
nineteen. As Ellis Marsalis says, "He called up and said, 'Man, I have a
chance to join Art Blakey's band. What do you think?' I said, 'Well,
one thing about Juilliard, man,' I said, 'Juilliard's going to be there
when they're shoveling dirt in your face. Art Blakey won't.'" By 1982,
when he turned twenty-one, Wynton had toured with the jazz star Herbie
Hancock and had played with distinction on half a dozen albums, leading
"the jazz press to declare him a prodigy," Jon Pareles wrote in The New York Times
in the mid-1980s. Columbia Records signed him in an extraordinary
contract that called for Marsalis to make both classical and jazz
recordings, and he started a collection of Grammys in both categories.
No jazz musician has had such success since.
Few men so eloquently "wordy" have ever revealed so little of
themselves to the world as did Duke Ellington. As some men hide behind
public silence, he hid behind public phrases to build the walls around
him ever higher. By Irving Townsend
To a degree Marsalis's aesthetic, which draws reverentially on the
African-American traditions of the blues and swing, seems to repudiate
the style of the previous era. Swing was a rejection of traditional New
Orleans jazz, bebop a rejection of swing, cool jazz a rejection of bop,
free jazz a rejection of the cool, and fusion a rejection of free jazz.
(Though reductive and Oedipal, this theory bears up well enough if one
ignores the innumerable overlaps, inconsistencies, and contradictions,
and also the entire career of Duke Ellington.) Wynton and his young
peers were rejecting fusion, an amorphous mixture of jazz and pop-rock,
which they saw as fatuous and vulgar, and which they thought pandered to
commercialism.
As the composer and trumpeter Terence Blanchard, a childhood friend
of Wynton's who followed him to New York and into Blakey's band,
recalls, "In the early eighties we had to fight for our existence in the
music war. The fusion thing was real big, and we were trying to get
back to, like, just the fundamental elements in jazz." But for
all fusion's attributes as a target (it was slick, ostentatious, cold,
and elementally white, much like the big-band "innovations in modern
music" of Stan Kenton and the "third-stream" pretenses of the 1950s),
the style scarcely dominated the New York jazz scene when the Marsalis
brothers and Blanchard started out. In fact, when Wynton Marsalis played
at the club Seventh Avenue South in the last week of January 1982, to
promote his eponymous first solo album, nearly every jazz room in town
featured bebop (or older styles of the music): Kai Winding was at the
Vanguard, Anita O'Day at the Blue Note, Dizzy Gillespie at Fat
Tuesday's, Archie Shepp at Sweet Basil, George Shearing at Michael's
Pub.
"There
was a whole lot of jazz in New York then, and it was straight-ahead
[bebop], by and large," recalls the pianist and educator Barry Harris.
"You had all the work you could do [as a bebop musician], and nobody was
doing fusion but the kids. Now, they made the festivals and whatnot for
the younger crowd. That was where that was at. It was no big thing.
That was a good time for straight-ahead [music] in New York."
Although
marginal to the core jazz constituency, centered in New York (as it had
been for decades and continues to be), fusion had a voguish appeal to
college audiences and other young people. The Marsalis revolution was
especially radical, then, in rejecting a style popular among musicians
of the revolutionary's own age, rather than the music established by his
elders; it was subversive methodologically as well as aesthetically,
and the ensuing polarization in jazz circles on the subject of Marsalis
and his music was uniquely intra-generational.
The musical
landscape Marsalis entered in full stride and soon dominated was far
more complex than most accounts have suggested—as is the actual music he
has made. Marsalis was never a nostalgist like the tuba player Vince
Giordano, who re-creates jazz styles of the early twentieth century. The
improvisations on the first few Wynton Marsalis albums employed
elements of the blues and swing (along with other styles, including free
jazz), but in the service of personal expression; and Marsalis's
earliest compositions, with their harmonic surprises and their lightning
shifts in time signature, were less homage than montage. In the image
his detractors like to paint (over and over), Marsalis single-handedly
halted jazz's progress. "Wynton has the car in reverse," the trombonist
and composer Bob Brookmeyer has said, "and the pedal to the metal"; if
so, the vehicle was already in gear. Over the course of the 1970s a
movement to elevate esteem for jazz and protect the music's heritage was
emerging in one sphere at the same time that fusion and the music of
the living bebop masters coexisted in their own spheres. The Smithsonian
Institution began an effort to preserve the musical archives
of Duke Ellington and other jazz masters; the bandleader and trumpeter
Herb Pomeroy was leading a repertory jazz program at the Berklee College
of Music, in Boston; the saxophonist Loren Schoenberg was working with
Benny Goodman to revive his big band; the bassist Chuck Israels formed
the National Jazz Ensemble; the musicologist and conductor Gunther
Schuller was conducting vintage jazz works and writing about them as if
there were a canon; the impresario George Wein founded the New York Jazz
Repertory Company. "I just felt like it was time," recalls Wein, who
later produced the neo-traditional concerts of the Carnegie Hall Jazz
Band. "There was a lot of that percolating at the time, and that's the
atmosphere that Wynton and the others came into."
The revival movement itself was a revival. Back in the late 1930s,
when the "From Spirituals to Swing" concerts at Carnegie Hall gave
American jazz the imprimatur of the cultural establishment, the music
had changed course and languished in a contemplative state. Writers and
musicians of the period rediscovered the artists and styles of the
music's (relatively recent) past—a respite, time has shown us, during
which jazz began metamorphosing into bebop.
The debate over
classicism that has swirled around Marsalis is nothing new either. The
enduring issue is, of course, not which work is entitled to a place in
the canon—Manet's Déjeuner sur l'herbe? Jelly Roll Morton's
"Black Bottom Stomp"?—but who is empowered to confer that distinction.
Marsalis has compounded things substantially, not only by making music
that he expects will be taken seriously but also by defining the terms,
and by challenging white critics and white-dominated institutions to
yield authority over such matters.
The scholar and author Gerald
Early, a professor at Washington University in St. Louis, says, "Wynton
Marsalis is a target for criticism because, unlike a lot of artists,
he's become a quite outspoken critic himself, and he has articulated a
historical theory and an aesthetic theory about jazz music. I think that
critics feel kind of threatened and rather uncomfortable when an artist
comes along who's capable of doing that pretty well—well enough so that
a critic has to respect it." Indeed, most of the early press about
Marsalis was laudatory, until he dared to use his platform to advance
ideas about jazz history and black identity. Ever since, jazz critics,
most of whom are white, have tended to treat Marsalis more severely.
"The fact that these critics are white, that a lot of the audience for
jazz music is white," Early says, "I think is a source of tension for
many of the artists who are black. White critics basically codified and
structured the history of this music and made the judgments about who is
significant in the music and so forth, and I think in this culture that
can't help but be a real source of tension for many black jazz
musicians."
Stanley
Crouch, a critic and a long-standing influence on Marsalis, is quick to
expand on the theme. "I think a lot of the criticism of Wynton's music
is based upon a hostility toward him. Marsalis, any way the critics look
at him, is superior to them. He's a greater musician than any of them
are writers. He's a good-looking guy. He has access to and has had
access to a far higher quality of female than any of them could ever
imagine. He doesn't look up to them, and that's a problem." Wynton
Marsalis lives in an airy eight-room apartment on the twenty-ninth
floor of a high-rise tower a few dozen footsteps from the stage entrance
to Alice Tully Hall,
where Lincoln Center's jazz orchestra has been playing since it
started, in 1987. His home is as conscientiously detailed as the house
of his parents. On a visit a year ago I asked him if his mother had
helped him decorate it, and he laughed. "Maybe she should have," he
said. "She knows what she's doing." But he has his own taste, and it
isn't his mother's. The living room, which is so spacious that at first I
didn't notice the grand piano in the corner, is done in vivid colors;
Marsalis says that he likes Matisse for the "positivity and affirmation"
of his work, and that he picked up the artist's vibrant palette in his
appointments. Patterns on the carpeting and the fabrics suggest
crescents, the symbol of his home town. Sunlight floods the room from
banks of windows at the room's outer corners. "I like the sun," Marsalis
told me as we sat on sofas opposite each other. "The source of life.
There's a lot of sun in New Orleans." An enormous lithograph of Duke
Ellington hangs over one of the sofas, and other prints and photographs
of Ellington, along with those of Armstrong and Blakey, line the hall
leading to the other rooms. Gerald Early has commented on Marsalis's sense of style: "Whether he
is at the cutting edge of what's going on in jazz now is neither here
nor there. He represents a certain kind of image, which I think is
enormously important, of the jazz musician as this kind of well-dressed,
extremely sophisticated person, and a person who lives well—a person
who reads books, a person who, you know, enjoys a kind of GQ sort of life." Until
recently Wynton Marsalis seemed physically unaccountable to time. His
good looks were the boyish kind. Full-cheeked and bright-eyed, he was
adorable. At the same time, he always carried himself with a poised
surety, a masculine grace, that tended to make women straighten up and
men start poking their toes at things. The nickname "young lion" seemed
appropriate, Marsalis being a creature of fearsome beauty who is also
nocturnal, combative, and nomadic. But his body has begun its midlife
thickening. He projects a quieter, softer, slower presence now, although
he still plays a tough game of basketball. For
most of the past twenty years he has been on view in his natural state:
working. Marsalis is living by the work ethic that his father passed on
from his grandfather, with a determination that would seem pathological
if it weren't utterly normal for him. He is not manic; he works at a
moderate pace but never stops. Indeed, although Marsalis has not been
recording much lately, he is constantly working with the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra.
From his office in the headquarters of Jazz at Lincoln Center he
oversees its creative and educational activities. He practices the
trumpet for several hours every day. He plays with his sons when they
are with him. And in the evening he goes out—leaving just a few hours a
night for sleep. When we spoke at his home, I asked him what the man in
the lithograph over his head, Duke Ellington, meant to him. "Indefatigable
worker. He loved music and people and playing. He played a lot, and he
loved jazz, and he loved the Afro-American people."
"Do you have a performance philosophy?" "I've
always tried to be respectful of my audience. I always sign people's
autographs, always acted like I was working for them. I try to play
people's requests, try to come up with a way of playing that I thought
people would want to listen to—never thought I was above them. I'm here
to do a job. I always try to be professional, and many times, in halls
across the country, I'm the last one to leave—all the crews are gone. "For
me to tell people who are spending their money and have worked their
jobs and are going on a date with their husbands or their wives, tell
them, 'I know you all are here, and you should be honored that I'm
here'—that's just not my philosophy." He keeps a dressing room
full of elegant clothing—closets of dark suits and formal wear, and a
rack of hats. The bedroom has a long cabinet with framed family photos
and other memorabilia on display; when Marsalis sits up in his bed, they
are what he sees.
