Wynton Marsalis: Acquisition of Power and Agency
In our last post, “Wynton Marsalis on Sharing Our Democratic Space,” we primarily focused on his latest recording, The Democracy! Suite. In Part Two of the interview-discussion, we get personal.
My 2002 essay, “The Canonization of Jazz and Afro-American Literature,” detailed how Wynton, Stanley Crouch, and Albert Murray pulled off a cultural coup in the 1990s by establishing the largest institution in the world devoted to jazz: Jazz at Lincoln Center. As to be expected, three learned and accomplished Black American men at the upper tier of American culture spearheading such an epic achievement riled those whose sensibility and ideology differed. Nonetheless, as I said about Stanley at his memorial service last fall, they exercised their power of cultural agency and cultural capital on behalf of the music.
Be that as it may, we don’t focus on that per se in the remainder of our discussion. Rather, what follows is first-person remembrances of interpersonal relationships of love and soul. In addition, Wynton extends, elaborates, and refines his earlier commentary about the personal responsibility for the state of democracy that each of us can take, right in our own communities.
Let’s start where the last post left off.
Stanley Crouch, Albert Murray, Ralph Ellison
Stanley Crouch and Wynton Marsalis
Greg Thomas: So, my final question has to do with the music and democracy. I first started to really understand the articulation of the democracy-jazz connection through the work of Stanley Crouch. Reading Stanley's work led me to Albert Murray and Ralph Ellison, who go into beautiful detail about these relationships between people and ideas. I'm wondering: how did their work add to your understanding of the relationship between democracy and jazz?
Wynton Marsalis: Well, I loved them personally so it's hard to even talk about it. But writers are not musicians. Because my daddy liked to talk about music, I like to talk about it. I like to talk about it, I like to read about it, I love the stuff they said. Some stuff I agreed with, some I didn't, but I'm a musician, so a musician plays music.
You can be a musician with an unbelievable understanding of music and can play and write and may not want to talk about it. You may have nothing to say about it, but what you're saying about it is in your music. I read an interview with Steve Coleman and he said that. It made me laugh because it's so true.
GT: I feel you and I hear what you're saying, but look, Stanley played drums. Ellison played trumpet. Murray played some bass. I'm not talking about professionally--
Wynton: But I'm saying . . . [laughing]
GT: [laughing] Don't get me wrong, I played the saxophone. Again, I'm not saying professionally.
Wynton: If you hear Stanley play drums—
GT: What say?
Wynton: If you hear Stanley play the drums, you will see why he went into writing! I'm only messing with him because I messed with him when he was alive nonstop, because he loved messing with you.
GT: Oh, no doubt.
Wynton: So, because he loved messing with me, I would always mess with him. I'd say, "All right, man, you keep messing with me, I'm going to make you play those drums."
GT: But I'll tell you something. Man, I remember one time, when he was still on 11th Street in Greenwich Village, that he put on this recording. Matter of fact, you might have talked about—
Wynton: Of him and David Murray.
GT: Well, no. It was just him.
Wynton: Oh, really?
GT: Yeah, you talked about that one with David Murray at his memorial service at Minton’s. But no, it was just him. I'm there listening. Now, you, with the relationship you had with him, you were just frank and candid. I didn't know who was playing, so I'm hedging my bets. I'm like, "Hmm. That's real interesting." He said, "That's me." I said, "Oh, okay." [laughs]
Wynton: That's really sad now. [laughs]
GT: And we went on to the next subject.
Wynton: No, man, I loved them.
GT: I know.
Wynton: I mean, because there's "liberal writers," there's such a kind of patronization and propriety over black people—the intellectual part, and the leadership. They don't really like that. So that would make me, when I was younger, really play up Stanley and Murray, you know?
GT: Yeah.
Wynton: Especially Murray, because that kind of Black . . .
GT: Intellectual excellence.
Wynton and Albert Murray, 1990, at the Newport Jazz Festival
Wynton: Yeah, because you're always supposed to be going toward an academy whose theorems and postulations work against your best interests. You're supposed to always be submitting your work to them for their approval. It's like a trick bag that's played on you. I realized that when I was younger.
