Wynton Marsalis: Sharing Our Democratic Space
I’ve known Wynton since 1993, when, after a nascent Jazz at Lincoln Center concert at Avery Fisher Hall, a decade before building their own edifice at Columbus Circle, I met him, played some basketball, and came back to his “deluxe apartment in the sky” off Amsterdam and 65th St. to rap and argue for a few hours.
Since I had been following his career from his entry on the cultural scene in the late ‘70s, and as he was a source of inspiration and exemplar of excellence for me in the early ‘80s, where his jazz and classical recordings adorned my college dorm room, this was a dream come true.
Over the next few years, we’d occasionally speak about the music, to be sure, but as important for me was the brutha-to-brutha conversations about life; family issues; male to female and female to male relationships; and our children.
In fact, when my first wife, Tina, was pregnant with our daughter Kaya in 1995, we visited Wynton. He blew into her tummy and said: “She’s going to be special.”
From his mouth to God’s ears, Wynton spoke prophetic truth that day.
In this first of two-parts, my questions focus on his new recording, The Democracy! Suite. In part two, we let loose as if the camera wasn’t running, kickin’ it back and forth like we used to back in 1990s.
Backstory: The Democracy! Suite
Greg Thomas: Wynton, thanks so much for speaking with us about your latest recording. When and why did you decide to write The Democracy! Suite?
Wynton Marsalis: Late this past summer, speaking with members of our touring team and our concert team at Jazz at Lincoln Center, we were thinking of ways to get out and to continue to serve our audience.
One of the members of our team, Dan Israel, said we should write a piece and go into the hall, record it and offer it to presenters. I wrote it, and then we went in the hall and we played it. We went on a three-week tour, a lot of great places, great partners, partners in Chautauqua and other venues that we'd played, all beautiful community. Everybody was so glad to get out. Of course, it was socially distanced. We'd take a COVID test every week.
Then we sent the film of what we had done in our hall out around the country and the world. Then, when the shows were showing, I would get on Zoom and do an interview with different people from their community. It ended up being a soulful thing to do; it give the opportunity to connect with a lot of different people around the world.
The Meaning in the Music: Song Titles
GT: I'm curious about some of the titles of The Democracy! Suite. Some of the titles are clear, for example, “Sloganize, Patronize, Realize, Revolutionize,”: activism. “Ballot Box Bounce”: voting. But some others aren't as clear. You started with “Be Present.” What does that allude to or signify?
Wynton: Well, two things. “Be Present” means be in this time. It's for everybody who is actually present, who got out, who protested, who let their voice be heard, in any way.
I was asked a lot: what do you think about Black Lives Matter? I always would say, "Well, we have such a bad problem in so many arenas, whatever arena you're in, do something." Be present. There's been a problem so long in our country, from urban renewal to laws to the police to schools to businesses. So be present. Be a part of it. Then [it’s] for all the people who had to be present when they didn't want to be.
There’s this thought that the essential workers and the healthcare workers wanted to be at work. They have families too. They have all the problems we have and more. They have to go into work and deal with an illness that we don't really know what it is. And maybe even [contract] it.
GT: I hear you about those healthcare workers. The thing about them that gets me is, it's like an everyday heroism, because of what they were doing and the context they were doing it in: facing danger daily.
Wynton: Many don't want to do it. The circumstances forced many people to do it.
GT: That's right. They didn't have a choice.
Wynton: That doesn't make it any less heroic.
GT: For sure. Okay, another tune: “That Dance that We Do (That You Love Too).”
Wynton: That's just a groove. People like to play groove. I always notice all the kinds of grooves watching the different protests on television. Some people have a nice groove, man. They'd be in a car [sings]. So, depending on their chant, they would have a more complex rhythm.
GT: Right.
Wynton: I've seen more people playing tambourines. I always wonder, where do all these damn tambourines come from? Being from New Orleans, just any type of parade, people getting out on the street, gettin’ down, getting up and getting down. That's all it is. A lot of The Democracy! Suite has two melodic lines going at the same time—a kind of contrapuntal writing with two-part counterpoint. The solos, a lot of time, dialogue with each other. And I was trying to share the space more.
So, everything I do on The Democracy! Suite, where we played two or three horn polyphony, [we’re trying] to say that we have to share our space more.
GT: Shared Leadership is what we call it in the Jazz Leadership Project. You know what I mean?
Wynton: Yeah.
GT: Alright: “It Came 'Round ‘Gin.”
Wynton: “It Come 'Round 'Gin,”: just what old people tell you, no matter where you are. If somebody has been around, every time you tell them somethin’, it reminds them of something else. That’s related to “Be Present” and has a similarity to music Art Blakey would play.
There's always been a push to run jazz musicians away from their identity. If they go away from their identity, they're cutting edge. If they go away from their jazz identity to any form of pop music, funk, hip hop or rock, whatever it is, then they're “embracing the future.”
So, I always reiterate for my younger musicians: you don't have to run from your identity. This too can be modern, and you have to imbue it with that feeling. Don't run away from your giants, because it's designed to run you away from them. When you see something designed to run you off, run towards it. It's like how black folks in Booker T. Washington's time would say, "How do you all know how to vote?" They’d say, "We look at how the white folks vote, and we vote the other way." You have to know, and I'm not turning it into a racial thing.
That could apply to anything, any philosophy that makes you weaker. And then you're put in a position of having to embrace that for you to be okay. That's like a Catch-22 that the Afro-American has been put in many times, by black and white folks. Like my father always says, he went to a Black college. They could not play jazz in the school.