He
flopped onto his mattress and focused on the task of cleaning and
lubricating his trumpet. "I should properly do this all the time," he
said, shaking his head at himself. "I keep playing till it's so filthy
all you hear when I play it is the dirt." Marsalis pulled his instrument
apart and began a consuming procedure that involved massaging a viscous
fluid onto each of the parts. As he worked, he talked about music,
which is what he seems most at home doing wherever he is. "My
daddy said to me, when I was leaving high school, you know, debating
whether I would go to New York, should I go into music, and the whole
thing was, 'Well, you don't want to go into music, because you'll end up
being like your daddy.' He struggled his whole life. He said, 'Man, I
can tell you one thing. Do it if you want to do it and if you love doin'
it. But if you don't want to do it for that reason, don't do it.
Because when it really, really gets hard, you have to tell yourself,
This is what I want to do.' My father told me, 'Don't sit around waiting
for publicity, money, people saying you're great. Son, that might never
happen. If you want to do it and you love doin' it, do it. But if you
don't ...'" Marsalis shook his head. For all his success and
acclaim, Marsalis is vexed by his critics in the jazz establishment. "My
relationship with the jazz critics has never been good," he said,
pausing for some time, at least half a minute. "It's never been a great
relationship. I've never been portrayed accurately—not at all. The whole
thing was always, like, trying to water down your level of seriousness,
always trying to make you seem like an angry young man and all this.
Man, you know—that was just bullshit. "When I hear that term,
'classicism,' it's hard for me to figure out what people are talking
about. There are so many musicians playing today—like, the way Joe
Lovano plays, the way Marcus Roberts plays, the way that Joshua Redman
plays, the way that Danilo Pérez plays, the way Cyrus Chestnut plays.
There are a lot of musicians playing a lot of different styles. In any
period of any music a vast majority of the practitioners sought some
common language, and then there are people who do variations on that
language. I think we need to delve deeper into the tradition, not run
away from it. See, musicians are always encouraged to run away from it.
You know, if you're a musician, you want to run from it, for a basic
reason—because you don't compare well against it."
A decade ago The New Yorker
ran a cartoon depicting a middle-aged white man lying in bed. Two young
children are bursting into the room. "Dad! Dad! Wake up!" one of the
kids yells. "They just discovered another Marsalis!" As each of his
musician brothers—and their father—followed Wynton onto the national
jazz scene, the Marsalis era took a shape that began to seem dynastic.
The family looked like musical Kennedys, from the strong-willed
patriarch to the pair of handsome, charismatic sons who led their
generation to the younger siblings struggling to fulfill impossible
expectations. Eventually all five musicians ended up working at Columbia
Records—back under the same roof but in a variety of roles.
Easily
reduced to clichés of sibling contrast, Wynton and Branford have
personified the duality Wynton sees in the world of the arts: purity
versus corruption. In its cover story on Wynton and the young lions, Time emphasized the brothers' polar attributes.
Wynton,
extraordinarily disciplined and driven by an insatiable desire to
excel, was a straight-A student who starred in Little League baseball,
practiced his trumpet three hours a day and won every music competition
he ever entered. Branford ... was an average student, a self-described
"spaz" in sports and a naturally talented musician who hated to
practice.
Branford has played with rock and pop
musicians such as Sting and the Grateful Dead; Wynton has derided
pop-jazz players as "cult figures, talking-all-the-time heroes, who have
these spur-of-the-moment, out-of-their-mind, left-bank, off-the-wall
theories about music which make no sense at all to anybody who knows
anything about music." Branford has performed and recorded funk music
under the pseudonym Buckshot LeFonque (derived from a pseudonym that the
saxophonist Cannonball Adderley used in the 1950s). Wynton told a
Kennedy Center audience in 1998, "There's nothing sadder than a jazz
musician playing funk." They maintain a respectful distance,
playing together on occasion and rarely explicitly criticizing each
other in public. "I love my brother, man," Wynton told me emphatically.
"That doesn't mean we talk every day. We might not get a chance to talk
to each other at all for a long time, and we might not agree on
everything when we do talk—or when we don't. But I love my brother
Branford, man. I love all my brothers."
Branford toed the same
line when I interviewed him last year, and yet he promptly drew a
distinction between his work and Wynton's. "I love my brother," he said,
"but we're totally different. I don't agree with some of the statements
that he makes when he says jazz lost the world when it stopped being
dance music. One of the things that attracted me to jazz was the fact
that it wasn't dance music. I wouldn't want to play jazz and have people
dance to it. That's not my thing." Although at first praising
Wynton's efforts to carry on the legacy of jazz, Branford couldn't seem
to resist taking a thinly veiled shot. "I think it's something that
should have been done a long time ago and has to be done," he said. "I
use classical music as a role model. There are classical musicians who
preserve music. There are people who play madrigals. There are people
who only play in their Baroque chamber orchestras." Some of those
who know the two brothers well see sibling dynamics as an explanation
for every step in their careers. "They have tremendous love and
tremendous respect for each other, and they will fight to defend one
another when speaking to outsiders," Jeff Levenson, the former Columbia
executive, says. "But I really do believe that for Wynton and Branford,
each of their achievements has been a competitive strike against the
other. They've channeled all that rivalry stuff into their own
motivational energy."
Branford's
career has largely followed pop-culture convention—he's been a musical
anti-hero. He exudes a lusty nonchalance, an Elvis quality, that also
infuses his saxophone playing. His music is muscular and aggressive.
Thoroughly aware of his bad-boy reputation and its market value, he has
sustained it into his forties through practice. "They [writers] think
I'm an arrogant cuss, which I am," he told me. When Wynton speaks of
being mistaken for "an angry young man," the man might be his older
brother. Branford's success, coursing through the turbulence of
pop-music stardom, network television, and best-selling genres including
funk, seems, if not inevitable, at least easy to understand. Wynton,
for his part, rose on a bubble made from an unprecedented mixture of
seemingly incompatible ingredients: youth culture, history, the
African-American experience, mass marketing, and the ideals of fine art.
He was a young man who honored his elders, promoted higher standards in
a cynical business, and played a black music thought to be in decline
to become a national sensation. How long could he float like that? When
jazz musicians teach improvisation, they often start with a basic
assignment: Go home and listen to a recording you like. Take one musical
phrase that appeals to you, and use it to construct a composition of
your own. The record industry spent the 1990s on a similar
project: the big labels heard what Wynton Marsalis was saying, took from
it what appealed to them, and used it to build a new business of their
own. In seeking to elevate the public perception of jazz and to
encourage young practitioners to pay attention to the music's
traditions, Marsalis put great emphasis on its past masters—particularly
in his role as director of Jazz at Lincoln Center. Still, he never
advocated mere revivalism, and he has demonstrated in his compositions
how traditional elements can be referenced, recombined, and reinvented
in the name of individualistic expression. "It's a mistake when people
say about Wynton that what he's doing is recapitulating the past,"
Gerald Early says. "I really think that what he's doing is taking the
nature of that tradition and really trying, in fact, to add to it and
kind of push it forward." But record executives came away with a
different message: that if the artists of the past are so great and
enduring, there's no reason to continue investing so much in young
talent. So they shifted their attention to repackaging their catalogues
of vintage recordings. Where the young lions saw role models and
their critics saw idolatry, the record companies saw brand names—the
ultimate prize of American marketing. For long-established record
companies with vast archives of historic recordings, the economics were
irresistible: it is far more profitable to wrap new covers around albums
paid for generations ago than it is to find, record, and promote new
artists.
As
Bruce Lundvall, the head of the Blue Note recording company,
acknowledges, "The profitability of the catalogue is a mixed blessing.
Let's say [consumers] buy their first jazz record when they hear Wynton
or Joshua Redman or whoever it might be. Then they want to get the
history. They start to buy catalogue, and that's exactly what the
active, current roster is fighting. I remember [the saxophonist] Javon
Jackson saying to me, 'I'm not competing with Joshua Redman so much as
[with] Sonny Rollins and John Coltrane and Lester Young and Stan
Getz'—the whole history of jazz saxophone players, which is available
[on CD]." Jeff Levenson adds, "The Frankenstein monster has turned on
its creators. In paying homage to the greats, Wynton and his peers have
gotten supplanted by them in the minds of the populace. They've gotten
supplanted by dead people." But dead people make poor live
attractions, and thus jazz clubs have suffered commensurably. "You know,
I really love Duke and Louis and Miles and Ben Webster and all those
guys, but I like jazz best when I can hear it live—it is supposed to be
spontaneous music," says James Browne, who ran Manhattan's Sweet Basil.
"They've been saying jazz is America's classical music, and it deserves
respect. Well, now it's America's classical music. Thanks a lot. What do
we do now?" No longer signed to major record labels, Wynton,
Branford, and other jazz musicians of their generation are taking stock
(and they now have the leisure to do so). The focus of the discourse in
jazz has shifted from the nature of the art form to that of the artist. Both
Wynton and Branford describe their departures from Columbia Records as
an opportunity for self-evaluation. "I'm not with Columbia," Wynton said
soberly in his apartment. "It was not vituperative. It's just time for
me to do something else. It's just time, and it's a good thing. It's
just time for me to figure out how I can forward my identity, to say,
'This is who I am.' "The record companies should have abandoned
us a long time ago. They should have saved us the trouble. It's not
going to be healthy for our pocketbooks, but it's healthy for jazz.
Through that void there is opportunity. Somewhere in that void is an
opportunity for somebody to come up and start signing jazz musicians and
letting them make the records they want to make." Within
Lincoln Center, Wynton Marsalis's jazz program has always had a status
much like that of black culture in America: it is of the whole, yet
other. Jazz at Lincoln Center began as a way to fill blank dates on the
calendar at Alice Tully Hall, the smallest of the institution's four
major theaters. "I didn't think it was important at the beginning,"
Marsalis says. "They called me and said they wanted to do some concerts
with dead hall space in Lincoln Center, and did I have any ideas about
what they could do? Because I had played classical music, I was a person
to call. So I called Crouch—'What do you think? What could we do?' So
we got together. It wasn't that big a deal—it was just three of us in a
room [Marsalis, Crouch, and Alina Bloomgarden, of Lincoln Center],
talking. Then I started to take it seriously."
Although
Jazz at Lincoln Center is now the institutional equal of the
Metropolitan Opera, the New York Philharmonic, and the New York City
Ballet, most of its concerts are still being held in Alice Tully Hall.
