Marsalis, Wynton

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Wynton Marsalis

Trumpet player

For the Record…

Classically Trained Jazz Musician

Technique Drew Criticism

Jazz a Metaphor for Democracy

Lauded by Critics

A “Shepherd” of the Music

Selected discography

Sources

Wynton Marsalis is “potentially the greatest trumpet player of all time,” proclaimed Maurice Andre, the famed classical trumpet virtuoso. Given Marsalis’s technical prowess—“from astonishing scales to clean, quick-tongued repeated notes to gossamer phrasing to impeccable arpeggios,” as Leslie Rubenstein described in Stagebill— it is understandable why he has received such an accolade and why he is often hailed as the savior of modern jazz. But there are disbelievers, critics who consider him too conservative, technical, studied, elite. Marsalis’s detractors think he lives up to the Rolling Stone title “the hottest lips in America” even when he is not blowing his horn. Passionate—some would say obstinate—about his desire to return jazz to its purest form, Marsalis is not afraid to preach his beliefs over the heads of legends. They are not amused. Rolling Stone’s Steve Bloom quoted the late Miles Davis: “Sometimes people speak as though someone asked them a question. Well, nobody asked him a question.” But Marsalis is purposeful, undaunted. He told Bloom: “I love the music, above everything else. That’s all I answer to.”

For the Record…

Born October 18, 1961, in New Orleans, LA; son of Ellis (pianist and professor of music) and Dolores (former jazz singer and substitute teacher) Marsalis. Education: Courses in theory and harmony at the New Orleans Center for the Creative Arts, 1976; Berkshire Music Center, Tanglewood, MA, Summer 1979; Juilliard School of Music, 1979-81.

Jazz and classical trumpet player. Trumpet soloist with the New Orleans Philharmonic Orchestra, 1975; played with the Brooklyn Philharmonic, 1979-80; played with Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers, 1980-81; toured with Herbie Hancock’s V.S.O.P. Quartet, 1981; formed own group, 1981—; artistic director for the annual Classical Jazz Festival at Lincoln Center, 1987—; has performed and recorded with various orchestras.

Awards: Grammy Awards for best solo jazz instrumental, 1983, for Think of One, 1984, for Hot House Flowers, and 1985, for Black Codes; for best solo classical performance with orchestra, 1983, for Trumpet Concertos, and 1984, for Baroque Trumpet Music; for best jazz instrumental performance with a group, 1985, for Black Codes, 1986, for J Mood, and 1987, for Marsalis Standard Time, Vol. 1.

Addresses: Home —New York City. Office —c/o Agency for the Performing Arts, 9000 Sunset Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90069. Record company— CBS Records, Inc., 51 West 52nd Street, New York, NY 10019.

Marsalis’s impeccable background is well documented: Born in the jazz cradle of New Orleans, he received his first trumpet at age six from the great Dixieland trumpeter AI Hirt, in whose band Marsalis’s father, Ellis, was the pianist. He did not begin playing in earnest, however, until he was twelve, when he heard a recording of jazz trumpeter Clifford Brown. Marsalis then began studies with John Longo, who exposed the young student to the classical repertoire of the instrument. At fourteen he was a featured soloist with the New Orleans Philharmonic Orchestra. At seventeen he was invited to a summer session at the famed Berkshire Music Center at Tanglewood, Massachusetts, which waived its normal eighteen-year-old age requirement. After graduation from high school (3.98 grade point average, National Merit Scholarship finalist), Marsalis accepted a scholarship to the elite Juilliard School of Music in New York City. In addition to full-time studies there, he played with various orchestras, including the Brooklyn Philharmonic. In 1980, during his summer vacation, Marsalis began touring with Art Blakey, the famous jazz drummer. After his second year at Juilliard he walked away to tour with jazz pianist Herbie Hancock’s V.S.O.P. quartet. That same year Marsalis received a recording contract from Columbia Records to record both jazz and classical music, and subsequently formed his own jazz group. He was twenty years old.

Classically Trained Jazz Musician

From this prodigious beginning Marsalis has evolved into a musician who easily traverses the space between a blues lament and a baroque exaltation, between a small, smoky New York jazz club and Washington’s prestigious Lincoln Center. His movements between the two styles, however, are not with equal steps. He is classically trained, but considers himself foremost a jazz musician. Jane O’Hara pointed out in Maclean’s that “Marsalis’s classical training may have offered a temporary refuge from the black ghetto, but there is no question about the prodigal son’s real musical home: ‘I have studied Bartok and Stravinsky and I love them,… but jazz is in the present tense.’” Marsalis further defined this idea to Howard Mandel of Down Beat: “Jazz is the most precise art form of this century [because of] the time…. What the musicians have figured out is how to conceive, construct, refine, and deliver ideas as they come up, and present them in a logical fashion. What you’re doing is creating, editing, and all this as the music is going on. This is the first time this has ever happened in western art. Painting is painte d. Symphonies are writ ten. Beethoven improvised, but by himself, over a score. When five men get together to make up something, it’s a big difference.” Early in his career, Marsalis said this to People’s Barbara Rowes: “Beethoven did things with rhythms that are really hip, but there’s no way that can be compared with modern jazz.” Five years later, in his discussion with Rubenstein, Marsalis offered a more comprehensive understanding of the relationship between classical and jazz: “What the two styles do share… is a spirituality, and the ability to elevate the audience. That’s what music is, elevation and improvement. Just as Beethoven improved folk melodies, Charlie Parker improved ‘ill Remember April.’”

