Wynton Marsalis Tuesday May 29, 2007
Wynton Marsalis is for some people a controversial jazz figure. I don’t know enough either about the music or the man to make conclusive remarks wholly agreeing with him or condemning him, but I can make some pertinent observations and say a little of what I think.
A more knowledgeable person than I, a guitarist and PhD jazz researcher, once said to me “he’s trying to make jazz an American classical music”. I’ve since discovered some of what this means, within two books someone’s just given me: Marsalis On Music (1995) and Sweet Swing Blues On The Road (1994), both published by Norton. The former is aimed at children, although for the non-musically educated like me it’s quite useful: I don’t, or didn’t know the meaning of terms like bar, accent, and syncopation. I sometimes have an intuition of what musical terms mean but only as a vague notion lacking the possibility of any useful application. Therefore, for me a book like this serves some purpose. However, and this is where it gets both interesting and problematic, it’s not exclusively about jazz. There’s an accompanying CD with about 50 musical clips, the majority from the classical genre. These illustrate ideas and topics like rhythm and percussion, sometimes but not always juxtaposing the jazz version with the classical.
Firstly, this is a refreshing and educated way of reconfiguring jazz as a musical contribution that should be central to musical culture, certainly in the US where it was born and developed. But secondly, there’s a danger that in so doing, the music loses some of the spirit that fired its original creation. It’s always been problematic, it seems to me: firstly when it concerned black folk, then when anyone/else tried to make a living from it, and now when we live in a time when popular culture has never sunk so low and jazz, like any considered cultural activity, competes with wall-to-wall vacuity like a diet of reconstituted-potato chips that people don’t want to change. On the one hand, Marsalis has had a very successful career which arguably supports both a music and a community of people with an oppressed past. On the other hand, jazz needs some fire or it just gets vapid. In some ways what he’s done is noble, dignifying jazz and giving it a mainstream status; in another way can jazz be mainstream, when arguably it’s always had a nebulous but vital spirit of creativity that genuflects neither to musical form nor social establishment. Some-time jazz critic Theodor Adorno was probably right: the improvisation aesthetic of jazz is at least to some extent mythological, a marketing mythos designed to seduce and sell. Marsalis goes along with this, saying the great jazz from the past is definable just like Mozart or Haydn – the latter especially interesting, in his case, because Haydn produced definitive trumpet work which is what Marsalis plays. But does something get lost, within this Marsalis ethos?
The other book, published a year before, is a more notable contribution to jazz because it’s firmly located within it, instead of being like a school curriculum manual on music. The photography is accomplished, courtesy of someone called Frank Stewart, and the narrative concerns the working musical, social, travelling life of being a jazz musician – albeit, that even in 1994 Marsalis was doing more than just that by giving workshops, talks and classes. As far as I can tell from this, I like the guy and I like what he does. He talks in a balanced renaissance-man way covering topics like sex, love, community, suffering, and simple sensual pleasures that make up the tapestry of life, of which jazz is a part:
The warmth of a beautiful sound massages your soul. Like when you’ve been inside all day: in the late afternoon you go outside and the sun hits your face, but in that instant it becomes a caress. Intense, but not too hot or too bright, it warms your whole body up just right (15).
Elsewhere, quoted in Jazz (Ward Burns 2001) Marsalis says these memorably beautiful words:
Most of the things you are surrounded with you don’t need. But when you have those things around you, it makes you feel good about living in the world. And it gives you something to look forward to, and it also gives you a way to connect with everything that has happened on earth. It’s like real poor people in the country, on a Sunday, would get dressed up and they wouldn’t have any money but just that little hat with the flower on it…just a little something to make you special and make you sweet. That’s jazz music (121).
He says, effectively, that jazz is a good story full of colour, interest and feeling and he’s probably right, at least partially. In other respects though, I think it’s both legitimate and more refined to appreciate Mozart not as a contracted court composer in particular social relations, but simply to enjoy his artistry. The same point applies to jazz: I find it tiresome, even a little depressing, when it gets tied down to a particular history where grievance is the main note. It was a long time ago and if you focus there it gets maintained, like irritating a wound. Marsalis doesn’t do this, but he does walk a narrow edge above it, although he does that walk with an admirably balanced humanity, even humour, as when he gets questioned by some fans:
What do you think about rap music?
Rappers have interesting haircuts
But they’re talking about what’s happening today
Yeah, like what?
Racism and stuff
What solutions do they give you for that?
That it’s wrong
That’s a solution?
What solution does jazz give?
First, it teaches you to think across a longer than twenty-five second form. Second, it teaches you how to communicate with others. Third, it makes you develop your personality through practice and contemplation. Fourth, it puts you into contact with some of the greatest musical minds of the twentieth century. Fifth, your ears don’t ring after a gig. Sixth, you don’t have to keep reaching for your pipe in public
What does that have to do with life in the city?
Where are you from?
The street
You mean you live on the street?
No, but I know what’s happening in the street
If you know that, you know it’s something to avoid
Man, you ain’t hip
Hip to what? That corny slang, all that cussin’, posturing, and whining, calling girls bitches, that monotonous beat, antisocial behaviour, and a philosophy that doesn’t include anyone who doesn’t think and act like you?
Rappers are communicating with the people
Son, communication is an activity. That they are communicating is not the issue. The question is, what are they communicating? (136)
Indeed.
I can see why Marsalis has had a successful career in America because talking like that is a healing social project based on inclusive communication rather than social divisions, as a necessary factor of positive change. In that respect, locating jazz as part of mainstream culture is an admirable thing, so long as the music loses nothing in the process. The first is clear, although the second isn’t. He’s recently spoken out against c/rap music, and I completely agree with him
But check out the animosity his remarks generate