Sometime around the fall of 2004 Jazz at Lincoln Center will move into a
sprawling multipurpose compound at Columbus Circle, a few blocks south
of Lincoln Center proper. There, at the yet unfinished Frederick P. Rose Hall,
it will be part of the new AOL Time Warner Center, which will house not
only the corporate headquarters of AOL Time Warner but also a hotel, a
condominium tower, and various stores and restaurants. It will be the
only one of Lincoln Center's fiefdoms to be based "off-campus." Still of
the whole, yet other. Marsalis has been deeply involved in the
planning of—and the fundraising for—this new home for Jazz at Lincoln
Center, which he talks about with a keen sense of "the spirit of place,"
the phrase he once used as the title of a concert of Duke Ellington's
travel music. In a piercing wind on a January afternoon last year we
walked around the construction site, a beam skeleton more than ten
stories high at that point, and he described the philosophical
underpinnings of the project. "This is going to be the House of
Swing, and we want everything in it to swing, even though the only thing
swinging around here now is girders—watch your head," Marsalis said
calmly. Against the cold he and I were both wearing long topcoats,
woolen scarves, and hardhats, but he looked comfortable; he seemed to
know every unmarked area in the maze of steel and most of the men
working in it. Marsalis guided me to the center of an open space, about
250 square yards, which would someday be one of Jazz at Lincoln Center's
two main performance venues—this one large enough to stage one of
Ellington's symphonic suites; the other one about half its size, for
small groups and solo recitals. "They're like two sides of the same
thing, like night and day or man and woman," he said.
Seiji Ozawa Hall, at Tanglewood, is modeled on the world's few great concert halls. By Witold Rybczynski
"Sound
is very important," Marsalis continued. "So are the people. The people
are as important as the musicians here." The stages will be lower and
closer to the seats than they are in typical theaters, and the spaces
will be designed to carry, not diminish, the sound of the audience. "We
want to hear the audience answering us back—the call and response, we
want that." On our way to a makeshift elevator used for shuttling
the work crews and materials, a foreman approached Marsalis,
accompanied by several construction workers. "Excuse me, Wynton—I want
you to meet Moose," the foreman said. "He's a hell of a singer." A stocky fellow stepped forward tentatively. He had a stiff-lipped, nervous grin that he spoke through. "Hi, Wynton," he said.
Marsalis
shook his hand. "Why don't you come over some time and do some tunes
with us—sing with the band?" Marsalis said, waving a hand northward in
the direction of Lincoln Center. "No kidding?" the aspiring singer said, still grinning (but less nervously). "Come on over—we'll do some tunes."
The new Ken Burns series on jazz is good television but sketchy history. By Francis Davis
Like
Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington, both of whom toured the world under
the auspices of the U.S. State Department during the Cold War, Marsalis
has a feeling for people and a passion for his art that in combination
make him a potent political force. No one denies his importance as a
global ambassador of jazz. "He has never moved me as a trumpet player,"
Whitney Balliett, a well-known jazz critic, says. "But God—watching him
in the Burns thing [Ken Burns's 2001 PBS documentary about jazz],
it's phenomenal! All he has to do is open his mouth, and out it comes."
According to the composer and conductor David Berger, who has been
associated with the Lincoln Center jazz program since its inception,
"Duke Ellington probably had more charisma than anybody I ever met—I
mean, he was amazing. But Wynton, he's got it too. When you talk to him,
he makes you feel good—just his presence, his energy. It elevates you
and makes you want to be a better person."
I accompanied Marsalis to an event at the Cross Path Culture Center
to benefit Barry Harris's jazz-education institute, and I lost him in
the crowd of several hundred people. Dozens of jazz musicians, including
Randy Weston, Kenny Barron, Allan Harris, and Jeffery Smith, were
milling around the loftlike open space. When a camera flash went off, I
spotted Wynton having his picture taken. Shortly after that another
flash popped, ten or fifteen feet away from the first, and I saw Wynton
posing again. I realized that all I needed to do to find him at any
point during the evening was to look out at the crowd, and a camera
flash would mark him.
To an institution like Jazz at Lincoln
Center, with a new headquarters under construction and some $28 million
left to raise from corporate sponsors, grants, and society donors,
Marsalis is an asset of immeasurable value. "What strategy does the
board of directors have for raising the necessary funds?" I asked the
board chairman, Lisa Schiff, in her office, a few blocks south of Jazz
at Lincoln Center's future home. "Wynton," she said. For years
Jazz at Lincoln Center was savaged by charges of mismanagement, racism,
elitism, ageism, cronyism, and sexism, but these days it is more
inclusive, forward-looking, and professional. Indeed, the concert
schedule put together for the 2001-2002 year by Marsalis and his
reorganized staff (including Todd Barkan, the artistic administrator, an
independent-minded impresario who joined Jazz at Lincoln Center two
years ago) was practically a manifesto against canonical rigidity.
Emphatically multicultural, eclectic, and even contemporary, the program
presented the music of Brazil (Pixinguinha, Cyro Baptista), of women
(Abbey Lincoln, Barbara Carroll, Rhoda Scott), of white people (Woody
Herman, Lee Konitz), of the French (a tribute to the Hot Club de
France), and of young adventurists (Greg Osby, Akua Dixon). Perhaps
Marsalis really did have a plan for Moose the construction worker to
sing with the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra.
"One
of my problems with Wynton used to be that he drew such a hard line
many times," the composer and saxophonist Greg Osby recalls. "He doesn't
seem to be that firm anymore. A lot of it I recognize as youth. He's a
lot more accepting of varied presentation now. Not to say that he loves
it, but he's a lot more tolerant of it." Jazz's public advocates,
Marsalis among them, like to talk about the music as a democratic art, a
form of communal expression founded on the primacy of the individual
voice. In recent years the conversation about the future of the music
has focused on the global expansion of the jazz community and the
integrity of the voices in that expanded community. But if the
effectiveness of any democracy is in inverse proportion to its size, it
looks—again—as though jazz may be doomed. That is to say, the music may
not survive in the form we now know. Two decades after Wynton Marsalis
and his troops took up arms against fusion, world music, the apotheosis
of fusion, is at the gate. "I wonder about the future of jazz,
with all the music from other parts of the world floating around more
and more and more," Whitney Balliett says. "Eventually that's going to
be picked up in jazz. It already has been, and I wonder if there will
eventually, in the next ten or twenty years, be a kind of diffusion—if
the music will no longer be the jazz that we had ten or twenty years
ago." As for Marsalis, the very subject of globalism and jazz
makes him choke on his words. I brought up the topic while we were
eating Chinese food on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, after he had
told me how much he was enjoying his spicy chicken. "World music"—he
coughed out the phrase—"and all that stuff. I like people's music from
around the world, and music from around the world belongs in Jazz at
Lincoln Center. But for me—my music—I like jazz. I like the swingin.' I
loved Art Blakey. I loved Dizzy. I love jazz musicians. Jazz has to be
portrayed and brought forward for what it is—and celebrated. It can't be
sold by being subsumed into the world-music market, and I'm just not
willing to—I'm not willing to compromise my integrity under any
circumstances. I wouldn't do it when I was twenty. I'm certainly not
going to do it when I'm forty." In 1939 Duke Ellington
walked away from his contract with Columbia Records. Coincidentally, he,
too, turned forty that year, and was at a career crossroads. After more
than a decade of near servitude to his manager, Irving Mills, Ellington
ended their association and started rebuilding his musical
organization. He hired a pair of virtuoso innovators, the bassist Jimmy
Blanton and the tenor saxophonist Ben Webster, and began composing with a
new collaborator, the twenty-four-year-old Billy Strayhorn.
"Ellington's music was marked by increased rhythmic drive and
instrumental virtuosity," John Edward Hasse wrote in a 1993 biography of
the composer. "[It presaged] bebop and other musical developments to
come, and numerous musical explorations and innovations. With
breathtaking originality, Ellington broke more and more new ground." In
1946 the jazz magazines would proclaim, almost in unison, that Ellington
was passé again. Ten years after that Time would declare "a
turning point in [Ellington's] career," saying that the composer had
"emerged from a long period of quiescence and was once again bursting
with ideas and inspiration."
When
Wynton Marsalis turned forty, in the fall of 2001, Jazz at Lincoln
Center threw him a surprise party at the Manhattan nightclub Makor, a
couple of blocks away from his apartment. I had received an invitation
and had been told that the guest list would be limited strictly to those
who knew Marsalis well or worked closely with him, but there were
hundreds of people sardined into the place: musicians and administrators
from Jazz at Lincoln Center; the saxophonist Jimmy Heath; the
broadcaster Ed Bradley; and others I could not see, because no one could
move. Marsalis entered at 10:30 that evening, accompanied by his father
and Stanley Crouch (who lured Marsalis to the club under the pretext of
meeting a couple of women). The band struck up "Happy Birthday," New
Orleans-style, and Marsalis waded through the crowd toward the
bandstand, beaming, his arms raised high in the air. It took him
nearly twenty minutes—and thirty choruses of "Happy Birthday"—to reach
the stage. "It really was a surprise," Marsalis said, and he began to
cry. "Sometimes you're working so much, and this stuff just unfolds,
and—I don't know. I can't say nothing." The first piece the band
played, after "Happy Birthday," was Ellington's "C-Jam Blues" (also
known as "Duke's Place"), and the last song of the night was Ellington's
"It Don't Mean a Thing (If It Ain't Got That Swing)." Thanking his
well-wishers, Marsalis eventually approached my vicinity in the crowd,
and I asked him if he knew where Ellington had been on the same day in
his life. "In Sweden," he said in half a beat. "Making some music—or
making something!" (Ellington had indeed been in Stockholm, on a
European tour.) A few weeks later we were talking about his
birthday, and Marsalis brought up Ellington again. "I have so much
further to go," he said. "I'm just a baby. I'm just trying to figure out
how to play. Like Duke, man—Duke never stopped, never stopped learning.
Till the end, man, he was sitting at the piano every night—every
night—trying to figure out how to do it better. "I've had my ups
and downs. Everybody does. I don't know what you would say about me
right now. But I'm not concerned with that. You have to keep your mind
on the issue, and the issue is the music. You have to look at the world
around you and the things that happen to you and take them inside
yourself and make something out of it. That's what jazz is. That's how I
feel." For Wynton Marsalis, fate is an opportunity for creative improvisation—another ringing cell phone at the Village Vanguard.
We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.
The old kind of jazz is the only real kind, claims Wynton Marsalis. Sholto Byrnes is not convinced
The Independent Culture
Wynton Marsalis leans over the desk towards me, a smile both
encouraging and warning on his face. "When I read your article I'm going
to say, 'Yeah, you're my man. You understood. Unlike many of the
others, you understood.'" His has been a career of effortless achievement: performing the
Haydn Trumpet Concerto with the New Orleans Philharmonic Orchestra and
recording with Art Blakey's legendary finishing school, the Jazz
Messengers, while still in his teens. And becoming the first artist to
win Grammies in both the jazz and classical categories when he was only
22. In the intervening two decades he has released numerous albums,
ventured into orchestral composition (winning the Pulitzer Prize for his
Blood On The Fields oratorio), and now sits upon a mighty throne
as director of Jazz @ Lincoln Center – a job which puts him in control
of programming at the New York venue with a budget and powers of
patronage unequalled in jazz history. But despite all this, the world's
most famous and powerful jazz musician feels seriously misunderstood.
