Wynton Marsalis: The Music of America
Last night, at the Ridgefield Playhouse in Connecticut, I had the pleasure of witnessing a concert by the Wynton Marsalis Septet. Varieties of blues compositions at varying tempos and moods filled the hall with the sound of tragic optimism so essential to American character and to confronting a global meta-crisis. They also played two tunes from his recent recording, The Democracy! Suite. I was particularly pleased to see three young players—Sean Mason on piano, Chris Lewis on alto sax and flute, and Abdias Armenteros on tenor and soprano saxophones and clarinet— playing with poise, deep thought, and impassioned grace. In other words, those young cats played their asses off.
As we’ve written in years past on our blog, Wynton is an interdependent leader. He leans on the talents and skills of the musicians in his groups as they lean on his example, virtuosity, and good humor. But the true depth and range of Wynton’s actual achievements over the course of a 40+ year career isn’t given the recognition it deserves in a flash in the pan pop(corn) culture. That’s why I’m happy to share my liner notes, published in 2012, to his Sony Masterworks anthology, The Music of America: Wynton Marsalis.
With Maestro Marsalis, after the gig
The recording features curated selections from his compositional oeuvre, “performed by a diverse group of musicians including the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra, the Orion String Quartet, musicians from the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, and members of Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra in various configurations.”
Sony Masterworks Liner Notes by Greg Thomas
Yes and Love. These two words summon the affirmation and arc of intention, and the meaning and values at the core of Wynton Marsalis’s oeuvre, a small sample of which is contained on this two-disc set. When you listen, other words will bubble to the surface, other metaphors and images will arise. Nouns like “America”—rural to city, farming to high-tech, white and black and the spectrum of colors of the spiral rainbow—will be evoked. Marsalis’s music also registers an emotional spectrum, from the sensual slow drags to the in-the-pocket mid-tempos to the high-velocity-jet swing. You’ll also find down-home timbres, horns with bite and sass, plus strings that sing and sting with a fiddler’s edge.
The music in this collection covers only a thirteen-year period in a career that spans three decades, yet the scope and range of aesthetic content encompasses the sweep of a century of jazz tradition and modern innovation. Several cuts on the first disc—“Express Crossing (Astride Iron Horses),” “Station Call” and “The Caboose”—explore the dead metaphor of Pullman porter and Amtrak trains, even harkening back to the Underground Railroad, yet reinvigorate the metaphor in light of high-speed rails. These compositions are the best train onomatopoeia since Ellington’s many classics capturing the iron horse in sound.
“D in the Key of F” captures the Yes and Love of romance and intimacy between couples, alto and tenor sax alternating conversational choruses, ending in an embrace of harmony. Another number, “Jump,” swings with the verve of the best of the big bands of yesteryear. Marsalis’s trumpet mentor, Harry “Sweets” Edison, rises to the occasion, showing the young men how it’s done. Edison was a member of the Count Basie Orchestra that came swingin’ out of Kansas City in the 1930s.
“Fiddler’s March,” a response to Stravinsky’s A Soldier’s Tale, is exemplary of the way Marsalis incorporates classical composers into his aesthetic statements and counter-statements. “Hellbound Highball” demonstrates this engagement with European tradition more explicitly in string quartet format. “Go, Possum, Go” recalls the days of Davy Crockett, in an American slave fiddling context, through violin master Mark O’Connor, who, like Marsalis, reflects Anglo- and Afro-American traditions in his music.
The penultimate song on the first disc appropriates the march beat so fundamental to jazz and Western music. The last composition captures the spiritual optimism, the Yes and Love, of “I Am.” Both are from Marsalis’s 2002 engagement with a jazz quartet, a vocal choir and the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra, All Rise.
