The Landfill Chronicles: Wynton Marsalis — The Magic Hour, Chapter 22
Dan Ouellette’s The Landfill Chronicles — Pivotal Conversations on Eclectic Music Elevated to a State of Art (the archival conversation memoirs by Dan Ouellette published at Medium)
THE LANDFILL CHRONICLES — Dan Ouellette’s book-in-progress on Medium. The entire book will be available in print in 2024 on Cymbal Press.
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By Dan Ouellette
CHAPTER 22
long chapter…consume in chunks
WYNTON MARSALIS
(2004, New York)
It’s the Wynton Marsalis you rarely see. He’s dressed casually — wire-rim glasses, an untucked blue shirt, jeans and gray-white running shoes — not in his routine Brooks Brothers GQ duds. Looking relaxed in the spacious Right Track recording studio in New York, he and pianist Eric Lewis, bassist Carlos Henriquez and drummer Ali Jackson, huddle as if they could be discussing strategy for an upcoming four-on-four basketball game. But this is playtime of a different sort: rhythm talk in preparation for take 14 of a new Marsalis composition, “Free to Be,” a buoyant freedom song with a sunny bounce and syncopated skip.
While composing the piece, Wynton mixed in a potpourri of rhythms derived from nursery rhymes, Appalachian fiddle tunes and straight-up blues. Today, the tune swings (no surprise, because that is, after all, the trumpeter’s mantra), but he’s seeking precision. In the control room, he listens to the playback and opens the discussion again, first by encouraging his rhythm section, then pinpointing intervals where the time lags. He smiles and taps his hand on a table, snaps his fingers to illustrate what’s required.
After “rushing the rhythm” on the next two takes, the quartet cruises into take 17 with renewed energy. Wynton sails into his solo of curved and clipped phrasings and energizes the band with a roller-coaster squeal and a series of trumpet exclamations. The support team clicks in with sweet thunder and dense tumbles. The group breaks, listens to the playback and grooves to the beat with smiles of satisfaction.
These two days in the studio last June makes for eight tracks, including two vocal numbers, one sung by Bobby McFerrin, the other by Dianne Reeves. It all adds up to Wynton’s Blue Note Records debut, The Magic Hour — remarkably his first small-ensemble recording in five years. With a full set of catchy melodies and a compelling suite that features sprightly surprises around every bend, the album marks a dynamic new chapter in the recording life of the jazz maestro.
According to Blue Note, the negotiations to sign Wynton took nearly two years. The label’s new marquee artist was welcomed by president Bruce Lundvall who had signed the teenage trumpet phenom to Columbia Records two decades earlier when he served as that label’s general manager. At the time of his latest Blue Note coup, Bruce told me, “I believe that Wynton is on the cusp of an innovative new creative period musically. Blue Note will share a pivotal contributing role in the next phase of his already astounding career.”
Yet in a phone conversation last fall, Wynton hastened to disagree with his new boss’ assessment. “The Magic Hour is just a continuation of what I’ve been doing all along,” he said. “I’m just stating my basic proposition about jazz music with my quartet. Cusp? No. Innovation? No. All my music comes from the same source. I don’t go through periods. From my very first album to All Rise, my goal has always been to affirm jazz. Blues and swing. Written and improvised. I keep going in the same direction, exploring the different music within the language of jazz.”
Did Wynton feel that Blue Note offered him a new start? “I respect Bruce and how much he loves jazz and what he’s done for jazz and the musicians. At Blue Note there are a lot of people who are serious about jazz.”cWynton said he never had a problem at Columbia because Sony Music president Don Ienner was always straightforward and easy to talk to. “I respect him, though we didn’t always agree. But it was time to leave. It wasn’t acrimonious or ugly. Just a different time for different things.” He paused, then stressed, “But in no way is being at Blue Note a rebirth.”
**
At 42, Wynton is inarguably the world’s most recognized jazz artist and the artistic director of the music’s premiere showcase organization, Jazz at Lincoln Center. During his almost two-decade rule-of-the-roost at Columbia where he enjoyed carte blanche treatment, the prolific Wynton garnered several jazz and classical Grammy nominations and victories (he was the first and only musician to win a Grammy in both categories, a feat he accomplished twice) and won critical plaudits for a handful of discs, including Black Codes (From the Underground) recorded in 1985 while still a youngster and ten years later the Pulitzer Prize-winning extended work Blood on the Fields.
Despite all this, Wynton also delivered a fair number of weightless albums that neither sold well nor were reviewed favorably. And, while his triumphs have been well noted, he has not recorded a classic or written tunes that are coveted by contemporaries and young upstarts looking to cover new material. One wonders, is Wynton destined to be a secondary figure in jazz history books a hundred years from now? An Antonio Salieri to the Mozarts of the era? A hard-working jazz statesman and mover-and-shaker who built a presenting empire in New York, but never fully realized his potential as a top-flight composer?