He blames it on the critics. An attempt to enquire what he feels
about the criticism levelled at him by the saxophonist David Murray, who
said that great jazz musicians were out of work because they don't play
in Wynton-approved styles, gets Marsalis very agitated. His already
fast speech speeds up, and he interrupts before I can finish the
sentence. "Every four years there's another issue. There's another
controversy, but it's never really controversial. What is the
controversy?" he demands. "What's the controversy now – what is it? Man,
it's like a thousand times, controversy!" Of course, he knows really why he is a controversial figure. Leave aside
his own trumpet-playing, which is universally praised, and Marsalis is
seen as the standard bearer for those who want to codify jazz as
America's classical music, and whose focus is on recreating the music of
the past rather than innovating. Given that many feel that innovation
is the very essence of jazz, that's a controversial position. But he
doesn't see it that way. Of course, he knows really why he is a controversial figure. Leave aside
his own trumpet-playing, which is universally praised, and Marsalis is
seen as the standard bearer for those who want to codify jazz as
America's classical music, and whose focus is on recreating the music of
the past rather than innovating. Given that many feel that innovation
is the very essence of jazz, that's a controversial position. But he
doesn't see it that way. The contradiction at the heart of Wynton Marsalis is that he is
relentless in his pursuit of his vision of jazz (he gives me a long and
comprehensive definition, but basically it must swing in the
"ding-ding-a-ding" sense of the word), yet refuses to accept that his
public utterances and his role at the Lincon Center should be seen as
anyone's business but his own. In fact, his position as an arbiter of
what constitutes jazz is so commanding that everything he does has
consequences. During our interview he denies his authority time and
again – "it's not for me to say whether it's right or wrong" – when it's
perfectly obvious he has strong opinions on almost all areas. He is
unafraid to judge, but is wary which of his judgements he reveals,
hiding behind a bland wall of "it's not my place to say...". Flashes of
what he really thinks come out when he's pushed. After stressing his
good relations with David Murray (Marsalis plays basketball with
Murray's son, Mingus) he concedes the point: "Did some people lose some
gigs because I don't like their style of music? Maybe that's true, maybe
that's false, I don't know. But that's not controversial to me."
When I ask if he felt hurt by the comments Miles Davis and the
avant-garde trumpeter Lester Bowie made about him (Davis: "that
motherfucker's not sharing a stage with me". Bowie: "everybody knows
this cat ain't got it") he replies "not at all." He then goes on to
describe Davis as "a genius who decided to go into rock, and was on the
bandstand looking like, basically, a buffoon", and Bowie as "another guy
who never really could play." These judgements are not wholly without truth. Unfortunately,
such forthright condemnations of post-Sixties developments (which
Marsalis would deny were jazz) have come to define him as a purveyor of
negativity rather than a celebrator, or curator, of jazz history. He is
intensely frustrated that the focus is always on what he doesn't do
rather than what he does do. Speaking about Ken Burns's mammoth
television series Jazz, which was criticised for detailing the early
years but skipping through the last 40, Marsalis could be talking about
himself. "It's like I come to your house and you lay out a banquet for
me and then I'm mad because I don't like the cigar you gave me at the
end. Maybe the cigar wasn't that good, but why should that dominate the
conversation about the meal?" And then, in a statement that does reflect
the divide between him and his critics over post-Sixties jazz: "Maybe
you went through that meal just to get the cigar. Me, I wasn't going to
smoke that cigar at all." He does deserve garlands for bringing the music of
Ellington, Armstrong and Blakey to new audiences, and his idea that such
music should be seen as the bedrock repertory of jazz has much to
commend it. It's when he goes beyond this that he starts getting into
trouble again. Many contemporary artists in all fields argue that their
work has merit irrespective of its popular appeal. When I put this point
to Marsalis in the jazz context he is not impressed. "Why subject me to
it then?" he says. "Play it in your house. I want people to like what
I'm playing." Such an argument would have confined almost every wave of innovators to
their homes, but it's consistent with Marsalis's generally conservative
views. Towards the end of our interview he inveighs against rap and
hip-hop record companies. "They take your drawers off for you, they show
your ass, they sell bullshit, they call themselves 'niggaz' and the
women 'bitches' and 'hos' and it's fine with everybody." He adds, voice
laden with sarcasm: "It's just our style, cutting edge." But can't
people still make their own choices through the possession of a moral
sense? "We don't all have that. That's what the essence of decadence is. Civilisation is an effort." Marsalis is beginning to sound like a member of the Bush
administration, only with better grammar. It's no surprise that he
considers the more formal Thirties to be "a golden era in American
culture for dress, for music, for many things". "Unlike many of the others, you understood." Yes, I think I do
understand. I'm not sure I'm "his man" and I'm not sure I agree with his
views. But I do admire his convictions and the work he's doing in jazz
education. And to my surprise, I do find myself more "his man" at the
end of the interview than I was at the beginning. Marsalis performs a
valuable role in jazz, and if he wasn't so combative, that might be more
widely recognised.
Wynton Marsalis and the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra: Usher
Hall, Edinburgh (0131 228 1155), Saturday and on tour. Final date:
Barbican Centre, London EC1 (020 7638 8891), 30 January
Wynton Marsalis (on trumpet) and his band perform at Sanders Theatre. Harvard Magazine/PD
In the city of New Orleans,
after the Civil War and into the first decade of the twentieth
century, brass bands could be heard playing at baseball games,
churches, political rallies—and even in homes, to call children to
dinner. But when it came to jazz, musician Wynton Marsalis said at
Sanders Theatre on January 30, Charles J. “Buddy” Bolden was
the musician whose distinctive sound—embodying a mixture
of cultures and passions—helped define New Orleans as a city of
music.
Weaving history with anecdote—and, of course, his own music—M
arsalis used “New Orleans: The Birth of Jazz,” the sixth and final
lecture of his multiyear performance and lecture series at the
University, to tell Bolden’s story. (The lectures, “Hidden in Plain
View: Meanings in American Music,” began in the spring of 2011.)
Marsalis’s lecture-performance used the racial, cultural, and
musical elements of New Orleans jazz from 1885 to 1910 as a way to
examine the relationship between American music and American
identity. President Drew Faust introduced Marsalis, saying she knew “at
the outset” about the “Wynton Marsalis magic—his virtuosity, his
originality, his charismatic intelligence,” but could not have
anticipated how generous he would be during his time at Harvard:
working with students, speaking around campus, and researching and
writing the lectures. “[It’s] not just writing,” Faust said, “but
crafting each lecture into an irresistible synthesis of performance
and analysis on nothing less than American identity.” “Great players all come from Bolden, and all reflect him in some
way,” Marsalis said. “He had a band of seven pieces and his band
competed with other bands for the affection of fans. We know he
lost his mind—he was committed to an insane asylum where he lived
out his life and died. And now, I read his legend and I wonder ‘How
many brilliant artists go crazy?’” Reviving Bolden’s actual scores, Marsalis’s nine-man orchestra—t
rombones, horns, a piano, string instruments, and Marsalis himself
on trumpet—used musical notes to paint a picture of Marsalis’s native New Orleans through its most transformative century,
evoking images of street peddlers singing about the watermelons
they had for sale, church choirs lending melody to prayer, and
bands playing on the street and battling each other in city parks,
where audiences of blacks, whites, Hispanics, Creoles, and Italian
and French immigrants would gather by the thousands to soak in the
spirit of the music. Marsalis traced the history of the Crescent City through the
cultures and backgrounds of its varied inhabitants, illustrating
how cultural cross-pollination led to an exuberantly diverse music
scene. He discussed what he felt was a turning point for music,
when the Irish-born Patrick Gilmore came to New Orleans in
1864 with a 35-piece band from Boston. “Gilmore’s Famous Band,”;
Marsalis said, was hired to support Michael Hahn’s gubernatorial
campaign, and they performed for two months throughout the
city. When Hahn was elected, Gilmore organized a musical event that
utilized more than 5,000 citizens and military personnel from both
the U.S. and Confederate armies to create what Marsalis called “an
integrated music social spectacle.” “This event attracted 35,000 people,” he continued, “and
fulfilled what Abraham Lincoln would call ‘an attempt to keep the
jewel of liberty within the family of freedom.’” “The Gilmore
experience inspired excellence and brought about a level of
intensity and cultural engagement that would remain in the
community for a generation.” When America purchased the Louisiana territory in 1803, Marsalis
said, it had no idea what a prize it had acquired in New Orleans—”a
gumbo of sensitivities.” Marsalis said the compact and diverse
musical culture in his hometown was analogous to “going from a rap
group to the New York Philharmonic two blocks away.” The “downtown” musicians, like Bolden’s rival Jack Robichaux,
trained in the classical European conservatory style, while many
uptown musicians, like Bolden, could not read and played
mainly by memory and ear. “When you can’t read, you have more
bandwidth for expression,” Marsalis said. “Absolutely none of your
time is spent trying to decipher symbols. Music was the only
symbol.” After he described jazz as the heart of “the Negro soul,” the
band at his cue broke into a traditional slave song that gripped
the audience with emotion that was palpable throughout the hall.
Throughout the evening, the ensemble swung into the music of
whatever subject Marsalis covered, from blues and waltzes to
ragtime. New Orleans between 1885 and 1910 was a place like no other,
Marsalis said, adding that jazz was born there amid a diversity of
people, philosophies, and possibilities, and has proven the
most definitive artistic symbol of American democracy. “To gain...
a[n] important understanding of our collective past, it’s important
to search for the echo of that past in our own experiences,” he
concluded. “There, we find the common symbols that allow us to
grasp the fundamental meaning of the aspirations we share with our
ancestors.”
Going a Round With Wynton Marsalis : Jazz: He's down
on critics, dismayed at the direction of pop music and disappointed in jazz audio, but the acclaimed trumpeter still loves his music.
by DON HECKMAN
SPECIAL TO THE TIMES
October 13, 1994
How do you conduct an interview with Wynton Marsalis? Very carefully. The jazz trumpeter and artistic director for Jazz at Lincoln Center has had a long and sometimes contentious relationship with the press.
For starters, you don't make too many queries about his brother, Branford, leader of "The Tonight Show" band.
"Oh, man" is the frustrated response you'll get. "I must have answered questions about my brother playing with Sting or being on 'The Tonight Show' for the last 10 years. Then, when the so-called critics got tired of that, they started saying that I fired my brother. How could I fire my brother if he took another job?"
And reminding Marsalis about his onetime alleged disrespect for Miles Davis isn't too hot a topic, either.
"How many times," he says, carefully containing his frustration, "do you think I had to explain that I was just quoting Miles when I said that he wasn't playing jazz? But as soon as I did, there would be another article saying I was insulting Miles Davis. But I wasn't insulting Miles. I was just repeating what he himself had said about his music."
Most media, clearly, are not at the top of Marsalis' list of good guys, and he doesn't hesitate to engage them directly.
"That's all right," he says, speaking from his apartment on Manhattan's Upper West Side. "You can't expect to get into a fight and not get hit."
