Wynton Marsalis
AllMusic Zine, 1999
Beginning in the early Eighties, Wynton Marsalis was acknowledged as the leader of the so-called “young lions” in jazz. Almost all of its proponents were African Americans, not yet out of their twenties. Onstage they dressed with sober dignity, in contrast to the flashier fashions their elders embraced in the post-Miles generation of the Sixties. Also, unlike their predecessors—who sought to invigorate their music with freer approaches to improvisation and high-voltage rock ’n’ roll instrumentation—they championed jazz traditions from early New Orleans through bebop. Their forebears pushed beyond boundaries; the Young Lions pursued excellence within them.
I saw Wynton perform for the first time outdoors at Stanford University on a beautiful sunny afternoon. They closed their show with a blazing duo improvisation that featured Marsalis with drummer Jeff “Tain” Watts; I remember pianist Marcus Roberts standing at the side of the stage, laughing and shaking his head, as bowled over as I was. What really amazed me, though, was when the emcee thanked the audience for coming and invited anyone who wanted to hang out with the band to come backstage as their guest. I’ve never heard any artist before or since do that.
It also forecasted Marsalis’s rise not just as an artist but as an icon of American music. The world would come to know him for his leadership of the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, his contributions to the jazz and classical canons as composer of numerous orchestral and choral works, and his unique ability to communicate through words as well as music. No one since Leonard Bernstein had achieved a comparable eloquence, blending informality and scholarship, discussing the social and historical foundations of his work in academic forums one day, jamming with Muppets on Sesame Street the next.
Wynton and I had met once before when I came to his apartment in Manhattan to discuss his latest album for Musician Magazine. He greeted me warmly, beckoned me inside, and encouraged me to say a few things about myself as we got ready for our interview. When he asked if I was a musician, and I replied that I played piano, he beamed and motioned me toward the instrument in his living room. The idea of playing anything beyond “Chopsticks” in front of him was, at the very least, intimidating, but he nonetheless led me to the bench. Then he picked up his trumpet and asked, “So what are we gonna play?” I suggested “Blue Monk,” and we were off. He listened, nodded, smiled, blew some choruses on his horn, and then when my turn to solo came up, he leaned over the keys to my left and impulsively took over the bass line. You couldn’t miss it: He was having fun and making me feel like I was a part of it. This ability to share joy, as well as knowledge, may be the greatest of all his many gifts.
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Technique
With so many talented brothers in your family, did you ever feel sibling rivalry over music?
No, I never really experienced any rivalry. It’s like, I have two sons. My one son likes to play basketball, so he’ll go out and practice playing basketball for two hours a day. Now, they both went to basketball camp and of course, the one that practiced two hours a day won all the trophies for the best one-on-one or whatever he won.
My other son, what he’s seeing is his little brother beating everybody. And he doesn’t like that, necessarily. So I explained to him, “The two hours that you spend on the computer playing these games, he’s practicing! If you want to beat people playing ball like him, practice!”
It was the same thing with me and my brothers: I practiced. So there was really no rivalry. If you’re training and you’re studying karate or something, and I come to watch you train, then I want to fight you [laughs].
But in karate and basketball, the payoff for practicing is clear: You’ve got a winner and a loser.
Music is the same way.
The result of practice, in any event, is technique. Yet in different ways, Art Tatum and Thelonious Monk were criticized because of their techniques — Tatum for having too much of it and Monk for being too limited.
Right, but you’ll never have a family with somebody like Tatum or Monk in it [laughs] — somebody like Tatum and then somebody who’s not like any of the other great piano players but who’s good. It’s like Nat Cole and his brother: His brother is very good, but he’s not Nat Cole, no disrespect to him. If you had to make a choice between Tatum and Monk, that would be a hell of a family. That would be like Elvin Jones and his family, with Thad [Jones] and Hank [Jones]: All of them can play.
“Velocity is not technique. It’s just one aspect of technique.”
Has your technique affected how you’ve been perceived?