Technique Drew Criticism

Such views and outspokenness have helped Marsalis delineate his raison d’etre, but they have also drawn the sharp pens of critics. Marsalis has always maintained that it is easier for a young musician to master classical music than jazz. Critics of his early jazz work agreed. In the New Yorker, Whitney Balliett remarked, “Technique, rather than melodic logic, still governs his improvising, and the emotional content of his playing remains skittish.” Down Beat, quoted by Bloom, opined, “[Marsalis] seems to be detached from his prodigious maturity by not having experienced abandon…. Musicians, like artists, must live if they are going to make significant contributions.”

Since these quotes Marsalis has “lived,” and as Thomas Sancton noted in Time, even Marsalis “admits that the shoot-from-the-lip style of his early years went too far at times: ‘I was like 19 or something, man—you know, wild. I didn’t care.’” He has since become, Sancton deemed, “a less strident and more articulate advocate for the cause. Says pianist and composer Billy Taylor: ‘Wynton is the most important young spokesman for the music today. His opinions are well founded. Some people earlier took umbrage at what he said, but the important thing is that he could back it up with his horn.’”

Jazz a Metaphor for Democracy

Marsalis’s passionate advocacy for the proper understanding of and respect for jazz since his early years rests on the belief, as Sancton emphasized, that “jazz is not just another style of popular music but a major American cultural achievement and a heritage that must not be lost.” In the same article, Marsalis asserted that jazz is such a part of our heritage it is a metaphor for democracy: “It shows you how the individual can negotiate the greatest amount of personal freedom and put it humbly at the service of a group conception.”

Fortified by such a philosophical and spiritual belief, Marsalis strives to educate the next generation of possible jazz players on the contributions of past generations of jazz masters. Cognizant of his own lack of jazz education in his early years—critic Stanley Crouch, quoted by Sancton, explained that the young Marsalis “didn’t know anything about Ornette Coleman, Duke Ellington, or Thelonius Monk. His dad had tried to make him listen to Louis Armstrong, but he had this naive idea that Louis was an Uncle Tom”—Marsalis now visits schools when touring to inform and perhaps reform the musical and cultural attitudes of aspiring musicians. In 1987, he helped launch a three-year jazz education program in the Chicago school system. But his commitment isn’t fulfilled by singular visits to schools. Sancton noted that Marsalis “stays in touch with many of the students he meets, offering them pointers over the phone, inviting them to sit in on his gigs and sometimes even giving them instruments.”

Lauded by Critics

From this devotion to the cause have come recordings that show an increase in depth and maturity. Although, as mentioned, Marsalis’s early work was faulted by critics for lacking emotion, later recordings were lauded (Marsalis has since won eight Grammy Awards and is the only person in history to have won back-to-back classical and jazz Grammys in two consecutive years). Fred Bouchard in Down Beat said 1986’s J Mood offered “an intimate revelling in sensuous sounds, the sense of quirky unpredictability in the original melodies and the solo lines (no cliches here), an unexpected quietude and austerity on many tracks.” A Rolling Stone reviewer felt Marsalis Standard Time, Vol. 1 “tugging at the beat with willful elasticity and venturing out with confident improvisations heightened by the clarity of his technique.” And Michael Azerrad, writing for Rolling Stone, found Majesty of the Blues to be “an artistic quantum leap forward.” If “whorehouses still played jazz in the front room,” he wrote, “this is what it would sound like.”

The technical virtuosity evident on these recordings is brought to the fore on Marsalis’s classical ventures. Balliett labeled the Haydn/Hummel/Mozart Concertos “a beautiful record, full of the silver and bells and sunlight of perfectly played brass,” while Bouchard noted that Marsalis “has a natural flair for the witty exuberance, jazzy metrics, and peripatetic lines” of the concertos on the Jolivet/Tomasi recording.

A “Shepherd” of the Music

The recordings, the educational programs, the concerts, and the interviews have all shown parts of the intellectual and artistic Wynton Marsalis. From these sources critics have gleaned their definitions. On Marsalis’s uniqueness, James Haskins noted in his book Black Music in America: A History Through Its People that “because of his versatility, Wynton Marsalis brought a highly technical sense to his jazz playing and a vividness and immediacy to his classical playing that no one else had ever been able to do.” But Sancton observed that Marsalis’s effect seems to extend beyond any individual ability or achievement: “It is the fact that, largely under his influence, a jazz renaissance is flowering on what was once barren soil.” Perhaps, however, the simplest understanding of Marsalis’s effect, his message, and his ability belongs to a member of his group, saxophonist Wes Anderson. Sancton quoted him: “Wynton is someone who can guide us. He’s one of the shepherds of this music.”