In easy conversation, however, Marsalis--who appears with his septet Saturday at the South Bay Center for the Arts in Torrance--reveals few of the unappealing qualities attributed to him by his critics. Although he can be unnervingly direct and to the point with his responses, he is an articulate and thoughtful artist with a passionate belief in the vital role of jazz in American musical history. Described as "arrogant" by observers who have pressed him to deal with what he feels are superficial issues, he is deeply respected by others, who speak highly of his willingness to "say it like it is."
"The problem with most critics," says Marsalis, a Grammy winner in both jazz and classical categories, "is that they'd rather talk about gossip than about music. I mean, look at how they deal with rock. Some of them are actually glad when they can report that some jazz musician is playing rock music!
"How can that be? If you're a jazz critic, why would you be glad to report that a jazz musician is playing rock? That's a lack of integrity to me. What type of loyalty is that to the form of music that these people are supposedly writing about?"
But if the media are the most immediate target for Marsalis, he also has several other quarries in mind. Contemporary pop music is one of the most important. Several articles have noted his "anti-rap" views. Typically, says Marsalis, they have missed the point.
"My feelings are not just about rap, but about the whole direction of American popular music. Once it switched from an adult base to an adolescent base," he explains, "that was a major step backwards. Pop music used to be adult music, with adult sensibilities.
"But since pop made that switch to an adolescent base, it has never been able to return, as music, to what it was. And I guess it's understandable, because in terms of commerciality, it becomes more successful every year."
Not that Marsalis, one of the most active players of his generation, sees anything specifically wrong with commercialism, or with financial achievement.
"It's not necessarily a bad thing," he says. "But the cynicism that's involved with it is bad. How many times a year is the public duped, in one way or another, by what's happening in pop? And that's basically the attitude that bothers me--the attitude that you can just give people anything."
Another important item on Marsalis' list of important jazz issues to be dealt with is his continuing battle to establish a working definition for the music.
"I don't know why people make it so complicated," he grumbles. "Here it is: Jazz is music that is blues-based, in the broadest sense. And jazz is music that has to swing, that has to have a shuffle rhythm feeling in some form or another."
Other items on his list: the undervaluation of education and the deterioration in jazz audio.
As the son of jazz musician/educator Ellis Marsalis, and at 32 the eldest of four talented musician brothers (saxophonist Branford, producer-trombonist Delfeayo and drummer Jason), the New Orleans-born Marsalis is deeply dedicated to the value of jazz education.
"It may not help you get a job," he says with a sly laugh, "but it'll make you a better musician if you learn how to improvise and to play some blues. Because I feel that if you play jazz music, it develops your total musicianship."
The usually voluble Marsalis almost becomes speechless when asked about jazz audio.
"Man," he finally says, "do you know that when you hear most jazz musicians play, whether it's on record or in concert, it almost never sounds as good as when you hear them play (acoustically)? That's because there's no real feel for jazz in electronic technology."
His list of targets aside, Marsalis has a generally optimistic prognosis for jazz. His work at Lincoln Center for the last three years has drawn sell-out crowds to his programs, and Center support for his creative innovations has been unwavering. This year's program features a weeklong Louis Armstrong festival in mid-December, and Marsalis continues to tour--often as many as 300 days a year--around the world.
Marsalis' prognosis for jazz critics and journalists--his favorite target--is far less promising, and he is happy for the opportunity to make one last dig at them.
"I hear some of these guys say the trouble with jazz is it's too good for people," says Marsalis with a little grunt of amazement. "They believe that it'll never be popular because people want garbage.
"And I say, 'What do you mean it's too good for people?' I don't believe people want garbage. I've got more confidence in people than that.
"I believe," concludes Marsalis, "that if you give people something good, they'll accept it. Otherwise, I wouldn't be doing what I'm doing."
Wynton Marsalis grew up in a family of New Orleans
jazz musicians and received his first trumpet as a sixth birthday
present from bandleader Al Hirt. At 14 he debuted with the Louisiana
Philharmonic; at 17 he moved to New York, where he attended Juilliard,
joined Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers, assembled his own band, and began a
prolific composing and recording career. In 1987, Marsalis founded Jazz
at Lincoln Center, which has grown into the world’s biggest arts
organization dedicated to Jazz.
Why did you pick the trumpet? I got a trumpet for my sixth birthday, but I didn’t practice it. And
then the summer I was 12, I started listening to John Coltrane, and I
wanted to play. There was so much racism when we grew up, and that’s
part of what inspired me; I wanted to represent my humanity. The work
ethic I developed at that time—I still have that.
How did you learn to be a leader? I was always a leader on teams. I called the plays in football,
pitched baseball, played point guard in basketball. If something was
happening, the guys always asked me, “Man, what do you think we ought to
do?”
When I was a younger bandleader I was too harsh on the musicians. As I
got older the people who played with me taught me how to be better. An
important thing I learned was to have a clear direction. If you are
unclear or wishy-washy, or you lack the heart, they can’t follow you.
It’s exactly like leading on a horn. In our band, I play fourth trumpet,
following Ryan Kisor. He’s young enough to have been my student, but
he’s a great lead player. He lets you know what he’s going to play
before he plays it. If everything’s falling apart, he comes in. You can
depend on him.
How is leading a band like running a company? You have to know what all your people can do. The ones who need to be
challenged, you give them challenges. The ones who need to be carried,
you carry them. The ones you need to let go, you let them go. A leader
has got to have a certain kindness but a certain meanness, too.
What’s your theory on talent versus practice? You can become proficient at anything. If you’re a boxer, you can
practice four million hours and become proficient to a certain point,
but if you don’t have the talent, you won’t be the one to beat. You
can’t practice the ability to make connections or have a deep, spiritual
insight. To be great, you need courage to speak out and endurance to
deal with what is given to you. Ornette Coleman got beat up for playing
his music, but he played it. That’s not something you can practice your
way into.
How do you hire musicians?
I look for four things: First, individuality. Do they have a unique
sound? Second, knowledge of the music. Third, do they respond well to
pressure? And fourth, do they want to be a part of us? Do you think about how somebody will fit into the group?
People with difficult personalities can survive in our world. If they
can play, we embrace them and we work with them. But that doesn’t mean
they become less difficult.
Do you need to be alone to compose? I grew up in a big family with a lot of noise, so I like distraction.
As a matter of fact, if I’m composing, I’ll turn the television on. It
makes me concentrate more deeply on what I’m doing. Why did you decide to take on such a big management role with Lincoln Center?
My overall goal is to raise the level of artistic consciousness in
our country, so that we become a country of the arts. To the day I die I
want to work on that. I could go out and play and make much more money
and have a much better time, but the work we do is important work. And
I’ve learned so much doing it. What’s been the biggest challenge in building a major cultural institution from scratch?
Getting the level of financial support that the music deserves. That
would be number one. We’re constantly trying to find money to do arts
programs. And when you have financial strain, you start to make
decisions that are not the most prudent best-quality decisions. I’m not
saying that we have done that, but it’s a pressure. You’ve been criticized a lot for taking a conservative approach to jazz.
I like being critiqued. I always knew I was original. If anything,
the criticism made me more determined to go in my own direction. You
have to assess criticism and then make your own decisions. You have to
say, “We’re going this way.” That’s what steels your leadership—you
survive and become a better leader. If you can’t take it, you’re not the
leader. How much do you think about what the audience wants to hear? I always think about what the audience wants to hear—and what they
need to hear. What do I have to give people to bring them into the
feeling of this music? The audience has got to really want to be there.
Shakespeare had the right equation. He gave you sexuality and
skullduggery and backstabbing, and then he gave you artistry, too. The
high and low.
What can leaders learn from listening to jazz?
If you hone your listening skills so that you can follow the
development of a solo, you can listen more empathetically to people when
they talk and hear underneath what they’re saying. You can feel their
intention.
What has composing taught you about creativity? Celebrate your traditions as you innovate. As you come up with new
things, always reach back. Offer everything you have all the time.
A version of this article appeared in the January–February 2011 issue of Harvard Business Review.
My
generation finds itself wedged between two opposing traditions. One is
the tradition we know in such wonderful detail from the enormous
recorded legacy that tells anyone who will listen that jazz broke the
rules of European conventions and created rules of its own that were so
specific, so thorough and so demanding that a great art resulted. This
art has had such universal appeal and application to the expression of
modern life that it has changed the conventions of American music as
well as those of the world at large.
The
other tradition, which was born early and stubbornly refuses to die,
despite all the evidence to the contrary, regards jazz merely as a
product of noble savages - music produced by untutored, unbuttoned
semiliterates for whom jazz history does not exist. This myth was
invented by early jazz writers who, in attempting to escape their
American prejudices, turned out a whole world of new cliches based on
the myth of the innate ability of early jazz musicians. Because of these
writers' lack of understanding of the mechanics of music, they thought
there weren't any mechanics. It was the ''they all can sing, they all
have rhythm'' syndrome. If that was the case, why was there only one
Louis Armstrong?
That
myth is being perpetuated to this day by those who profess an openness
to everything - an openness that in effect just shows contempt for the
basic values of the music and of our society. If everything is good, why
should anyone subject himself to the pain of study? Their disdain for
the specific knowledge that goes into jazz creation is their
justification for saying that everything has its place. But their job
should be to define that place - is it the toilet or the table?
To
many people, any kind of popular music now can be lumped with jazz. As a
result, audiences too often come to jazz with generalized
misconceptions about what it is and what it is supposed to be. Too
often, what is represented as jazz isn't jazz at all. Despite attempts
by writers and record companies and promoters and educators and even
musicians to blur the lines for commercial purposes, rock isn't jazz and
new age isn't jazz, and neither are pop or third stream. There may be
much that is good in all of them, but they aren't jazz.
I
recently completed a tour of jazz festivals in Europe in which only two
out of 10 bands were jazz bands. The promoters of these festivals
readily admit most of the music isn't jazz, but refuse to rename these
events ''music festivals,'' seeking the esthectic elevation that jazz
offers. This is esthetic name-dropping, attempting to piggyback on the
achievements of others, and duping the public. It's like a great French
chef lending his name, not his skills, to a a fast-food restaurant
because he knows it's a popular place to eat. His concern is for
quantity, not quality. Those who are duped say ''This greasy hamburger
sure is good; I know it's good, because Pierre says it's good, and
people named Pierre know what the deal is.'' Pierre then becomes known
as a man of the people, when he actually is exploiting the people.
All
the forces at work to blur the lines deplore the purist ethic in jazz,
but try to capitalize commercially on the esthetic reputation of jazz.
In other fields, purism is considered a form of heroism - the good guy
who won't sell out - but in jazz that purism is incorrectly perceived as
stagnation and the inability to change. Therefore, those who are most
lauded by the record companies and writers and promoters are those who
most exploit the public. The major obstacle facing this generation of
musicians is finding out what makes something jazz.
Andre
Malraux, in ''The Voices of Silence,'' observes that art itself puts
the biggest challenge before an artist, not the superficial statistics
of sociology: ''Artists do not stem from their childhoods, but from
their conflict with the achievements of their predecessors; not from
their own formless world, but from the struggle with the form which
others have imposed on life.''