I don’t really know how I’m perceived. But I’m a firm believer, from beginning to end, in technique. Technique means you’re serious. When you don’t have technique, that just means you’re not really serious about what you’re doing. I tell my students, “Man, we could go play some basketball. You don’t have to be serious. It’s up to you. But don’t come trying to vilify somebody who’s serious.” You can’t name anybody who was great and didn’t have technique.
What about Monk?
Monk had phenomenal technique! Somebody should never be defined by the fact that other people are ignorant of what they’re doing. That's like Cézanne, the way he was vilified. Or Matisse.
Well, if you listen to Monk play a whole-tone run on the piano, his articulation is uneven.
But velocity is not technique. It’s just one aspect of technique. There was all kinds of things that Monk could do. He could make all kinds of sounds on the piano. He had a big, rich, golden tone. He invited all kinds of effects that nobody else could do but him. Plus, Monk, he was playing fast runs, all kinds of fast shit — and clean! I tell kids all the time, “Learn one of his solos.” That’s the best way to find out if he had technique or not. Then you’ll discover what I know. You have your conventional way that you think a piano should be played, but he invented another way to play it.
So Monk is not really a good example. There are some people who like Don Cherry as an example of somebody who didn’t have any technique but who had a statement to make. But the fact that he didn’t have technique didn’t help him make that statement. If he had technique, we’d be looking at him like Miles [Davis] or Clifford Brown, one of them. Instead, we look at him like, “Yeah, he’s great conceptually. But he [only] played the trumpet okay.”
The Crisis In Jazz Education
You’re very involved in teaching kids about music. How do you draw from your own experiences to teach them effectively?
Well, I was in England, teaching a class for some kids two or three weeks ago. They were playing, but they were having a hard time. So I said, well, I’m gonna teach them the lesson that Danny Barker taught us when I went to play with the Fairview Baptist Church band when I was eight years old. I taught them that exact same lesson, doing the same song: “Little Liza Jane.” You should have heard them an hour later, the way they sounded. I mean, that was basically his lesson. It wasn’t even really me. I just taught what he taught. So I always rely on things that happened to me as a kid.
What was the key to that lesson you got from Danny Barker?
The key to that is you don’t have [written] music. You explain each part, and you sing the parts. First, though, you keep telling them that they can play it. That’s the first thing, so they can start thinking they can play it. Like what Danny Barker used to do with us. We couldn’t play, man. We sounded terrible. But he would keep telling us that we could play it. Then, when we should play something that didn’t sound good, he would say, “Man, that sounds like jazz music!” Or he had a catchphrase that he’d say, like, “That’s beautiful! That’s what I’m talkin’ about! Boy, what can I say about that? You got that big sound!” He would make you think that you sounded like owls [laughs], even though you knew you didn’t sound like that.
So a big part of teaching is to keep the students thinking positively about what they can do.
Right. You can’t discourage a student. You’re just there to teach them. You can’t make them great; all you can do is impart some information to them and teach them the joy of the music. And there is joy in music, even when you can’t play. That way, it’s like athletics: You can enjoy playing some ball, even if you have a sad game. I mean, I like to play basketball. It ain’t nothin’ you want to see, but I have a good time playing it [laughs].
How much of learning to play well comes from talent, and how much is a matter of teaching?
I don’t know. It's different for different people. Some people are just born with something, and it doesn’t make a difference how they’re taught. Others have to be taught. There’s no rule for it.
With jazz specifically, is the shrinkage of the club circuit making it harder for young people to learn how to play well?
Well, kids are still playing in clubs. I go out every night and hear some young musicians playing. You gotta hustle gigs; that’s true. But there are still places to play. And you’ve still got talented kids. A lot of them just don’t want to play that much.
What does a musician learn through playing gigs that he or she might not learn in a classroom?