My mama used to always say: "I could give you a degree that says, ‘I am a fool’ and you'll run around the whole world so proud of your degree and showing everybody that degree saying, 'I am a fool. I am a fool.' So you have to wonder, what is the substance of your education?" She used to always say that.
Wynton: So, with Stanley and Murray, their objectives, on those things, it was really what they knew about. Their objectives were so rooted in an Afro-American tradition that I understood and came from, that, yeah, it was unbelievable. Their education was phew.
Wynton with Murray in Al’s book-lined apartment at Lenox Terrace in Harlem. Insiders called Murray’s home the “spyglass tree.”
Man, I used to go over to Murray's house every Sunday. He was my man. At a certain point, I was going to his house two, three times a week, sit up with Mozelle [Murray’s wife]. And all of it wasn't even teaching. It just was talking and hanging and reading. And the stuff he's telling me to read would be like William Faulkner, William Butler Yeats. It wasn't all Afro-American material.
GT: Oh, of course not. He was the opposite of provincial. He had you and me read Malraux.
Wynton: Malraux. Yeah, Voices of Silence. You know what it was. The “museum without walls.”
GT: Hey, baby.
Wynton: The human condition.
GT: All right, now, watch out.
Wynton: On and on.
GT: That's right.
Wynton: And meeting Romare [Bearden]. With Ellison, it was very different. With Ellison, he was reading his stuff. His writing was so poetic, and he loved it, so when I'd see him, he would read. He's also a trumpet player so I'm talking about the trumpet and people: what you think about this and that? Also, it was a generational thing like, they were in school in the 1930s.
GT: Yeah, Ellison and Murray.
Wynton: So, they were the age of my grandfather or older. They used to always call it that—"I'm your intellectual grandfather.” We would be joking about age and time. So many of the things that I thought, of course, they didn't agree with. I mean, we just had a generational thing. But the education that they gave, and the depth of their knowledge and study: there's no way I understood that there were people on earth like them. I just didn't. I wasn't aware of it, man. When I first met Murray and went to his house it was like, "Damn." I didn't understand nothin’ him and Crouch was talking about, not a word of it.
"Hey, man, certainly you’ve heard of so-and-so. You read this?" I'd never read none of that, never heard of it. I was just a dude from New Orleans whose daddy was a great teacher of music and who had intellectual interests in an environment that was not an intellectual environment.
Yeah, man, the education and the feeling and the depth. Plus, you’ve got to also talk about just how soulful they were when you were hanging with them.
GT: Oh, absolutely. Absolutely.
Wynton: But, see, I could relate to them on that level.
GT: Yeah, me too. Except for Ellison, because I didn't know Ellison . . .
Wynton: He was soulful.
GT: I hear you.
Wynton: But you'd get in there with Fanny [Ellison’s wife] and she liked you to tease him too. The funny thing was: Murray didn't like you teasing him. He was always very serious, but you could get with Mozelle. She liked when you messed with him.
Mozelle and Albert Murray
She would start saying, "Oh, what did you tell him? Oh, I'm so surprised to see the master being talked to that way." We were more like family, man, so of course I'd be messing with him; teasing was just kind of naturally my way, man. I used to tease my daddy all the time. Crouch? It was nothing but ribbin’ all the time with me and him.
GT: Right.
Wynton: But he was so threatening to the kind of liberal establishment because he wasn't... Eventually me and Crouch started arguing about all that anti-black shit he would be writing. I'd be like, "Man, you got to..." But he was a guy who you couldn't . . .
GT: No, no. You couldn't pigeonhole him.
Wynton: . . . put him on that plantation. You couldn't get him.
GT: That's right.
Wynton: Because at any moment, he might not behave.
GT: Yep.
Wynton: I remember he wrote an article for JazzTimes called, “Putting the White Man in Charge.” We had a bet on that article—
GT: That was the one where they said, "You're out of here."
