Marsalis, Wynton

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WYNTON MARSALIS

Born: Kenner, Louisiana, 18 October 1961

Genre: Jazz

Best-selling album since 1990: Marsalis Plays Monk: Standard Time Vol. 4 (1999)

Wynton Marsalis has been one of the world's most prominent practitioners and champions of jazz since becoming the first person to win Grammys in both jazz and classical categories with Columbia Records in 1983, and repeating the feat in 1984. Well dressed, articulate, puckish, ambitious, and hard-working, he is a virtuosic trumpeter, an accomplished composer, a persuasive classicist, a savvy media star, a hands-on band-leader, and co-founder/artistic director of Jazz at Lincoln Center, which became a full-fledged constituent of America's largest cultural performance institution in 1995. Marsalis personally conducts the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra annually through two full seasons and international tours while participating in a host of auxiliary events. From 1988 through 1994, he maintained a separate sextet, which has continued to perform since then, although less frequently and with changes in personnel. By 2003 Marsalis was averaging 120 performances a year. His discography since 1990 has encompassed the Pulitzer Prize–winning oratorio Blood on the Fields (1997); Live at the Village Vanguard (1999), a boxed set of seven nights with his band in a jazz club; and In Gabriel's Garden (1996), recordings of Baroque concertos by Bach and Purcell.

Marsalis has won nine Grammys, as well as the Grand Prix du Disque of France, the Edison Award of the Netherlands, and honorary membership in England's Royal Academy of Music. He was among America's "25 most influential people" in 1996, according to Time magazine. He was designated a "Messenger of Peace" by the United Nations (2001) and received a U.S. Congressional "Horizon Award" in 2002.

Wynton Marsalis is the son of the New Orleans jazz pianist and educator Ellis Marsalis, the younger brother of saxophonist Branford, and the older sibling of trombonist Delfeayo and drummer Jason. Wynton started on his career course in childhood, studied trumpet formally from age twelve, and spent time with Danny Barker, a banjo player and guitarist for Jelly Roll Morton. In high school Marsalis played with marching bands, jazz bands, funk bands, and, at the age of fourteen, performed Haydn's Trumpet Concerto with the New Orleans Philharmonic Orchestra. His mature music encompasses all these strains, intricately woven into highly self-referential narratives on jazz and the African-American cultural experience.

Marsalis entered the Juilliard School in New York City in 1979, and, with his brother Branford, a Berklee College of Music student, burst on the jazz scene that same year as a member of Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers. His debut recording, Wynton Marsalis (1982), cast him leading former Miles Davis band members Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter, and Tony Williams. Marsalis also encouraged "young lions": musicians born since 1960, well-versed in classic jazz (especially the bebop of the 1950s and 1960s), with virtuosic skills. Among Marsalis's protégés are drummer Jeff Watts; pianists Kenny Kirkland, Marcus Roberts, and Eric Reed; bassist Christian McBride; and trumpeters Roy Hargrove and Nicholas Payton.

Jazz, to Marsalis, is essentially an African-American-born form of expression, and an agent of progressive meritocracy bearing lessons for the authentic individual and the world. Its heroic lineage began with Louis Armstrong, another New Orleans–born trumpet player, and extends as far as Blakey and vocalist Betty Carter. In 2002 Jazz at Lincoln Center began to feature music from outside the United States, principally Cuba, Spain, and Brazil. Marsalis embraces the mid-1960s music of John Coltrane, such as A Love Supreme (1964), but not free jazz, electrically processed instruments, and rock-pop-hip-hop fusions.

Marsalis has promulgated his viewpoint as artistic director, fundraiser, lecturer and curator of Jazz at Lincoln Center; as consultant and interviewee throughout Ken Burns's Jazz, a ten-part, nineteen-hour video documentary that debuted on PBS in 2001; on the VHS/DVD release of his PBS series Marsalis on Music (1995); and in his twenty-six-part National Public Radio series "Making the Music," a 1996 Peabody Award winner. He tirelessly promotes jazz as a serious, important, relevant, and functional (if not commercially robust) concert music.

Stylistically, Marsalis moved through an early phase of Miles Davis emulation to develop a refined personal vocabulary based on faultless articulation and thoroughly considered ideas. Since the 1990s, he has pursued his esthetic by recording a repertoire of deceased jazz giants in addition to his own works; these recordings range from multi-episode "little big band" charts to completely notated, neoromantic and postmodern collages, as heard on his millennium composition All Rise (2002), recorded with Esa-Pekka Salonen conducting the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra.