Feeling
as I do that the greatness of jazz lies not only in its emotion but
also in its deliberate artifice, I have tried, in helping to shape
Lincoln Center's Classical Jazz series, to convey some of the conscious
struggle that has gone into the great jazz of the past and to show how
it impinges on the present.
The
irony of my generation is that now not just commentators but even many
musicians still believe in misconceptions that long ago were rejected by
men like Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington, who knew that their work
was much more than the result of talent forged by adverse social
conditions. For too long, people have attributed Armstrong's spiritual
depth and technical fluidity to the supposed fact that he didn't know
anything about music, couldn't read music and played in the hallowed
halls of prostitution, knife fights and murder. But Armstrong grew up in
a New Orleans that demanded many levels of musical sophistication. In a
highly competitive musical milieu, one had to know melodies, how to
phrase them beautifully, the harmonies of those melodies, many kinds of
rhythms, and so on. Access to such knowledge allowed younger generations
of musicians to develop what had only been implied in earlier music.
Armstrong
did that with ragtime, with the popular songs of his day, and with the
styles of trumpet players like King Oliver. He knew he was refining what
he heard around him, and he didn't like to be thought of as a ''rough''
player, which is why he spoke highly of those who had ''sweet'' tones.
But
the noble-savage cliche has prevailed over the objective fact of the
art - and this is manifest in my generation's inability to produce more
than a few musicians dedicated to learning and mastering the elements
like blues and swing that gave Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington,
Thelonious Monk and Charlie Parker such unarguable artistic power. Young
musicians who want to follow that path these days cannot find anywhere
to practice their art. In schools that I teach in around the country, I
find the teaching of the arts and of American culture almost
nonexistent; perhaps that's because jazz is central to American culture.
While faced with this problem, musicians are also faced with the
constant clamor for something ''new.'' How can something new and
substantial, not eccentric and fraudulent, be developed when the meaning
of what's old is not known? Could we have gotten to the moon without
even understanding Newtonian physics?
I
am not saying that there should not be artistic variety. How could I
say that, when so much of jazz results from the work of great
individuals? But those great individuals all had in common the pursuit
of quality and the painful experience of discipline. To accomplish what
they did, each of the great individuals in jazz took the time and effort
to master particular things. They were not satisfied to stand above the
engagement that is necessary to perfect craft.
With
these thoughts in mind, we designed a Classical Jazz series this year
that deals with the music of Duke Ellington, Tadd Dameron and Max Roach,
as well as with evenings given over to singers and instrumentalists
interpreting standard songs. The series focuses on two things as
''classical'' in jazz: the compositions of major writers and the quality
of improvisation.
In
the first case, musicians have struggled with the problem of creating
the sound of jazz in preconceived notes, rather than in on-the-spot
improvisation, in tones that have been pondered and edited until the
writer is satisfied. This doesn't mean that the individual piece won't
be reworked every now and then while still remaining in progress.
(Ellington and Charles Mingus were noted for this.) In the second case,
when jazz singers or instrumentalists take over a song, they use all of
the sophistication Louis Armstrong first brought to a very high level of
craft, virtuosity and feeling. This is the classical form of jazz
performance: when improvisation works so well that it can stand on its
own as composition. This kind of improvisation is what jazz musicians
raised to an art through deep study and contemplation.
While
enjoyment and entertainment are paramount matters in the Classical Jazz
series,it should be clear that we also feel a need to help promote
understanding of what happens in jazz. An important part of the series,
therefore, are the program notes by Stanley Crouch, which seek to
explain the intent of the musicians as well as the meaning of the art.
Although jazz can be enjoyed on many levels, from the superficial to the
profound, we feel that the proper presentation of notes, song titles
and even small discographies will help audiences better understand the
essential elements of the music and thereby enjoy the music even more.
Duke
Ellington exemplifies a mastery of the relationship of knowledge to
development. He was present almost at the beginning of jazz; his career
spanned five decades of continuous and unprecendented musical
development: he continuously proved that no one was more capable of
translating the varied and complex arenas of American experience into
tone. His recorded legacy gives us the most accurate tonal history of
the 20th century. Duke Ellington developed the implications he heard in
the lines and phrasing of Armstrong's improvisations, and he expanded
upon the compositions and arrangements of everyone around him, including
Jelly Roll Morton, King Oliver and Fletcher Henderson.
Max
Roach is part of this serious hierarchy of musical giants. All great
instrumentalists have a superior quality of sound, and his is one of the
marvels of contemporary music. The drum set is actually many intruments
in one - the bass drum, the snare drum, tom-tom, sock cymbal, crash
cymbal, and ride cymbal - and they all have unique characteristics. To
play them all at once requires an individual touch and attack for each
one. The roundness and nobility of sound on the drums and the clarity
and precision of the cymbals distinguishes Max Roach as a peerless
master of this uniquely American instrument.
His
stature as a musician, composer and bandleader is the result of his
having created a larger and more varied body of work than any other
drummer-leader. He has done solo pieces, pieces for drums and voice, for
jazz ensembles, percussion ensembles, for choirs, and has performed
with video. While working with Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie,
Thelonious Monk, Bud Powell and Clifford Brown, he developed a unique
vocabulary that gave the drums another level of identity. He played the
drums in a way that not only kept time and accentuated the beat, but he
also developed the call-and-response idea central to the foundations of
American music. He has refined his style over the course of the years,
and his playing now has the grandeur found only in those who had
exceptional talent to begin with, and matched that talent with an
ongoing dedication to sustained development.
Classical
Jazz at Lincoln Center - whether celebrating the work of an individual
artist or using the improvisational talents of masters like J.J.
Johnson, Jon Hendricks, Tommy Flanagan, Hank Jones, Sweets Edison and
the other artists on the programs - is intent on helping to give to
jazz, its artists and its products their deserved place in American
culture. I also feel that the Classical Jazz series gives Lincoln Center
additional reason to regard itself as a center of world culture.
Jazz
commentary is too often shaped by a rebellion against what is
considered the limitations of the middle class. The commentators
mistakenly believe that by willfully sliding down the intellectual,
spiritual, economic or social ladder, they will find freedom down where
the jazz musicians (i.e. ''real'' people) lie. Jazz musicians, however,
are searching for the freedom of ascendance. This is why they practice.
Musicians like Art Blakey, Sarah Vaughan, Elvin Jones, Max Roach, Sweets
Edison and Betty Carter are rebelling against the idea that they should
be excluded from choosing what they want to do or think, against being
forced into someone else's mold, whether it be the social agendas of the
conservative establishment or the new fake liberal establishment of
which many well-meaning jazz observers are part. They feel knowledge
gives them choice; that ignorance is bondage.
The
late Ellington pieces that will be featured - ''Such Sweet Thunder''
(1957), ''Suite Thursday'' (1960) and ''Anatomy of a Murder'' (1959) -
show how well Ellington mastered the integration of rhythm section and
band; these extended pieces prove that he is one of the great musical
thinkers as well as one of the great masters of musical form.
Integrating the rhythm section and the rest of the band is not a simple
job, and I believe the jazz pieces of concert composers are almost
always failures because they have not mastered that idea. Concert
composers must accept the fact that a rhythm section is part of the
sound in a very different way than anything in European music; but they
settle for corny syncopations, which only partly suggest the range of
force and impetus provided by the rhythm section.
Genius
always manifests itself through attention to fine detail. Works of
great genius sound so natural they appear simple, but this is the
simplicity of elimination, not the simplicity of ignorance. This kind of
intricacy is abundantly evident in these late works. Not only are
difficult form schemes arrived at and executed harmonically,
melodically, rhythmically and texturally, but Ellington also
successfully manipulates interrelated dance moods and tempos that imply a
totally innovative vision of form as it applies to movement. Even more
amazing than the complexity of these pieces is the fact that we can
still hear quite clearly the sound of the early New Orleans polyphonic
style that attracted Ellington to jazz as a young man.
Though
Tadd Dameron is not as well known as many other giants, he was one of
the finest composers jazz has produced. He created a body of material of
great originality and personality that still addresses the fundamentals
of jazz - blues and swing. What distinguishes Dameron is how
successfully he transformed the sound and the substance of the jazz
ensemble through skillful adaptation of the innovations of Charlie
Parker and Dizzy Gillespie. His work is difficult and beautiful, which
is what I consider the greatest challenge in modern music. As Duke
Ellington once said, some people think that something has to be ugly in
order to be modern. Like Ellington, Dameron didn't believe that.
His
music has a melodic and harmonic complexity that is angular, but it
always has a singing quality, which he probably got from Ellington, who
was one of his artistic mentors. An avowed fan of Louis Armstrong from
his youth, Dameron understood the majestic powers of the trumpet when it
sings melodies that rise above the ensemble with relaxed, lyrical
boldness.
A
recent experience showed me just how much Dameron's compositions
contributed to the language of the music. I was listening to a recording
of John Kirby's Sextet from the late thirties, a well-rehearsed and
exceptional band with intricate arrangements. Yet, when I put on some of
Dameron's music, recorded with the trumpeter Fats Navarro 10 years
later, it sounded almost like an entirely different idiom. Dameron
learned to apply keen melodic and harmonic sense to the rhythmic
innovations instigated by Charlie Parker. In other words, his music
swang and sang and had intellectual stang. JAZZ AT TULLY HALL
While
jazz festivals over the years have largely been eclectic affairs, more
recent developments have seen some jazz festivals becoming more focused.
The Classical Jazz series at Lincoln Center's Alice Tully Hall has been
following the newer pattern, with this year's festival focusing on
composition and on jazz as an art form.
The
festival, presented in conjunction with radio station WBGO/FM and with
major funding from Yves St. Laurent, opens Friday with the music of Tadd
Dameron and featuring Tommy Flanagan, George Mraz and Kenny Washington
and the ensemble Dameronia, which includes Clifford Jordan, Walter Davis
Jr. and Benny Powell.
On
Saturday, the program is titled ''Saturday Night Songbook'' and
features artists like Anita O'Day, Jon Hendricks, Earl Coleman, Joe Lee
Wilson and Frank Morgan. There is no Sunday program. On Monday, Aug. 8,
the program is called ''Standards on Horn,'' with the participants
including Wynton Marsalis, Harry (Sweets) Edison, Doc Cheatham and J.J.
Johnson among others.
The
offering on Tuesday, Aug. 9, is titled ''Many Eras of One Man's Music''
and focuses on Max Roach. Mr. Roach will, course, be on the program as
performer as well as composer, along with the Max Roach Quartet, the Max
Roach Chorus and Abbey Lincoln Moseka.
The
final program, on Wednesday, Aug. 10, is ''A Duke Ellington Tribute,''
in which the performers will include, in addition to Mr. Marsalis, Jimmy
Hamilton, Milt Hinton, Norris Turney, Jaki Byard and Jimmy Knepper.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Trumpeter and bandleader Wynton Marsalis is artistic director of the Classical Jazz series, presented by Lincoln Center.
