Wynton Marsalis
MAGICAL MARSALIS
Trumpeter, composer, and bandleader Wynton Marsalis may just be the world’s most famous jazz musician. Director of Lincoln Center’s esteemed Jazz Orchestra, inescapable - and controversial - commentator on the state of jazz today, Marsalis has long been a force to be reckoned with. The Magic Hour begins an association with Blue Note Records after a two-decade relationship with Columbia/Sony. If the album is any indication, the next few decades will be excitingly creative ones for Wynton Marsalis. He spoke with Ted Panken about his new beginnings.
Barnes & Noble.com: I want to speak first about The Magic Hour. Did you write a suite of tunes for this, or were you picking and choosing from recent things?
Wynton Marsalis: I wrote all the tunes. I wanted to write songs that were easy to play, easy to learn, easy, hummable type melodies, but with more challenging harmonic progressions. I wanted it to be things that were reminiscent of childhood and of the spirit of play. A lot of them were like teasing or mocking, and they have nursery rhyme qualities. Like, the song “Free to Be,” half the bridge says, “I’m gon’ tell yo' MA-ma.” All those kind of things. They were all written at the same time, and they all deal with the feeling of three-note themes. A lot of them have three words. Kids like threes. Like “Big Fat Hen,” “Free to Be,” “You and Me,” and the one song that doesn’t have three is called “Skipping,” and the theme is three.
B&N.com: Did your choice of repertoire or the tone of the repertoire have anything to do with doing an inaugural record for a new label, or have any reference to the history of the label you’re working with?
WM: No. I had done a big work, All Rise, very serious and involved, and I wanted to do something lighter. I don’t think about the label. The music is one thing to me. It has to be documented some kind of way, if you’re lucky enough. But the fact of the documentation is not an event. The event is the music.
B&N.com: You’ve now been an influence on two generations of musicians. The music you did with LCJO, the septet, and the big band is part of the lingua franca they grew up with. You’re still a young guy, but that imprint exists. What do you think your legacy is?
WM: The older New Orleans musicians told me to always stay in front of the people. I’m always in front of the people. I play in parks. I play picnics. While I was driving out to the West Coast, we stopped at random in a town of Wyoming that reminded me of a town in Gunsmoke, and I came into the restaurant. When I went in I asked the guy, “Do you need me to go in the kitchen and play my horn for the chef so he’ll put some extra love in the food?” So the chef came out, and it turned out he’d heard some of my music, and he loves jazz, and he had some crawfish étouffée he started telling me about. He’d had a Mardi Gras picnic and he’d cooked gumbo. He brought out some of his étouffée and put it on the table. Then the owner of the hotel came in and said, “Man, we’ve got a hotel log, and Louis Armstrong stayed here in the 1950s,” and he pulled out the log and showed me the signature of Louis Armstrong. That kind of thing happens all the time. That’s what’s in the music. I play in front of the people. I don’t play in my apartment. I’m always out on the road. I’m always around the young people.
B&N.com: It seems that from the time you came up, you’ve been on a mission, and it sounds like that zeal has not diminished a bit.
WM: It’s gotten stronger. It’s all the human contact. It’s all about the human aspect of it. That’s what I like and what keeps my interest strong. I don’t believe that people are dumb. I don’t feel like there’s any reason to dumb down. Because I feel like people understand what you’re telling them. If you remember, I go out to a lot of schools. Rich schools, poor schools, colleges -- it doesn’t make a difference. I go everywhere. I have questions asked, and people understand what you’re saying. This thing of dumbing down or that people don’t understand, I have not found that to be true, in my experience. People’s experiences have been segregated, so the whole thing of highbrow or lowbrow is immaterial. There are kids in inner cities all over America who can listen and understand. And if you don’t know that to be true, you haven’t been in front of those kids. Now, they don’t get a diet of that music, so naturally they’re going to go to what they hear. But just because we all go toward what we’re comfortable with, what we’ve received, it doesn’t mean we can’t understand something different, or that we wouldn’t like a different thing. It’s just a matter of exposure in many cases.
B&N.com: Would name your five favorite trumpeters, as of today, and why?
WM: I like Louis Armstrong. Just because he played our instrument on the highest. In his later years especially, it doesn’t sound like a trumpet. It sounds almost like a voice descending over the heavens. And his command over the nuances of the instrument, his ability to convey direct human emotion through his sound is unparalleled. Felix Chappotin, the Cuban trumpet player. He’s like the Cuban Louis Armstrong. He played with unbelievable clarity of emotion and feeling, and also with humor. Miles Davis. The concentration of emotion in the sound. Also I like his playing because of his diligence. The fact that he started off not playing that good, and he developed into one of the greatest, then he went back to not playing that good. The fact that he could go from being not good and then being one of the greatest trumpet players ever, and then to go back to not really playing that good -- that’s amazing to me. An amazing journey. Maurice André. I love him because of the character of his sound, the singing quality of his playing. And he plays with very great rhythm, especially on Baroque music. His playing has a balance, a tenderness and a toughness. I like…oh, man, so many great trumpet players. [Harry] Sweets Edison. The way he could bend the trumpet and the down-home way he plays, the sophistication of his playing. But I’m kind of torn, because I need to have Dizzy [Gillespie] in there. You know what I’m saying. Put Booker Little in there. I’m going to split one of my positions. Booker died young. He not only had a tremendous concentration in his sound. He had a concentration of energy and he had a cry, a distinct cry that came out of his sound. He projected tremendous emotion and feeling. He could play incredibly fast. And he’s another one whose playing exhibited great development. He started off in one place, but his sound ended up in another place altogether, even in that short amount of time. I liked his compositions. What he was doing with form was very interesting. And he was extremely serious about playing.
B&N.com: I know you’re thinking of your life and career as a continuous flow, but looking from the outside I see The Magic Hour, maybe because of its simplicity and elegance, as a transitional record. What would be your artistic goals for 2010?
WM: My aspirations are more for the art form itself. Just a deeper penetration of the art. More integration of the various arts in the spirit of jazz. I want to work more on our identity as musicians, and the concept of developing our music in a mobile environment; developing these beautiful thematic solos, to have ideas that are developed in an environment that’s changing. So my aspiration is to get deeper into the art at all times. To get deeper into the blues, deep into the American folk material, deeper into the groove, deeper into orchestration, deeper into communicating human feeling through sound, deeper into communicating with other musicians -- just always go deeper. March, 2004
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