Some of his most suspect releases arrived in one year: 1999, the centennial of one of his main heroes, Duke Ellington. That’s when Marsalis had the audacity to shove out a total of 15 albums, including so-so “standard time” homages to Thelonious Monk and Jelly Roll Morton, a fine extended work inspired by Duke (Big Train), classical CDs of film scores and dance commissions and an excessive seven-CD box of live Village Vanguard shows (one for each day of the week, the trumpeter said at release time).
But because of the unprecedented marketplace deluge and marketing missteps, most fans and listeners completely missed the best album of the bunch — perhaps the strongest of his career and the closest he’s come yet to approaching classic status. The Marciac Suite flew far under the radar screen. It’s a remarkable collection of songs for septet and quintet that Wynton wrote to celebrate a tiny farm town in southwestern France. Marciac not only hosts one of the largest European festivals but also prides itself in being one of Wynton’s biggest supporters. It even erected a statue of him in the town square (though it was stashed away in the Marciac jazz museum when I visited in 1999).
The CD was the last to arrive on the shelves and garnered scant notice. It’s unfortunate because it features a full package of heartfelt and humor-laden tunes, including the radiant melody “Sunflowers,” the most enthralling song Wynton has ever penned. Like the Marciac countryside of rolling sunflower fields, the tune blooms with a riot of color.
**
After the excesses of 1999, Wynton dug deeper into his other responsibilities, most notably planning and fundraising for the $128 million three-venue home for JALC, which is scheduled to open in October as the centerpiece of the new Time-Warner twin high-rise complex on Columbus Circle. While he has been touring nearly non-stop and recording (All Rise, released in 2002 on Sony Classical, was an extended piece for big band, gospel choir and symphony orchestra that took over six months to write), the crux of Wynton’s existence in the last few years has been the new New York 100,000-square-foot facility — the first of its kind ever created specifically for jazz.
Seven months before the grand opening, Wynton and JALC’s board of directors had raised $113 million. “That’s unprecedented for jazz,” he says. “I’m excited by it all because this is something that has never happened.” While the burden to make the Frederick P. Rose Hall a reality weighs heavily on his shoulders, he credits the board and the development team for spearheading the fundraising. “I’m just one of many people responsible. I meet with people, make presentations, do concerts and walk people through the new space.”
The visionary of the space who drafted the “Ten Fundamentals of the House of Swing” in 1998 to help architect Rafael Viñoly design it, Wynton plays down the pressures involved in its completion. “I love pressure,” he says gallantly. “That’s never been a problem. The more the better. That’s how you see who you are. Anything that’s important and requires serious concentration involves pressure. It’s like playing a game that you want to win or writing a piece that’s difficult. You want to give the extra attention so you don’t mess things up.”
Wynton likens the project to building one’s own house but “to the tenth degree.” Despite the challenges, such as creating a space within a new large structure and building broadcast facilities, he says Rose Hall will fulfill JALC’s two-fold mission: to present the finest artistry and promote the democratic nature of the music. “We want the best,” he says, “and we always want to make the space accessible to the different communities of jazz. We want it to be flexible to accommodate everything, from film to community activities to music with theater. And we will also do opera.”
Overarching the entire project is the music itself. In a recent interview, Wynton said, “I just want people to be aware of jazz, to make the music available through recordings and broadcasts, and to produce more jazz musicians who can play. Art can always conquer, if it’s available to be heard…[Rose Hall will be] a place to address all aspects of our music, so we don’t shut our music away from itself, to suit some reductive, abstract notion of what jazz should be.”
Given all the hand shaking and wheeling and dealing to cobble together funds for this enormous project, has this been a distraction from his music? Wynton scoffs at the notion, asserting that he is a jazz artist to the marrow.
**
In December, we meet for an extended conversation, this time in a conference room at Blue Note. The rendezvous had been planned two months prior as the only available slot on Wynton’s hectic schedule. It’s late in the afternoon three days before Christmas, and Wynton, clad in a blue knit dress shirt and dark blazer, is visibly tired. His youngest son Jasper — the spitting image of his dad — is sitting in a Blue Note office at a computer playing games. Unlike most elementary school-aged kids who get transfixed by a computer screen, Jasper leaves his seat, smiles, shakes my hand and flashes a shy hello with a meet-and-greet charisma that’s part of his DNA. In contrast, the still boyish-faced Wynton seems weighed down and not at all eager to field queries.
Wynton is an enigma of polarity. Depending on the setting, he can be humble or pompous, genial or arrogant, forthcoming or aloof, gracious or fiercely competitive, conciliatory or downright brassy.