The second disc opens with the ultra-modern “The Majesty of the Blues,” followed by “The Dance,” an invitation to waltz along in triple meter, to modulate and break, and to flow in ensemble groove. But the reverie is interrupted by the tragic awareness of man’s inhumanity to humankind, by the lurching of slave ships on the rocky Atlantic. From Blood on the Fields (Marsalis’s epic piece, recorded by the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, which garnered a Pulitzer Prize in Music in 1997), we see through hearing the tale of a man and woman captivated with each other as captives. “Move Over,” said the woman, yet really desiring for him to “come close to me, touch me” because although they were enslaved externally, she tried to teach him how to live in spite of a bad situation.
This American tragedy, this tale of irony—freedom’s grounding in unfreedom—and the romance and adventure of life still amounts to a Yes, an affirmation of life. But to affirm life we also say “No” to “Soul for Sale”—an allusion to Cole Porter’s “Love for Sale,” with likewise jaunty music contrasted by the harsh reality of the lyrics. We affirm life anyway by signifyin’ and scattin’, by declaring “We gonna swing anyway!” Even with tears, Yes. With the blues, Yes. With tenacity, discipline, integrity, and with what Marsalis calls soul: “to give without want.” Yes. And to Love, to give without seeking in return. Yes.
Do you yet wonder how and why Yes, and when and where Love? The fourth cut, where the heroic soloist is supported by the ensemble bosom of the democratic process, shows a way, as “Double Rondo on the River (Pedro’s Getaway)” swings the forward motion and drive of jazz. This is the feeling of players and listeners immersed in a purification ritual, the spirit of regeneration in the midst of tragedy. To complete the cycle of life, you also need romance, the sweet embrace of life captured in the tenderness of “Spring Yaoundé,” whereby a ritual of fertility conceives springtime. That’s the Saturday Night Function.
On Sunday morning, from the solemnity of the “Altar Call” to the jubilation of the “Holy Ghost,” you’re in an Afro-American church service where you give glory to God in the Highest by shouting a joyful noise unto the Lord. You done worked hard all week, had a good time Friday and Saturday nights, so now’s the time to rejuvenate through joy, to show gratitude for the blessing of life, of breath, of the senses, of time and space. Time to show appreciation for feeling in form, for the memory in sound that is music and all of God’s gifts. Yes, Love.
Whereas a mournful “The Death of Jazz” taps into the very earliest of jazz traditions, the funeral and the parade, we ride the rollicking second line in the Crescent City with the final cut, “Oh, But on the Third Day.” Guitarist and banjo player Danny Barker, who performed with, among others, Louis Armstrong, Sidney Bechet and Cab Calloway, shines here. Marsalis played in Barker’s Fairview Baptist Church Brass Band when he was eight years old.
Wynton Marsalis’s achievement as a composer for small and large groups has not been given due consideration by so-called serious music critics. Similar to Duke Ellington, whose prolific production make assessing his body of work a daunting task, Marsalis has written so much music encompassing such a panorama of styles, genres, grooves and feeling-tones that even a Ph.D in musicology is no guarantee of proper critical judgment. In 1999 alone, he came out with an average of one full recording per month. Who—in these days of pop flash and flesh, celebrity worship and corporate greed —does that? Who has the depth to plumb the entire American jazz tradition as if it’s all good and new, and then connect it with music from Africa, Spain, France as well as the spicy flavors of the Mediterranean? Who is searching for the ineffable qualities of spiritual transcendence in the artistic objectives of jazz? Wynton Marsalis is foremost among them.
Perhaps his early celebrity, as a superb classical instrumentalist who also played precise jazz, overshadowed his compositional achievement. Benny Golson, one of the greatest jazz musicians and composers, puts this in perspective: “Wynton is fantastic. As a trumpet player, this guy did his homework. He used to play the classical literature, the Haydn Trumpet Concerto and what not. But when he started to write, everyone was so overwhelmed by the playing that they weren’t aware of his writing. This guy has written symphonies, he won the Pulitzer Prize. He’s been going forward ever since.”
We invite you to go forward also, with one foot in the past and the other pointing to the future, to bask in the music of Wynton Marsalis, so that you too will say: Yes, Love.