Well, you know, you can’t learn any field in a classroom. I don’t care what it is. You can’t become a scientist in class. But the classroom is not the problem. You do have to be trained. The problem is they’re not teaching them shit in the classroom, not that they’re in a class. A lot of times we hear, “These kids come from these schools.” But the schools are not teaching them how to play. The problem is not the kids. The problem is the teachers are not teaching them what it means to be a jazz musician. It’s like being a writer: You can go to any school and study. But to be a writer, you have to write.
So the quality of teaching has declined?
I don’t think it’s declined. There’s just not that many … Let’s put it this way: The Duke Ellington Orchestra is not here, so you can’t go find out exactly what they were doing. Whatever group of people would be responsible for maintaining that legacy of music that doesn’t exist. If you weren’t there, you missed that. That’s what happens when you don’t have a body of intellectuals surrounding your work who are interested in it continuing.
We are seeing more of that today, aren’t we? People notice what you’re doing at Lincoln Center, for example.
Well, we established the gig, Rob Gibson and myself. Rob is the executive director. He started commissioning me. I brought him to Lincoln Center to help me with Jazz at Lincoln Center. He told me, “We should commission you.” I would never have commissioned myself or even thought about my compositions. That would not be my scenario. But he said, “You should write this music. Let’s do this thing.” We established that if he had an idea, if I had an idea, if somebody had an idea, then we start to do that.
Evangelizing For Jazz
Why do you feel that you have to go beyond playing gigs and dedicate yourself to educating the public about jazz?
If nobody tells you, you won’t know.
Do you feel, then, that jazz needs somebody to speak for it in order for it to be appreciated?
Everything needs somebody to speak for it, not just this music. Cooking does: You can taste food your whole life, but that doesn’t make you a chef. “Man, that’s a damn good meal.” “Well, we can’t talk about it.”
But what musician did not talk about music with other people? Bach did it. Duke Ellington did it. Miles Davis did it. The whole idea that you can learn how to play something and you ain’t gettin’ nothing but bad information, or no information at all, and you’ll learn just by hearing it — some people can do that. But not many.
Miles wasn’t known for enlightening the public about what he was doing.
Well, that was just a persona. But when he was learning how to play, Dizzy Gillespie wasn’t doing it. Charlie Parker wasn’t doing it.
You’re talking about musicians teaching other musicians …
I’m talking about how Dizzy talked to Miles or what Monk told Miles, which Miles related to me. For him to learn how to play, there’s a lot of talking went on with Fats Navarro and these people.
But he didn’t do what you’re doing, which is to educate the public through talking to them.
Well, he didn’t have a talent for that. Not every musician does that. Somebody has to tell you how to check Miles out — “This is how he plays” — for you to know what you’re checking out.
For you, though, it’s kind of a mission to spread the news about this music to audiences.
I don’t really look [at] it like a mission. For me, it’s just a natural thing to do. Like, sometimes you stop somebody on the street and ask them for directions. One person will say, “Go left.” Another person will give you detailed instructions. It just depends on who it is.
Much of the music you hear on the radio seems to survive without having someone go out and explain it.
Well, you don’t have to explain that music [laughs].
So why is it important for people to hear what you’re saying as well as what you’re playing?
See, I don’t know if it’s important. I just communicate it. I’m a musician. I’m trained in music. I know some things about it. If you want to hear it, I don’t mind talking about it. But I don’t know if it’s important for them to hear it.
You told another interviewer, “Everybody is convinced that the Beatles are the greatest band in the world. The fact that that’s not what the truth is, the fact that you’re a musician and you have to communicate these facts to people, that’s a really painful position to be in.” That does sound as if this is a mission of sorts.
I don’t have to do that. I choose to do it.
Anatomy Of An Oratorio
One of your most ambitious pieces was the Pulitzer Prize-winning oratorio Blood on the Fields. What led you to write it?
I was reading a book on Australia by Robert Hughes in 1986 or ’87. He was talking about how the prisoners got from England to Australia. He said that the one ship that lost the most prisoners — I think he said ninety percent — was a ship that packed the people like they were African slaves. So it was entirely tragic, the way he was describing it. Then he said, “If a slave ship lost ninety percent of its people, they’d go out of business.” That gave me the idea for writing something called Middle Passage, a piece about a trip over on a slave ship.