Wynton Marsalis’s “Blood on the Fields" was the first non-classical work to win the Pulitzer Prize
Kris Snibbe/Harvard Staff Photographer
It was a moment that many thought never would happen.
In 1997, for the first time in the history of the Pulitzer Prize in
Music, the award went to a genre intimately bound up with the cultural,
social and racial history of this country: jazz. Wynton Marsalis’s
“Blood on the Fields,” an epic vocal-orchestral suite that dealt head-on
with the tragedy of slavery, became not only the first jazz work to
take the highest honor in American music but the first non-classical
piece ever to win. Since the inception of the prize in 1943—when composer William
Schuman received the award for “Secular Cantata No. 2, A Free
Song”—every Pulitzer-winning composition spoke in the language of
European-derived, Western classical music. As for jazz, blues, gospel,
country, spirituals, and every other genre the United States gave to the
world, all had been excluded. Completely. This caused a contretemps in 1965, when a certifiable jazz
genius—Duke Ellington—was denied a special citation the jury had
recommended to the Pulitzer board. The subsequent and continued
exclusion of jazz, often cited as America’s greatest cultural invention,
disturbed some Pulitzer board members and distant observers alike. But
it took years of effort, hand-wringing, argument, and public discourse
to change the trajectory of the music Pulitzer in 1997. When jazz
experimenter Henry Threadgill won a Pulitzer this year for “In for a
Penny, In for a Pound,” the double CD recorded with his band Zooid, the
triumph represented just the most recent development in a campaign that
had begun in earnest in the early 1990s. “At some point, the board began to worry that the diversity of
music—American music—that was being offered to us was awfully narrow,”
says Jack Fuller, the former president of Tribune Publishing who had
joined the Pulitzer board in 1991. A jazz connoisseur, trombonist, and
pianist who would go on to write the critically applauded jazz novel
“The Best of Jackson Payne,” Fuller came onto the board with no agenda
but knew the sorry history of jazz and the Pulitzers: “It’s hard not to
be embarrassed by the Duke Ellington story, and nothing had been done to
change the course of that history. Mistakes had been made.” The denial of the Pulitzer citation to Ellington, who since the late
1920s had penned such classics as the jazz anthem “It Don’t Mean a Thing
(If It Ain’t Got That Swing),” the symphonic “Black, Brown and Beige,”
the film score for “Anatomy of a Murder,” the pictorial “New Orleans
Suite,” the stage works “Jump for Joy” and “My People” and much more,
was most notorious. When the Pulitzer board declined to give Ellington the honor, jury
members Winthrop Sargeant and Ronald Eyer resigned. Ellington masked his
disappointment in irony. “Since I am not too chronically masochistic, I
found no pleasure in all the suffering that was being endured,” he
wrote in his memoir, “Music Is My Mistress.” “I realized that it could
have been most distressing as I tried to qualify my first reaction:
‘Fate is being very kind to me; Fate doesn’t want me to be too famous
too young.’” Ellington was 66.
It took years of effort, hand-wringing, argument, and public discourse to change the trajectory of the music Pulitzer.
But what stung Ellington most was what the rejection said about an
art form born of the African-American experience, a music to which he
had dedicated his life. “I’m hardly surprised that my kind of music is
still without, let us say, official honor at home,” Ellington told
critic Nat Hentoff in a New York Times Magazine piece titled “This Cat
Needs No Pulitzer Prize.” “Most Americans still take it for granted that
European music —classical music, if you will—is the only really
respectable kind. I remember, for example, that when Franklin Roosevelt
died, practically no American music was played on the air in tribute to
him … By and large, then as now, jazz was like the kind of man you
wouldn’t want your daughter to associate with.” That stigma prevailed at the Pulitzers, though, in a brief gesture,
the board gave a posthumous special award to ragtime master Scott Joplin
in 1976, the year of America’s bicentennial, before returning to
business as usual. The Pulitzers may as well have put out a sign: “For
Classical Composers Only.”
Improvisation is central to the Pulitzer-winning
“Blood of the Fields” by Wynton Marsalis, above,
at Sanders Theatre in 2013.
Kris Snibbe/
Harvard Staff Photographer
By the early 1990s, some board members chafed at the inherent paradox
of failing to honor a distinctly American music with a prize conceived
specifically for that purpose. Jazz, after all, had been around long
before the Pulitzers began awarding the music prize, flourishing since
the turn of the century (or earlier, depending on your definition of
jazz). The question was how to break the classical-music stranglehold on
the prize. “We didn’t know quite how to change that,” says Fuller.
“But, ultimately, the way to change the kind of finalists you get is to
think about the juries. So we began to think about the juries.” Indeed, for most of its history, the Pulitzer music juries “had been
composed largely of people from the academy,” adds Fuller, meaning
professors and composers deeply invested in classical music. “And the
academy had its own distinctive set of aesthetic values. So the idea was
to find a very respectable jury full of people whose expertise was
clear, and whose expertise transcended any one idiom but were open to
many things.” So in the 1990s, Fuller and colleagues appointed to the Pulitzer
juries jazz connoisseurs such as David Baker, head of jazz studies at
Indiana University, and composer-author Gunther Schuller, a scholar in
both jazz and classical realms. But still no results. Frustration was
rising. “I had made no secret for quite some time that it was shocking to me,
absolutely shocking, that a prize for American music had never gone to
the most influential American genre in history,” says Fuller. “And it
just seemed absurd. So the idea wasn’t that you start making it a jazz
prize. The idea was that you start changing the things that made it so
unlikely that a jazz performance, or a jazz composition, would be able
to be attracted to apply and then to win.” In 1997, the board went all out, appointing to the jury Modern Jazz
Quartet pianist-composer John Lewis, Pulitzer-winning classical
composers John Harbison and Joseph Schwantner, both of whom had played
jazz in college, and myself. Robert Ward, who had won a Pulitzer in 1962
for his opera “The Crucible” (based on Arthur Miller’s play), was
appointed chairman. At the same time, contemporary jazz composers were trying to storm
the gates of the Pulitzers, the 87 entries in 1997 including
non-traditional works by Marsalis, Ornette Coleman, and others. The jury
that auditioned these scores knew full well that historic change was
immanent. “I’d been on the jury quite a few times in that period.
There’d been some pushing back from the [board] about the lack of
consideration of jazz,” remembers Harbison. “And I think the makeup of
that jury that year we were there was already a response on the part of
the Pulitzer board. A lot of great jazz composers had come and
gone—[Charles] Mingus and Ellington—without recognition of a body like
the Pulitzer. At the time of that Pulitzer jury it was, at the very
least, a kind of talking point.” Or, as juror Schwantner put it, when it came to jazz, we were
“absolutely open to that. No question about it. And I’d wondered,
actually, why this hadn’t happened before.” (Juror Lewis died in 2001;
chairman Ward died in 2013.) As we listened to the recordings and followed along in the scores of
the submitted works, I was struck by the distinctive experience of
evaluating Marsalis’ “Blood on the Fields,” which I’d already reviewed
in concert. For as the music played, the manuscript featured pages and
pages of white space—sections where the musicians were improvising,
rather than reading from pitches and rhythms Marsalis had put down on
paper for them. Those blank stretches symbolized a huge gulf between jazz and
contemporary classical music, for since its inception, jazz has made
improvisation a central element of composition and performance. The
first published jazz composition, after all, had been copyrighted in
1915. Jelly Roll Morton’s “Jelly Roll Blues” proved that this music—once
improvised freely in the streets, social clubs, and brothels of New
Orleans—could be put to paper.
Join us at Harvard’s Sanders Theatre on Sept. 10-11 as we
celebrate 100 years of the Pulitzer Prize and explore the theme “Power:
Accountability and Abuse” with two dozen Pulitzer winners. Visit the
Nieman Foundation’s Pulitzer Centennial event page to learn more.
But as jazz evolved, its improvisational nature remained vital.
Ellington, for instance, predicated portions of his compositions on what
he expected his musicians to invent on the spot: “My aim is and always
has been to mold the music around the man,” Ellington wrote in 1942. “I
study each man in the orchestra and find out what he can do best, and
what he would like to do.” Ellington routinely leaves room for musicians
to riff freely, asking them not for specific notes but, instead, for
the character of sound, color and rhythm he knows each uniquely can
produce. “There’s almost always some open space in most of the Ellington
pieces,” says Harbison. “The solo spots are kind of part of the
conception, but they’re not specific. Jazz composition includes
non-determined elements. And that’s just something that people have to
come to terms with, to take a certain stance on. It seems that in the
great pieces of Ellington, the building in of the soloist—and even the
voice of the soloist—has been a part of the composition.” Classical music, on the other hand, generally had lost touch with improvisation in the 20th
century. Most modern classical performers (with the exception of church
musicians and avant-gardists) had been trained to play exactly what was
written in the score—nothing more, nor less. The freedom and personal
expression inherent in jazz was an alien language to the classical
jurists who had been judging the Pulitzer Prize for decades. Most of the 1997 jury immediately recognized the technical acuity and
musical breadth of “Blood on the Fields,” even though much of it hadn’t
been written down. And the jurors understood this was a historic
opportunity to honor a way of making music far outside contemporary
classical practice. “If there had been an overwhelming consensus for a
concert [classical] composer, there probably would have been another
concert composer” among the finalists, says Harbison. (In addition to
Marsalis’ opus, the jury recommended classical composers John Musto’s
“Dove Sta Amore” and Stanislaw Skrowaczewski’s “Passacaglia
Immaginaria.”) “But there certainly was in the air a lot of thinking
about the tremendous importance of jazz to American culture, and the
absence of any jazz recognition from that fairly highly publicized
award.” Ultimately, the jury unanimously chose “Blood on the Fields,” summing
up the value of the piece in its report this way: “It is important
because of the brilliance of its jazz orchestral writing, the fervency
of its musical spirit and the power with which it expresses the pain and
promise of the black experience in America.” The Pulitzer board
concurred. “The board is an interesting board, and they’re really thoughtful,”
recalls Fuller. “So the same people who were uncomfortable with the
present situation were wary about the change. What is it going to usher
in? Is this music serious enough? The old stuff you hear about jazz all
the time. But it really wasn’t some kind of a big struggle once we got
down to it at the board level. My memory is that it was pretty clear,
once everybody listened to the music, that [“Blood on the Fields”] was a
remarkable piece of music. And it was major, and it was very serious
and very sophisticated.” Yet this was just the overture. The board went on to award special
posthumous Pulitzers to George Gershwin in 1998, the year of his
centennial, Ellington in 1999, also his centennial, Thelonious Monk in
2006, John Coltrane in 2007, and Hank Williams in 2010. Bob Dylan was
honored with a special Pulitzer in 2008.
