The
Atlantic Monthly | March 2003
by David Hajdu
Wynton's Blues
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 kingmaker. 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.
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 nightlife
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 museum like 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
also 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, 'Julliard’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 Grammy’s in both categories. No jazz musician
has had such success since.
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 Kennedy’s, 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. Its 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.
"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."
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.