I didn’t do anything for a long time until I had a commission from Lincoln Center to write a piece of music. This was during the time when they kept accusing me of racism and all of this, so I said, “Yeah, I’m gonna write a piece on slavery,” not so much in response to that but just the fact that that environment was all around; it had me thinking about it. So the original idea of writing Middle Passage became the front end of the piece.
What about the rest of it?
A lot of the concept for Blood on the Fields comes from this story by Stephen Vincent Benét, called “Freedom Is A Hard-Bought Thing.” Other parts of it I got from different people. Like, one January — I remember because the Super Bowl was on — I was in Boston. A lady told me a story about her great-grandmother told her that her great-grandmother told her about a woman who carried a man who got injured. He didn’t think, or he was careless to her. I put a lot of things together I had heard, and it came out from there.
When did concrete musical ideas begin occurring to you?
The first part of it was the part I wrote in 1987. It’s the little simple one-note theme where the man sings, “You don’t hear no drums, woman.” I didn’t hear no words then, just the music. Then I put in that little vamp …
Those open fifths on the piano?
Yes. Then after that was “A Man and a Woman,” in the beginning. Those were the first two I heard. From that all the others came. I used that theme over and over again. [sings] “Oh, Lord, Juba. Oh, Lord, Judah.” Sometimes I’ll turn it around. [He whistles the retrograde — the theme, backwards.]
Did you hear the harmonic treatment early on?
Some of it. Mainly, I knew it would be coming out of the blues. I tried everything to have the blues as much as possible. I was reading a lot of books. They were saying things about the ring shouts they used to do. A ring shout was like a dance; it was like [Marsalis vocalizes a Bo Diddley-like beat]. I heard this tape of ring shouts from Georgia; Rob Gibson, the director of Jazz at Lincoln Center, had it. He did a lot of fieldwork, so he had tapes I could listen to. For the ring shout, I got this theme. [He whistles a descending line.] It’s that cycle of fifths that goes with the fifth in the bass.
How did you put all these elements together into a harmonious context?
Well, see, I hear all those as the same. I know there’s a big discussion out there about styles and all of that. The [most] important thing is the rhythm in the middle of it: That determines the identity of it. When you add the rhythm, everything else you can write around it. Harmony is harmony. It doesn’t make any difference. You can appropriate almost any harmonic language to the sound of jazz. Duke Ellington did it with Tchaikovsky’s music. In indigenous New Orleans music, you can play it like bebop or avant-garde. You can play it in any style. You can write a fugue and swing it. The question is the rhythm.
The Challenges Of Simplicity
You took different orchestration approaches throughout Blood on the Fields, depending on the style of music you were referencing.
I changed orchestrations, but the point I’m making is that I don’t hear the styles as being that different. You have call-and-response. You have riffs, breaks, polyphonic sections, improvisation sections. You can express your identity in whatever accent you put on it if you understand that orchestration. Sometimes you mix them up.
The ensemble writing in “Oh We Have a Friend in Jesus,” for example, features a clarinet line on top that you wouldn’t have used on pieces with a more modern feel.
Well, I wanted that to sound like a well-meaning country band: real naive sounding, like a rehearsal band, where everybody’s trying to play. It never really sounds good — but it does sound good because it’s earnest. You might hear a really well-rehearsed band, and they might sound polished. But another band that’s unpolished and playing some wrong harmonies and stuff, they’re so well-meaning that it gives it a certain flavor. That’s what I was trying to do with that.
So you wrote out those harmonic clashes.
I wrote ’em all out. I did change the clarinet line because it was too dissonant to get my point across.
It must have been a challenge for these excellent musicians to play naively.
Well, most of it comes from the blues. The main thing is to get to hear it, so you can see how your part works with everybody else’s part, to see if the balance is right. That first clarinet part I had was really out there. I still like the first one, but it obscured the point. It was sound from a theoretical standpoint; it was acceptable, like it wasn’t wrong.