Jurors understood this was a historic opportunity to honor a way of making music far outside contemporary classical practice
Perhaps more important, the board refined the rules for the prize, in
hopes of opening the doors wider. Though the award long had been given
“for distinguished musical composition by an American in any of the
larger forms including chamber, orchestra, choral, opera, song, dance or
other forms of musical theater,” the rules for 1998 erased mention of
specific genres, instead honoring “distinguished musical composition of
significant dimension.” And while earlier instructions required that
“all entries should include … a score or manuscript and recording of the
work,” the 1998 instructions asked only for “a score of the
non-improvisational elements of the work and a recording of the entire
work.” In effect, improvisation—so central to jazz—had been explicitly
accepted by the Pulitzers. (These changes were made in consultation with
the 1997 jury.) In 2004, the Pulitzer board altered the rules again, deciding that
submissions no longer would require a score at all, a publicly released
recording sufficing as the documentation of a musical work. This opened
the field to any jazz composition (and music of other genres, as well)
for which no score exists. “After more than a year of studying the Prize
… the Pulitzer Prize Board declares its strong desire to consider and
honor the full range of distinguished American musical compositions—from
the contemporary classical symphony to jazz, opera, choral, musical
theater, movie scores and other forms of musical excellence,” the board
said in a written statement on June 1, 2004. This did not sit well with all parties.
“I don’t think it’s a good idea at all. This has already happened
that one piece has been awarded that is not [fully] written out,”
Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Donald Martino told me in 2004,
referring to Marsalis’s “Blood on the Fields.” “Let these people win
DownBeat polls,” he added. “They have their own venues.”But the tide of history was going another way, with Monk—one of the
greatest of American composers—awarded a posthumous Pulitzer special
citation in 2006. “Monk should have gotten the prize in his lifetime,”
Harvard University professor and then board chairman Henry Louis Gates
Jr., told me when the award was announced. “But the Pulitzer Prize was
defined so narrowly and parochially—to cover just American classical and
neoclassical music—that geniuses like Monk were overlooked. And this
was an attempt to redress that omission.” By 2007, jazz visionary
Ornette Coleman would win for his recording “Sound Grammar.” Now it seems only a matter of time before blues, gospel, spirituals,
and other intrinsically American musical languages are honored by the
Pulitzers. “In my opinion, good music is good music,” says Jim Amoss,
former editor of The (New Orleans) Times-Picayune and a Pulitzer board
member from 2003-2012. “And whatever tradition it springs from, or
whatever genre within that tradition happens to be, if it is sublime,
well-made music, it should be able to make it.” It’s hard to argue with that open-eared, thoroughly democratic
perspective. And it’s worth remembering that the shift to that
philosophy began in 1997 with a music steeped in the values of free and
open expression that improvisation represents: jazz.
Wynton Learson Marsalis (born October 18, 1961) is an American virtuoso trumpeter, composer, teacher, and artistic director of Jazz at Lincoln Center. He has promoted classical and jazz music, often to young audiences. Marsalis has been awarded nine Grammy Awards and his Blood on the Fields was the first jazz composition to win the Pulitzer Prize for Music. He is the son of jazz musician Ellis Marsalis Jr. (pianist), grandson of Ellis Marsalis Sr., and brother of Branford (saxophonist), Delfeayo (trombonist), and Jason (drummer). Marsalis is the only musician to win a Grammy Award in jazz and classical during the same year.
Early years
Marsalis was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, on October 18, 1961, though he grew up in Kenner.[1] He is the second of six sons born to Delores Ferdinand and Ellis Marsalis Jr., a pianist and music teacher.[2] He was named for jazz pianist Wynton Kelly.[3]Branford Marsalis is his older brother and Jason Marsalis and Delfeayo Marsalis are younger. All three are jazz musicians.[4] While sitting at a table with trumpeters Al Hirt, Miles Davis, and Clark Terry,
his father jokingly suggested that he might as well get Wynton a
trumpet, too. Hirt volunteered to give him one, so at the age of six
Marsalis received his first trumpet.[5]
In 1987, Marsalis helped start the Classical Jazz summer concert series at Lincoln Center in New York City.[7] The success of the series led to Jazz at Lincoln Center becoming a department at Lincoln Center[8],
then to becoming an independent entity in 1996 with organizations such
as the New York Philharmonic and the Metropolitan Opera.[9] Marsalis became artistic director of the Center and the musical director of the band, the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra.
The orchestra performs at its home venue, Rose Hall, goes on tour,
visits schools, appears on radio and television, and produces albums
through its label, Blue Engine Records.[7] In 2011, Marsalis and rock guitarist Eric Clapton performed together in a Jazz at Lincoln Center concert. The concert was recorded and released as the album Play the Blues: Live from Jazz at Lincoln Center.
Other work
In 1995, he hosted the educational program Marsalis on Music on public television, while during the same year National Public Radio broadcast his series Making the Music. Both programs won the George Foster Peabody Award, the highest award given in journalism.
In December 2011, Marsalis was named cultural correspondent for CBS This Morning.[10] He is a member of the CuriosityStream Advisory Board.[11]
He serves as director of the Juilliard Jazz Studies program. In 2015,
Cornell University appointed him A.D. White Professor-at-Large.[12] Marsalis was involved in writing, arranging and performing music for the 2019 Dan Pritzker film Bolden.[13]
In 1983, at the age of 22, he became the only musician to win Grammy Awards in jazz and classical music during the same year.[5] At the award ceremonies the next year, he won again in both categories. After his first album came out in 1982, Marsalis won polls in DownBeat
magazine for Musician of the Year, Best Trumpeter, and Album of the
Year. In 2017 he was one of the youngest members to be inducted into the
DownBeat Hall of Fame.[14]
In 1997, he became the first jazz musician to win the Pulitzer Prize for Music for his oratorio Blood on the Fields. In a note to him, Zarin Mehta wrote, "I was not surprised at your winning the Pulitzer Prize for Blood on the Fields.
It is a broad, beautifully painted canvas that impresses and inspires.
It speaks to us all...I'm sure that, somewhere in the firmament, Buddy Bolden, Louis Armstrong and legions of others are smiling down on you."[15]
Statue dedicated to Wynton Marsalis in Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain
Approximately seven million copies of his recordings have been sold worldwide.[18] He has toured in 30 countries and on every continent except Antarctica.[19] He was given the Louis Armstrong Memorial Medal and the Algur H.
Meadows Award for Excellence in the Arts. He was inducted into the American Academy of Achievement
and was dubbed an Honorary Dreamer by the I Have a Dream Foundation.
The New York Urban League awarded Marsalis the Frederick Douglass
Medallion for distinguished leadership. The American Arts Council
presented him with the Arts Education Award.
He won the Dutch Edison Award and the French Grand Prix du Disque.
The Mayor of Vitoria, Spain, gave him the city's Gold Medal, its most
coveted distinction. In 1996, Britain's senior conservatoire, the Royal Academy of Music,
made him an honorary member, the Academy's highest decoration for a
non-British citizen. The city of Marciac, France, erected a bronze
statue in his honor. The French Ministry of Culture gave him the rank of
Knight in the Order of Arts and Literature. In 2008 he received
France's highest distinction, the insignia Chevalier of the Legion of Honour.[20] He has received honorary degrees from Kenyon College (2019), New York University,[21] Columbia, Connecticut College,[22] Harvard, Howard, Northwestern, Princeton, Vermont, and the State University of New York.[23]
Raymond Leppard (conductor), Wynton Marsalis and the National Philharmonic Orchestra for Haydn: Trumpet Concerto in E Flat/Leopold Mozart: Trumpet Concerto in D/Hummel: Trumpet Concerto in E Flat (1983)
Raymond Leppard (conductor), Wynton Marsalis and the English Chamber Orchestra for Wynton Marsalis, Edita Gruberova: Handel, Purcell, Torelli, Fasch, Molter (1984)
In The Jazz Book,
the authors list what Marsalis considers to be the fundamentals of
jazz: blues, standards, a swing beat, tonality, harmony, craftsmanship,
and mastery of the tradition beginning with New Orleans jazz up to Ornette Coleman. He has little or no respect for free jazz, avant-garde, hip hop, fusion, European, or Asian jazz.[5] Jazz critic Scott Yanow
regards Marsalis as talented but criticized his "selective knowledge of
jazz history" and has said that Marsalis considers "post-1965
avant-garde playing to be outside of jazz and 1970s fusion to be barren"
and the unfortunate result of the "somewhat eccentric beliefs of Stanley Crouch".[4] In The New York Times in 1997, pianist Keith Jarrett said Marsalis "imitates other people's styles too well...His music sounds like a high school trumpet player to me".[5] Bassist Stanley Clarke
said, "All the guys that are criticizing—like Wynton Marsalis and those
guys—I would hate to be around to hear those guys playing on top of a
groove!" But Clarke also said, "These things I've said about Wynton are
my criticism of him, but the positive things I have to say about him
outweigh the negative. He has brought respectability back to jazz." [24] When he met Miles Davis, one of his idols, Davis said, "So here's the police..."[5] For his part, Marsalis compared Miles Davis's embrace of pop music to "a general who has betrayed his country."[5] He called rap "hormone driven pop music"[5]
and said that hip hop "reinforces destructive behavior at home and
influences the world's view of the Afro American in a decidedly negative
direction."[25] Marsalis responded to criticism by saying, "You can't enter a battle and expect not to get hurt."[5] He said that losing the freedom to criticize is "to accept mob rule, it is a step back towards slavery."[25]
Berendt, Joachim-Ernst; Huesmann, Gunther (2009). The Jazz Book: From Ragtime to the 21st Century (7 ed.). Chicago, Illinois: Lawrence Hill Books. pp. 164–180. ISBN978-1-55652820-0.
National Endowment for the Arts (June 24, 2010). "National Endowment for the Arts Announces the 2011 NEA Jazz Masters". Washington: National Endowment for the Arts. Archived from the original on September 17, 2010. Retrieved July 19, 2010. For
the first time in the program's 29-year history, in addition to four
individual awards, the NEA will present a group award to the Marsalis
family, New Orleans' venerable first family of jazz.
THE
MUSIC OF WYNTON MARSALIS: AN EXTENSIVE VIDEO OVERVIEW, A CROSS SECTION OF
RECORDINGS, MUSICAL ANALYSIS AND COMMENTARY, PLUS VARIOUS INTERVIEWS
WITH WTNTON MARSALIS:
In 1987, Marsalis helped start the Classical Jazz summer concert series at Lincoln Center in New York City.[7] The success of the series led to Jazz at Lincoln Center becoming a department at Lincoln Center[8],
then to becoming an independent entity in 1996 with organizations such
as the New York Philharmonic and the Metropolitan Opera.[9] Marsalis became artistic director of the Center and the musical director of the band, the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra.
The orchestra performs at its home venue, Rose Hall, goes on tour,
visits schools, appears on radio and television, and produces albums
through its label, Blue Engine Records.[7]
Approximately seven million copies of his recordings have been sold worldwide.[18] He has toured in 30 countries and on every continent except Antarctica.[19]
