NOV. 17-NOV. 30, 2009 Volume 1, Issue 10
Clay Patrick McBride
All Rise You may know Wynton Marsalis the showman, the iconoclast, the humanitarian. But you must know Wynton’s music as well.
BY HOWARD MANDEL he marble halls of the Fifth Avenue center for Cultural Services of the French Embassy rang with happy blues Nov. 6, when Wynton Marsalis played trumpet with his quintet, having just been awarded the Chevalier of the Legion of Honor, France’s highest award for excellent achievement. Add it to the United States’ own National Medal of the Arts and congressional Horizon Award, a United Nations’ designation as a “Messenger of Peace,” the Netherlands’ Edison Award, honorary membership in Britain’s Royal Academy of Music, multiple Grammys, honorary doctorates, laurels from community service organizations and, oh yes, the 1997 Pulitzer Prize for Music, and it’s pretty clear: Honors crowd the shelves of the most famous jazzman of the 21st century. Who has not heard of Wynton Marsalis? He has performed in 30 countries, on every
T
continent except Antarctica and sold five million recordings worldwide. Artistic director, founder and indomitable spirit of Jazz at Lincoln Center, leader of its Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra (LCJO), hero of Ken Burns’ 10-part documentary Jazz, the composer-performer has collaborated with everyone from Kathleen Battle to Willie Nelson, been commissioned for the dance companies of Alvin Ailey, Peter Martins, Twyla Tharp and Zhongmei, and created the 100-minute, 12-movement All Rise for symphony, jazz band and choir. The list of his activities—musical, humanitarian and commercial (he’s been an “ambassador” for Movado watches, appeared in an iPod ad, made Brooks Brothers the official clothiers of the LCJO)—goes on and on. He’s played twice this year at the White House for the Obamas. Since Hurricane Katrina, he’s been an activist for reconstruction and civic improvement of New Orleans, and he’s lent his name to the Freedom Campaign for Burmese Nobel
laureate Aung San Suu Kyi. He’s a tireless educator, holding innumerable master classes and informal jam sessions as well as instituting JALC’s Essentially Ellington high school band competition, now in its 15th year. He’s got friends in high places, having played basketball with Kareem Abdul-Jabar, been photographed at society soirées with Mayor Bloomberg and applauded on his investiture as Chevalier by attendees that included police commissioner Raymond Kelly, comedian Bill Cosby, festival producer George Wein, actors Wendell Pierce and François Battiste, former and present Lincoln Center potentates and other culture machers too plentiful to mention. But have you heard his music? And do you like it? These are the key questions for evaluating the enduring reputation of Marsalis, now 48 and a force to be reckoned with since he emerged from Juilliard to join drummer Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers (with
his brother, saxophonist Branford Marsalis) back in 1980. It seems impossible that anyone could have heard it all, though maybe critic Stanley Crouch, Wynton’s intellectual consultant and chief cheerleader going on 30 years, comes close. According to his website, the trumpeter has released 40 jazz albums under his own name, 11 with the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra and 18 more categorized as “classical.” Those include Listen to the Storytellers, in which he’s a narrator; Concert for Planet Earth, where he blows with his septet as well as with Placido Domingo on the melody known in the U.S. as “Brazil,” and A Fiddler’s Tale, his “response” to Stravinsky’s A Soldier’s Story—besides several CDs of baroque trumpet repertoire. He has been ambitious—and prolific. Focusing on Wynton’s jazz productions, one finds several sets with several CDs, most
MARSALIS on page 7