You actually bring out that clarinet line at some of its most dissonant points.
Well, he’s way up there. I think I changed it from that broadcast [recording] and made it more consonant when we recorded it [in the studio]. The consonance is what makes it sound like that, the fact that they’re playing unison notes and they’re not really in tune. The trumpet is playing an octave below the clarinet, and the clarinet is really squeakin’ up there.
I’ve listened to so many types of harmony. Sometimes I try to have a real basic, fundamental harmony. Sometimes it’s dissonant. But I always want it to sound like it’s simple.
Too many musicians assume that the blues is just a question of melodic alteration: flatting the third or the seventh, for example. But you take these alterations and build harmonies on them.
Duke [Ellington] is the father of that kind of blues harmony. Monk too. Jelly Roll [Morton] was the first to really exploit that. I’m just trying to be in that tradition.
Writing For Horns
How long did it take to compose Blood on the Fields? Were you working on and off over a few years?
No, I never work like that. It’s always rushed at the last minute and late [laughs]. It’s always in a big garble.
How did you decide where to write out parts and where to let the musicians improvise?
I tried not to write out the rhythm parts. Somebody’s got to be improvising. The more you write out a rhythm section, the less it’s gonna sound like jazz. Freedom is good for the drums and the bass. When they’re not free, it can still sound good, but something happens to it.
You still have to write out all the notes whenever the horns are playing in harmony. What happens in Blood on the Fields is, at first, most of the music is written out. Then, as it goes on, the music becomes more open. There’s more room to play because the guy [i.e., the protagonist in the story] is getting at [sic] free. At first, nobody’s playing; we’re reading the parts. Then, as he starts to realize what he has to do to become free, his people start soloing more.
But also, I was running out of time [laughs]. It was, like, four days before. We were rehearsing all day and I was writing all night.
Some horn ensemble passages, such as in “Juba and a O’Brown Squaw,” could be either improvised or written.
There’s no [written] music for that. It’s supposed to be a ragtag band of people. This guy is roaming around the woods somewhere, like a harlequin figure, somebody dispensing information. It’s not real formal.
Did the horns have chord charts to follow?
Nothin’. It’s just a triad. [Whistles a simple melody on the I chord.] That’s the whole thing.
Sectional horn improvisation is a neglected skill in modern jazz.
That’s an important part of our tradition. But the guys I have — Wycliffe [Gordon, trombonist], Victor [Goines, tenor saxophonist], Wes [Anderson, alto saxophonist], Ronald [Westray, trombonist] — we’ve been playing together a long time.
You scored Blood on the Fields for a thirteen-piece ensemble. Why not something larger?
That’s just what I was comfortable with at the time. It could have been for more, but I figured this was like a small, big band. I’d never written for big band, so I wanted enough voices to get a big sound but not to where my lack of experience would hurt me.
Slavery as Metaphor
Did you write about slavery in Blood on the Fields for similar reasons as to why the Holocaust Museum was set up in Washington, DC, for fear that certain atrocities of the past might be forgotten?
Well, certainly, that’s important. It’s important to have the Holocaust Museum. We need a national museum of slavery too. In New Orleans, we used to have something called the Cabildo [a museum on the site of the signing of the Louisiana Purchase]. When I was little, we would all go there and see chains and the different things from slavery. Several times I’ve been to the Cabildo.
But Blood on the Fields is not so much about slavery. It’s set in slavery, but it’s also about today. It’s set in two times, so it’s not just a question of what happened back in slavery. For me, it’s more a matter of the human proposition, like a man and a woman, freedom, integrity, responsibility, redemption through sacrifice — the basic Western themes. That’s the center of it: redemption through sacrifice.
Like, in the Christian tradition, Jesus comes to help the people. They abuse and kill him, and he blesses them. That’s a theme that we see over and over. The whole Afro-American position of the past thirty or forty years was, “Okay, we’re abused, pressed in the service of this country for no money, lynched, raped, discriminated against, constantly made a national scapegoat for issues. But God bless America.”
