The History of Jazz (79 page)

The trumpeter’s next two recordings,
Marsalis Standard Time, Vol. 1
and
Live at Blues Alley
, delivered on the promises of these previous projects and remain the most impressive examples of modernist combo playing in Marsalis’s oeuvre. After them, Marsalis overtly renounced this approach in favor of a traditionalist ethos. In contrast, these two midcareer projects betray little of the hyperconscious historicism that would become the dominant theme of the trumpeter’s later work, but are vibrant, forward-looking works. On the first,
Marsalis Standard Time
, the band is at its finest pitch, incorporating the experimental metrics of
J Mood
into the heady motion of jam-session jousting: on “A Foggy Day” Marsalis superimposes 6/8, 12/8, 5/4, and other meters onto the song’s basic foundation; during part of “Autumn Leaves” the band changes meter every bar; “Caravan” is masterfully reworked, once again with virtuosic cross-rhythms. Much credit was due to Marsalis’s rhythm section for this tour de force. Pianist Marcus Roberts stood out as an advanced structural thinker in the mold of Monk, Tristano, and Hancock and clearly delighted in pushing and prodding Marsalis, who in turn showed how far his phrasing had grown since his first recordings. Jeff “Tain” Watts and Robert Hurst, on drums and bass respectively, also proved to be facile at these games in running time, but equally skilled in maintaining the drive and swing of the music.
Live at Blues Alley
moved in this same direction, but with even greater intensity. This recording features the most aggressive solos of the trumpeter’s career. The rhythm section plays at fever pitch for long stretches. The music moves confidently from modal to chordal structures and into different conceptions of time, but with a fiery, unrelenting undercurrent. On the whole, these two releases represent Marsalis’s most successful and fully realized attempt to expand the vocabulary of combo playing set out in the Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, and Ornette Coleman recordings from the 1960s.

Yet at the peak of this forward-looking period, Marsalis was increasingly sounding a cautionary note. “I knew that when I did that album at Blues Alley that I wasn’t going to make another record in that type of style—all those really complex rhythms, playing fast, wild,” he explained. “Now I’m trying to really put together an approach through which I can create a more accurate tonal picture of my experiences, of the world I come out of, of the things in my life that have the deepest meaning to me.”
¹
For Marsalis, this “world I come out of” meant the sounds of his native New Orleans and the traditional African American roots of jazz. In retrospect, we can see that the resulting album,
The Majesty of the Blues
, initiated a new period in Marsalis’s career. In some respects, the new style marked an extension of earlier concerns—one notes the shifting meters of the deceptively simple-sounding “Hickory Dickory Dock”— but in other ways, Marsalis was moving dramatically away from his previous practices. The trumpeter who, as a teenager, had amazed audiences with his pure, clean tone was now exploring the “dirtier” approach favored by prebop jazz musicians, increasingly distorting his sound with a mute. Instead of living up to his early reputation as the “next Clifford Brown” or his midcareer tag as the bandleader who would build on Miles’s work from the 1960s, Marsalis now seemed intent on reviving the aesthetic of King Oliver and Bubber Miley. At the same time, Marsalis’s melody lines were becoming more compact; as he would later describe it, he was focusing on “clarion” phrases rather than imitating saxophone lines. The ensemble textures were more open and uncluttered.

On the title track of
The Majesty of the Blues
Marsalis adopted a spacious 6/4 meter that gave the underlying blues progression an ambling, unhurried feeling. In place of the restless probing of
Live at Blues Alley
, a more restrained and controlled approach comes to the fore. In the age-old struggle between form and content, Wynton seemingly changed camps overnight, setting himself up now as an architect of sounds rather than the churning, burning soloist heading off into the great unknown. Above all, Marsalis was consciously trying to reconnect with the premodern jazz tradition of his hometown. For some of the music, Marsalis relied on seasoned jazz players flown in from New Orleans, including eighty-year-old Danny Barker. The same return to the roots was evident on Marsalis’s
Resolution of Romance,
a follow-up recording of standards, in which the seething polyrhythmic piano of Marcus Roberts was replaced by the more traditional approach of the trumpeter’s father, Ellis Marsalis.