Wynton: But before the article came out, we were laughing about it. I said, "You better go back to that other material where you're constantly insulting black people because when you write that, when you put this article out, you're going to lose your job over that. Because “my liberalism” is only going to take me so far. You can come into my house. I'm going to show you off.
It's like when Ellison wrote in Invisible Man: “but don't think that means you're going to come in here and start sleeping with my daughter.” This ain't a part of that equation; you've overstepped now.
Representative Anecdote: One Night in Miami
GT: That reminds me of the scene in One Night in Miami, directed by Regina King, my favorite actor. It’s when you first see the Jim Brown character, played by this excellent brutha, Aldis Hodge, driving his Cadillac. Goes up to an estate, probably a plantation. You see the cypress on the trees. He gets out, knocks on the porch door. A young lady comes out, a young white girl, "May I help you?"
He says, [imitating Brown’s deep voice] "Could you tell Mr. Carlton that Jim Brown is here?" She says, "Jim Brown!" Gets all excited, invites him in, calls her daddy. Daddy comes out. "Oh, James." Greets him with that Southern hospitality. They're in St. Simons, Georgia, where Jim Brown grew up. They sit down on the porch. Mr. Carlton, played by Beau Bridges, says,
"Would you like some lemonade?"
"No, thank you."
He has the young lady, the daughter, get some lemonade anyway. Southern hospitality. So they talk and he basically says, "I'm so proud of you. 1860 yards. That's a record that will always hold up."
"Well, I'd like the record and the championship," Brown says.
"Ah, don't worry about that. That record will stand the test of time."
"Actually, it's 1863 yards."
"That's more like it."
He had come because his aunt told him that Mr. Carlton wanted to see him.
Beau Bridges and Aldis Hodge—playing Jim Brown—in One Night in Miami
Mr. Carlton: "Our families go back a long way. I'm so proud of you."
The daughter comes back out, puts down the lemonade and says, "Daddy, don't forget, we got to move that bureau." He says, "Oh, okay." So, he gets up.
Remember, Wynton, this is Jim Brown.
Jim Brown says, "Oh, you moving some furniture? Let me give you a hand with that."
Mr. Carlton says "Now, James, that sure is considerate of you. But you know we don't let niggers in the house. Remember now, I’m proud of you. You keep up the good work."
So, bottom-line, that kind of “liberal” will be polite to you as long as you stay in your lane. That was a powerful movie, man.
Wynton: Mm-hmm. Yeah, man. Well, if you're from the South, you know...
GT: Yeah, my people are from Georgia and Florida.
The Perennial Struggle for Power and Agency
Wynton: But the North is... I will say this about the Southern racism: it is actually more digestible for me than the Northern, and I'm from the South.
GT: I agree. I'm from the North but my people are from Georgia and Florida.
Wynton: Yeah, the North, it's more intellectuals engaged in it. And the tactics are much more subtle and real for those who are like that. But these problems are, they're nuanced. And they're tied into the whole kind of sectarianism and tribalism in the world and just the way that people . . .
My little brother always says that most things out here are random. You can't make sense of it. But the one thing that's not random is that acquisition of power. The acquisition of power and agency. It comes in many forms. We talked about race; it comes in that form. You talk about gender; it comes in that form. You talk about pecking order in a family; it comes in that form.
These are timeless kind of issues and problems with humanity. And there's a continuous struggle against it. It doesn't matter who you look at, what century you're in. Depending on your level of education or just natural insight, you'll find people who were trying to create a desire in human beings for equality and to share agency and power and resources with others, since the beginning of time.
It's an uphill struggle. Maybe that's just part of what the human journey is, that there is that struggle and that strife. If you take that strife away, what are we down here doing? We're back in the proverbial Garden of Eden or back in the . . . where very little was happening. So for something to go on, you got to have some type of friction and some type of struggle.
GT: There's no doubt about that. And that gets back to democracy and The Democracy! Suite. Democracy, in a pluralistic democracy, you have various groups vying for influence based on their interests, based on resources that they're struggling over. That's just the way it is, as Murray said, in an open society.