“What would have happened if Jesus had gotten on the cross and said, ‘To hell with y’all’?”
Obviously, that’s an ironic legacy.
Yeah, but that’s something that resonates in all of Western thought. It’s not just Afro-American. The question for me is, what would have happened if Jesus had gotten on the cross and said, “To hell with y’all”? It’s like Yeats in that poem [The Second Coming], saying, “The center cannot hold.” What happens then? So in the past forty years, the Afro-American position has changed. Blood on the Fields addresses that too.
Plenty of people have found reason to use Jesus as a symbol by which to justify oppression and aggression.
You can interpret that any way you want to. But the simple fact of the image of a man on the cross being sacrificed for you leads to the question of this type of power and consciousness to be on Earth and then be destroyed by humans — and to accept it so that the world can be redeemed. However people want to read, whatever they want to do to other people, it’s still a fact of the greatest healer being killed and sacrificed so that the blood of Christ can nourish the earth.
That’s what gives songs like “Oh We Have a Friend in Jesus” such resonance, the fact that the flip side of the beauty of the message is a tendency to accept oppression in anticipation of brighter times to come.
See, that’s why I gave two readings of it [in Blood on the Fields]. That’s a misreading of it. On the other hand, they thought “the last shall be first.” Also, the central character, Jesse, has to recognize that, for him to be free, it’s up to him to heal the land. He has to forgive the land to be free. He can’t hate the land and be free because Juba tells him, “The land that holds you slave is the same that lets you go.” So he’s in a quandary. That’s the land of his bondage. He was a prince, and now you’re telling me that he has to love the land? That’s how I was seeing it.
A lot of people are so afraid of the name of Christ because religious fanaticism and judgment, and all these things are connected to Jesus. So whenever the name of Jesus is evolved, all these images come into play that have nothing to do with the fact of the story of Jesus. The fact of it—not your relationship to it—because this is not an attempt to make a religious statement.
But a spiritual statement?
Yes.
The Borders Of Creativity
You’ve got two thousand years of history between Jesus and our time, with plenty of people inflicting their misinterpretations on what he said. It’s tough to get back to the source.
But a lot of great things have come out of that Christian tradition, especially in art.
Much of that art flourished within parameters strictly defined by the Church. That’s a classic lesson in music as well: The limitations you work within define the kind of greatness to which you can aspire.
That’s the form. You have to have some kind of limitation. That’s what form is.
And in Blood on the Fields, you’ve defined limitations based on the size of the ensemble and the marriage of European and Afro-American traditions.
It’s really just American traditions. I try to use everything in my experience. I’m an American. I play John Philip Sousa’s music. I’ve been taught by musicians who are white, black, yellow, green, every kind. It’s not like my experience in music has been segregated. For me, it’s about being true to that experience, not to the cliché of that experience. A lot of times, so many clichés come out of there that you will espouse a philosophy that your experience doesn’t support. You’ll be saying something, and you’ll say, “Wait a minute. That’s not something I experienced.”
But because of the breadth of your background, don’t you have to filter out certain aspects of your style to attain a kind of stylistic purity in what you’re trying to accomplish?
I never concentrate on filtering anything out. If something comes to me, I’ll use it. Wes [Anderson] and I joke about this: I change the music a lot when I hear it the first time because I’m impatient to hear it. I don’t just let it be what it is. I almost always go back to what I originally had. Wes says, “Don’t change it. You know you’re gonna go back to what you had.”
So if, say, a Ravel-type harmony feels right, there’s no reason not to use it.
Well, I don’t know Ravel’s music well enough to know what his harmonies are. The music I know is jazz music. I don’t know classical music well enough to appropriate that much of it. I’ve played the music; I know it by sound. But mainly, my music comes out of Jelly Roll, Duke and Monk. That’s the music I’ve studied well enough to have a command of a percentage of that vocabulary.
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