The blues was now emerging as a focal concern for Marsalis. One suspects that the influence of critic and mentor Stanley Crouch, who was increasingly playing Boswell to Marsalis’s Johnson, was decisive in this regard, as was the aesthetic vision outlined by Albert Murray in his book
Stomping the Blues
. Crouch praised the latter, in his liner notes for
The Majesty of the Blues
, as a work “all musicians of my generation should read.” Clearly Marsalis had taken to heart Murray’s celebration of the blues tonality as the essence of African American music. Blues progressions had played a very modest role in Marsalis’s early works, but now his music was permeated with I, IV, and V chords and bent notes, amply demonstrated on the three volumes of
Soul Gestures in Southern Blues
and the later
Blue Interlude
release. Only a few years earlier, Murray’s vision of jazz had seemed an exercise in nostalgia, out of touch with the currents of fusion, free, and European classical strains in the jazz world. But now the most famous young jazz musician of the day was championing the same cause. In the hands of Wynton Marsalis, jazz was coming full circle in a return to the roots that, in its own way, proved as shocking and unexpected as the earlier controversial career shifts of Miles, Coltrane, and the various jazz progressives of the 1960s.

This turnaround was bound to puzzle those who had looked for Marsalis to extend the “advances” of earlier leading jazz figures. Marsalis’s new rhythm section was clearly more reverential than his early accompanists, rarely pushing the trumpeter the way Marcus Roberts, Jeff “Tain” Watts, or Kenny Kirkland had in previous bands. Criticism was further spurred by Marsalis’s outspoken attitudes. In interviews, the trumpeter had always been uncommonly blunt, not hesitating to ridicule other musicians, even some of the most famous, taking a polemical spin to questions, and frequently showing that he did not need to have a trumpet in hand to blow his own horn. “When I first came to New York in 1979 … the established cats who should have been setting an example were bullshittin’, wearing dresses and trying to act like rock stars,” he had once confided to jazz writer Francis Davis. “So when people heard me, they knew it was time to start takin’ care of business again.” Marsalis was especially critical of Miles Davis, telling one interviewer that “Bird would roll over in his grave if he knew what was going on.”
²
Some time later, when Marsalis tried to sit in with Davis’s group at a jazz festival, Miles stopped the band cold in mid-tune and refused to continue until Wynton had left the stage.

Marsalis’s music in the 1990s increasingly highlighted his role as composer and section player in settings that often downplayed his skills as a soloist. His band was expanded to a septet, and this spurred an even more pronounced departure from the aggressive and uninhibited attitudes of his earlier quartet and quintet efforts. During the course of
In This House, on This Morning
, which was given its premiere in May 1992 at Avery Fisher Hall in Lincoln Center, a beachcomber’s assortment of musical styles is paraded onstage by the seven instrumentalists, who are joined by vocalist Marion Williams: the gospel sounds of the sanctified church; the twelve-bar blues; boisterous New Orleans counterpoint; waltz time and two-beat struts; even a measured dose of atonality in a memorable moment when Marsalis uses his horn to mimic a babbling speaking-in-tongues. Yet this backward glance never collapsed into mere mimicry, and Marsalis, perhaps preeminently among his generation, proved capable of resurrecting the vocabulary of past masters while putting the stamp of his own personality on the proceedings.

In time even this enlarged combo proved too small to realize the trumpeter’s growing ambitions. Marsalis at midcareer found his most comfortable setting was the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra—a far cry from his fast-and-loose early bands. Yet bigger ensembles also gave Wynton a chance to flex his muscles as a leading post-Ellington composer, demonstrated most notably on his 1994 piece
Blood on the Fields
(later awarded the Pulitzer Prize) for a fifteen-member jazz orchestra. This impressive and lengthy work, some three and a half hours in duration, seemed determined to swallow whole not only the early jazz tradition but elements of a range of other African American musical styles—gospel, work songs, blues, and other cultural bric-a-brac from a bygone era. This historical eclecticism would constantly reemerge, in ever-differing forms, in Marsalis’s later work, whether he was sharing the stage with country artist Willie Nelson, collaborating with Ghanaian drum master Yacub Addy on the trumpeter’s composition
Congo Square
, or devoting tribute albums to everyone from Jelly Roll Morton to Thelonious Monk.