Indeed, for all their traditional antagonisms and obvious differences, the so-called black and so-called white people of the United States resemble nobody else in the world so much as they resemble each other. And what is more, even their most extreme and violent polarities represent nothing so much as the natural history of pluralism in an open society.
—Albert Murray, The Omni-Americans: Black Experience and American Culture
Wynton: Right. And the question for each of us is, what do we actually do to participate in that society? What do I do? I vote. I'll complain to a congressperson. But in terms of the community I live in, and the democracy that's in that, in terms of making more education available—some things I participate in, but I could always do more and better as a citizen. I don't know how many of us think they could do better, but I think for us to evolve our way of life, there has to be a greater investment by citizens. It has to be more than voting.
Voting is not enough. And it's true of education. What do you want for everybody else's kids? You could go back to the days when somebody's parent, somebody was a carpenter. They could show you how to do carpentry work. People in the neighborhood would set up workshops for people. We'd save up for music school, Bert’s music school. It was just community music school, man. We would go and they would teach us fundamentals of music—and that wasn't a thing that was school board sanctioned. It was just a guy in the community.
When we played ball when I was growing up, it was because of the guy who was the janitor. We called him Mr. Buddy. He said, "These kids should be able to play some ball." Everything was segregated, but he went and petitioned and got us some old uniforms from the 1950s.
He talked to a chemical company and they let us use their lot. Filled out whatever paperwork he had to. Went around from person-to-person. Raised money to get this from that one and from this one, like a lot of church organizations do. Then they put us on the schedule. The schedule was the seven or eight white teams and then there were three Black teams, because of him. He was just a citizen. He wasn't getting paid to do it.
GT: Right.
Wynton: He was giving up time and now the gym is named after him. I didn't know that. Jonathan Batiste and I were talking—he's from Kenner—and I was telling him how we used to be in that gym. We would be in the new gym, and when Mr. Buddy would come in all the older cats would say, "Man, we got to stop all this cursing because Buddy is up in here." The respect that we had for him. [Batiste] said, "Mr. Buddy?" I said, "Yeah." He said, "Well, the gym is named after him." I said, "What you talkin’ about?" He said, "The gym is called Buddy Lawson." I said, "It wasn't called Buddy Lawson when I was growing up.”
He sent me a picture of the gym now, with Buddy's name on it. I was thinking, across time, how to us Buddy was a person that we knew. To J. Bat and them it was the guy's name who was on the gym.
Sometimes these things go on for generations, millennia, and it's these age-old human battles, man, and we're a part of that struggle. We want to see change in our lifetime but many times we're just a small part of the change. We spend our whole lives toiling, our lives, our parent's lives, and their parents. It's worth the struggle but when you start to think it shouldn't be a struggle because you're a certain age, that's when you become old.
GT: Yeah, dig that.
Wynton: I think you keep your youthfulness as long you know that the struggles that you had and that you saw, and the changes that you want to see in the community, and the education system, [and] in my case, in the arts, that you don't determine the outcome of it. Many people do. All you can do is your part, but you got to keep that struggle and that hunger.
Because for Black people, when you lose that struggle you become like an [old] uncle. Then you always get good reviews, everybody loves you, and you used to be something. Because now your virility is gone and your ability to fight against the injustices—and not just injustices by white people.
My daddy would always say, "They couldn't play jazz in the building at Dillard [University].” You know it's an uphill struggle.
GT: Absolutely, man. Listen, I really appreciate your time. The Democracy! Suite, your latest excellent composition, in a career of many recordings that deal with social, political, artistic, and just human issues. Thanks again.
Wynton: Hey, man, always. It's always good to see you and talk to you.
It’s great to share with you the flavor of a real conversation about perennial issues and master American writers whom Wynton and I knew and loved. But to truly share what this conversation, and others like it, is really requires more.
That’s why in April 2021, Jewel and I are launching the Tune In To Leadership Podcast. You’ll hear our voices, as we share content on the themes, principles, and practices we cover in our print blog, as well as us in conversation with business, civic, cultural and thought leaders such as Wynton Marsalis.
Coming in April 2021: the Tune in to Leadership podcast!