Spot Light: Marsalis Wins Pulitzer for Blood on the Field

In 1997 Wynton Marsalis became the first jazz-identified musician to receive the most celebrated musical award presented in the United States—the Pulitzer Prize for Music Composition—for his libretto and score for Blood on the Field (1997). The oratorio encompasses numerous serious and dramatic subjects relevant in both political and personal spheres, including the pressures on Africans in America seeking freedom from slavery (and by implication, the ongoing effects of slavery on African-American culture), the inevitablility of male-female power struggles, and the impact of tricksters' provocations, all evoked in a kaleidoscope of musical idioms in twenty episodes stretching over three hours. Miles Griffith and Cassandra Wilson sing the parts of the lovers, and Jon Hendricks is Juba, a wise fool. All three vocalists have husky voices, and their parts are pitched in low vocal registers. Marsalis's score is rigorously composed. Though structured as a conventional song cycle, his orchestration seems based on the music of Duke Ellington, employing trumpet, trombone, and saxophone sections in melodic counterpoint and as a backdrop for the vocals, as classical composers use strings, brass, and woodwinds. Propulsion is generated by a jazz rhythm section—notably, trap drum kit struck at a steady but usually restrained swing. Soloists break out of the sections in brief bursts, to echo or comment on the singers' lines; the bandmembers also recite non-melodic passages of the libretto in unison, as a chorus. There are many virtuosic demands placed on individual instrumentalists as well as the entire Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra; Marsalis's trumpet is evident throughout, almost as a character in itself. Certain episodes are programmatic, depicting the chaotic emotions at a slave marketplace, or the high-stepping of a New Orleans parade, while some songs—"You Don't Hear No Drums," "God Don't Like Ugly," "Look and See"—could stand alone. But Marsalis's work is so designed for the specific forces at his command that most other ensembles are likely to be intimidated from attempting to stage it.

Marsalis is the first (and only) jazz artist to win the Pulitzer Prize for music composition (in 1997, for his oratorio Blood on the Fields ). He has also composed for string quartet, chamber orchestra, modern dance, and ballet. Marsalis's disciplined showmanship, in conjunction with the talents of collaborative administrators, transformed Jazz at Lincoln Center from a summer concert program into a full-fledged constituent of the Lincoln Center empire, equal to its two opera companies, the New York City Ballet, the Juilliard School, the film program, and the theater company. Jazz at Lincoln Center's diverse activities under Marsalis's guidance include an annual, nationwide high school big-band competition in which contestants compete by playing Duke Ellington scores. In 2001 ground was broken for what Marsalis calls "the house that swing built," the first multiuse building designed specifically for jazz use at the world headquarters of AOL/Time-Warner in New York City.

Marsalis has authored three books and a jazz curriculum, undertaken musical diplomatic missions (leading the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra to China), and recorded more than forty albums in twenty years. Neither critical acclaim nor the confidence of his corporate sponsors has insured him satisfying record sales or a general audience fervent and eager for his personal productions. In 2002 Marsalis and Columbia Records let contract renewal negotiations lapse, despite the release of the prestigious project All Rise (2001).

Marsalis is featured on the Marsalis Family (2003) album with his father and brothers, a production of Branford's Marsalis Music label. In mature mid-career, Wynton Marsalis carries a unique portfolio of achievements, plus increasing responsibilities and possibilities, expectations and challenges.

SELECTIVE DISCOGRAPHY:

Think of One (Columbia, 1983); Hot House Flowers (Columbia, 1984); Tune in Tomorrow: The Original Soundtrack (Columbia, 1990); Standard Time, Vol. 3: The Resolution of Romance (Columbia, 1990); Uptown Ruler: Soul Gestures in Southern Blue, Vol. 2 (Columbia, 1991); Blue Interlude (Columbia, 1992); Citi Movement (Columbia, 1993); In This House, on This Morning (Columbia, 1994); Joe Cool's Blues (Columbia, 1995); In Gabriel's Garden (Sony Classical, 1996); Blood on The Fields (Columbia, 1997); Marsalis Plays Monk: Standard Time Vol. 4 (Columbia/Sony Classical, 1999); At the Octoroon Balls/A Fiddler's Tale Suite (Columbia/Sony Classical, 1999); Big Train (Columbia/Sony Classical, 1999); Mr. Jelly Lord: Standard Time Vol. 6 (Columbia/Sony Classical, 1999); The Marciac Suite (Columbia/Sony Classical, 1999); Live at the Village Vanguard (Columbia, 1999); All Rise (Sony Classical, 2001); Trumpet Concertos (Sony Classical, 2002); The Marsalis Family (Marsalis Music, 2003). With Art Blakey: Wynton (Who's Who in Jazz, 1988).

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

W. Marsalis, Sweet Swing Blues on the Road (New York, 1994); W. Marsalis, Marsalis on Music (New York, 1995); L. Gourse, Skain's Domain: A Biography (New York, 2000); W. Marsalis, Jazz in the Bittersweet Blues of Life (New York, 2001); W. Marsalis, Jazz at Lincoln Center: Jazz for Young People Curriculum (New York, 2002).