Yet Marsalis’s successes in funding and promoting such projects did little to stifle the surrounding controversies—so much so that commentators even began talking of a jazz “war” between progressives and traditionalists. When Marsalis took on the role of artistic director of the jazz program at Lincoln Center, harsh economics entered the picture as well. Some critics complained of the exclusionary tone of the Lincoln Center proceedings, carping that those aligned with Marsalis’s vision of the jazz tradition were celebrated—and financed with commissions and employment— while players whose aesthetic was too avant-garde or too European were neglected. When Marsalis was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Music—the first time an artist had earned this honor for a jazz work (although it should be noted that former Benny Goodman sideman Mel Powell had won it in 1990 and Third Stream guru Gunther Schuller did the same in 1994, albeit not for jazz compositions)—an event that should have been celebrated by fans as the end of the unspoken segregation practiced by the judges of America’s most cherished music award was instead treated as just one more grievance by a vocal group of Marsalis detractors.

At the height of the hostilities, which appeared to peak around the year 2000, almost anything relating to the trumpeter seemed destined to fuel the flames of contention. In some instances, Marsalis made missteps that contributed to the backlash, yet with the passing years he increasingly grew into the role of global ambassador for jazz that had been thrust upon him when he was scarcely out of his teens. His mentoring of young musicians, his advocacy for the music’s importance in the broader culture, his ability to mobilize financial resources, all contributed to the greater good of jazz. At the same time, his critics sometimes conveyed the impression that their resentment was more an anger that jazz history had not gone some other way, more futuristic, more “out there,” more whatever. Marsalis was a convenient target for such attacks but, in this instance, even his adversaries may have been giving him too much credit. As we have seen, Marsalis’s success was more a result of renewed interest in the jazz heritage than its cause.

Branford Marsalis’s evolving career reflected a careless disregard for the rigid hierarchies espoused by his younger brother. If Wynton championed mainstream jazz, Branford played with rock bands; as Wynton’s music grew more structured, Branford increasingly delighted in loose, blowing dates; when Wynton frequented Lincoln Center, Branford took a prominent television gig on the
Tonight Show
; while Wynton focused on the traditional sounds of gospel and blues, Branford experimented with the contemporary sounds of funk and hip-hop. But under the superficial laxity of Branford Marsalis lay a musical mind capable of the most rigorous logic. His melodic lines unfolded with a structural elegance at times reminiscent of Sonny Rollins, developing with clarity and precision, but not without incorporating surprising twists and turns along the way. Although his devil-may-care choice of engagements at times raised concerns about whether he most valued artistry or mere fame, Branford Marsalis’s talent could not be doubted. At his best, invariably in small-combo jazz settings, he showed that he deserved mention on any short list of the finest saxophonists of his generation.

At times it is hard to separate the personal influence of the Marsalis siblings from the institutional impact of record companies hoping to replicate their success stories. These moves, especially those of the CBS label, often took on a formulaic aspect. Eager to find a “second Wynton,” CBS signed Terence Blanchard, a teenage New Orleans trumpeter who had replaced Marsalis in the Blakey band and who frequently collaborated with a fellow Crescent City jazzman, saxophonist Donald Harrison. Pianist and vocalist Harry Connick Jr., another New Orleans native, was also signed by CBS when barely out of his teens. Connick showed very real talent, especially as a singer, and exuded a rare degree of stage presence for a young musician, yet these gifts were hyped beyond recognition when the publicity machine tried to anoint him as the “next Frank Sinatra” on the basis of a few early, albeit promising recordings. Trumpeter Marlon Jordan was also signed to the label while still a teenager—his hometown, few will be surprised to learn, was New Orleans. These artists’ recordings were often produced by Delfeayo Marsalis, who also became an important participant in the expanding New Orleans quarter of the CBS jazz empire. Other labels joined the New Orleans craze, with MCA/Impulse promoting Henry Butler, an exciting pianist and vocalist with a dynamic, heartfelt style, Verve signing Nicholas Payton, a sweet-toned trumpeter who was barely out of his teens at the time, and Novus recording the aforementioned Delfeayo Marsalis, who showed his skill in playing the trombone in a manner reminiscent of J. J. Johnson.