So, you could play classical music, great. You could play in the band that played R&B. "We ain’t going to teach you that, but you can come play that at the dance.” But jazz? “We don't want to hear that." Or you could be dealing with a critical community that wants you to represent the European avant-garde. If you do that, you're okay. If you don't, you're not okay.
Everybody wants to be loved. You gotta choose who you want to be loved by. Love [those] who love you. Don't get out there trying to please [everyone] . . . “Greg, I want to go out with you, and I love you, but can you just not be you? Can you make yourself be 30 or can you make yourself be 80 or can you make your head look different?”
GT: I hear you. How about “Deeper Than Dreams”?
Wynton: A lot of people couldn't sleep in that time. They lost their loved ones, and you couldn't see your people who passed away. You didn't have the same type of opportunity to close out, like you would have in cases of death that were not sudden. So, people who had elderly people—some younger people passed away—but generally elderly people with some underlying conditions.
If you weren't in the [same] state, or you weren't near them, a lot of times you didn't see them. So they have to come to you, and they come to you in a dream. But it's deeper than a dream. Because everybody is having it; so it's a collective kind of thing that makes it deeper. You have to sit with them and heal. Your grief is healed with them, by sitting with them in that [dream] state.
That's what I meant by that. And because it was for my father, I used the language of Ornette Coleman.
My father loved Ornette. Ornette lived in New Orleans in the '50s. Ed Blackwell, Ornette's first drummer, grew up playing with my father. Ornette told me one time that my daddy and Alvin Batiste, a great clarinetist also from New Orleans, drove to Los Angeles and knocked on his door. They said, "We just came to see what you was doing." When he told me the story, we both started laughing! He told the story to make me see how familial stuff was, and how much love they had between them, and how serious they were about music.
But are you going to drive from New Orleans to Los Angeles just to see what somebody's doing? [laughs]
GT: I hear you. Then: “That's When All Will See.”
Wynton: Well, that talks about how we all come together when there's a tragedy. That the tragedy overwhelms our tribalism. Like after Katrina, we saw that with the nation and the citizens of New Orleans. After 9/11, we saw it with people traveling around and doing different things. We're forced to come together.
“That's When All Will See” is more a global thing. When will we all see that for our existence on this earth, we have a symbiotic relationship with people? That we're in an ecosystem that can accommodate everybody, [a] kind of ecosystem thinking and ecosystem health, instead of imbalance because of greed and stupidity. It's the source of endless religious books, books, paintings, music—it just goes on and on, with people—shamans and seers and priests and priestesses and artists who've said this. So, it's just another statement of that in the New Orleans way.
GT: I just have two more questions. The promotional copy for the record quotes you saying, "The question that confronts us right now, as a nation is do we want to find a better way?" If I can get editorial for a moment, it seems to me that some people want to find a better way and some people don't. What would you say?
Wynton: We can't look at other people and know what they're doing. We can only work on ourselves and our community and what we're doing. What are me and you doing, and what can we do to be better citizens in our community? We can find a lot that we can do. I think it's such a large problem that confronts the world and my question there was a question of: is that what you want to do? You may not want to do that so . . .
GT: That's what I said, basically, some people don't really want to.
Wynton: My daddy used to always say, "You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him thirsty." Man, if you don't want it to be, it's not for me to say, "You need to be doing this." I need to say to myself, "What can I do? What actions can I take to demonstrate more fully that I want to find a better way?" Because that means I'm going to do something different. I have to challenge myself to go down that difficult road and sometimes I'm up to it and sometimes I'm not.
The ‘us’ in the quote is a matter of a kind of collective consciousness like in a jazz group: for us to play together we have to want to play together. Ted Nash is someone, [so] I have to play with him. If I have to play one chorus instead of five, I have to want to do that. If I don't want to play with him, I don't need four horns. I'll just play by myself. I can play as long as I want. But if I want to, I have to figure out how to share this space.
If I want to follow the Constitution, I'm not trying to figure out how to get around it. I'm trying to figure out how to strengthen it because it's designed to distribute agency through a very complex system of checks and balances. That system is easy to subvert like any law is. The question is, do you want to follow the laws? Do you want to? When we say things, like with police reform, it ends up being a senseless argument with defund the police and you get the most extreme sides—and newspapers love whenever there's an extreme. So that leads you toward whoever has mental illness.
So now we're kind of playing on a mental illness in the society, somebody who will go to the most extreme: kill people, holler, scream, spit on people, knock people out. Most people are not going to do that. Police who will be extremely brutal and cruel, now they represent all the police.
GT: No.
Wynton: The truth is that most of us don't fall in that category. We're participants, and the integrity of our participation we monitor. So, when we hear foolishness—it's important not to entertain foolishness because, man, you start entertaining foolishness just for the fun of it and the quality of life diminishes for all of us.
It's a challenge. But it's always been a challenge for you and I and for everyone. We're walking down a long road. If we aspire to a richer and enriched way of life for more people, that, by necessity, is going to be people who don't agree with us, who don't look at the world the way we look at it, who are not in our group. We can't look for I want the world to be good, but not for these people.
It's like what we saw symbolically in the election: we only want the votes of “these people” not to count. It's easy for us to agree with that when it’s on “our side.” [When it’s others,] we see how absurd that is, but there's a lot on our side that is absurd.
GT: So, my final question has to do with the relation between jazz and democracy. I first began understanding that through 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 the relationship between people and ideas. I'm wondering: how did their work add to your understanding of the relationship between democracy and jazz?
Wynton’s often surprising answer, and the free-wheeling conversation that followed, will be featured in Part Two. AND: we have a big announcement that will accompany the interview. Wait until you hear . . .