Today he just seems exhausted and, given his disdain for the negative press he often receives in jazz magazines, a tad ill-at-ease. At first, Wynton answers questions in his laid-back New Orleans patois with one- and two-sentence responses. He’s not at all chatty the way he was the week before while hanging out in dapper attire at the bar at Birdland before accepting his 2004 Musician of the Year award from the Musical America International Directory of the Performing Arts organization.
But he warms up once we dig deeper into talking about band mates (“We’re all just like family”) and the music itself (the source of all his passion).
Wynton admits he’s a hard worker. He says that in 1999 he challenged himself to work every single day of the year. Why? “Just gratitude. If you’re given something, you want to know, what do I really have? At the end of the year, I knew I could do it. It was a great exercise. I felt exhilarated. Tired? Yeah, but my impulse was all about gratitude.”
Gratitude is one word Wynton keeps returning to in our conversation. It’s his way of saying how lucky and blessed he is to be in his position of authority and notoriety. Yet it seems at times like he also uses the word to cloak any semblance of ego-motivation and self-aggrandizement.
Though his detractors often feel he’s hell-bent on reducing jazz to museum music in the name of protecting jazz’s heritage, Wynton contends he’s not on any kind of mission. “I’m just doing what I have the abilities to do,” he says. “I’m grateful for all the opportunities I’ve had, for the musicians I play with, for the fan base, for the way we’re treated all around the world. Look at Marciac. You can’t campaign to be treated like that. It’s gratitude.”
When told that the word driven could easily be substituted for his every utterance of gratitude, Wynton admits that he is compelled, but, again he stresses, not in any exaggerated sense of self-importance. “The music calls me,” he says. “I have the gift, the talent to hear it. I get up in the middle of the night because I hear a song and have to write it down. I’m always heeding the call. Whenever I play, I’m heeding it. That’s why I’ve been able to continue to develop and be resilient through all of life’s ups and downs.”
That hasn’t been a cakewalk because Wynton has chosen to wear many hats. He is the jazz ambassador who had an inordinate amount of face time on Ken Burns’ Jazz documentary series; the bandleader of a globetrotting orchestra, a septet and these days a quartet; JALC’s artistic director who has the final say on all programming decisions; an educator who has spearheaded an impressive jazz program that includes concerts for children and a middle-school curriculum; and the go-to fundraiser for the new jazz performance venue, which, though he likes to call the future space the House That Swing Built, is more accurately dubbed the House That Wynton Built.
At a recent JALC Gala fundraiser concert and dinner, Wynton performed onstage in support of a bevy of women artists, from pianist Marian McPartland to pop diva Diana Ross, then glad-handed the crowd later. He made the rounds, from table to table, shaking hands and posing for photos. I caught up with him as he was being ushered to the next stop. Do you really like doing this, I asked him. He grinned and said, “I’ll do whatever it takes to educate the kids.”
He’s paid well for his JALC services. In 1999, Wynton Marsalis Enterprises earned $980,024; in 2000, $725,000; in 2001, $627,500; in 2002, $713,500. The slimmer sums after 1999 could be chalked up to the downturn in the economy, but that’s still not a bad payday, especially considering he’s back on salary with a record label (reportedly for a 40–60 profit split in his favor). He also generates income from endorsements, such as Movado watches, which recently ran a full-page ad in The New Yorker with four shots of Wynton mugging for the camera with his trumpet. It could well be that he’s the highest paid jazz musician in history.
Given his speech before the National Press Club last fall where he articulately stumped for increased funding for arts programs in schools, maybe Wynton could even consider politics. He laughs at the mention and shakes his head. “Oh, no,” he says, citing the scrutiny his private life would undergo. “I’d have to admit to too much.”
**
At Birdland before his Musical America award presentation, photographer Enid Farber gave Wynton a photograph she snapped of him with President Bill Clinton after they both appeared on a recent jazz panel. It looked like Bill was giving Wynton some fatherly advice. What were they talking about? Wynton smiled broadly and said, “Let’s just say we weren’t talking about jazz. We were finishing up a conversation we had begun right after he got caught.”
One of the Marsalis hats that gets short shrift in the press is his trumpet playing. He says he doesn’t miss winning jazz magazine critics polls like he did when he was an upstart. But the fact is, judging by his technique and delivery, today he should consistently be at the top of the heap. In his early days, many of his live performances were perfunctory. Now, on any given night, they can be transcendent.
Jeff Levenson, who worked as an exec at Columbia during the end of the trumpeter’s reign there, says, “Wynton is an awesome musician who can play anything he wants at will. He has such a compelling command of his instrument that he can summon any emotion, transmit it through his trumpet and reach an audience.”
Last April at the Jazz Standard, upstart alto saxophonist Greg Osby joined Wynton on stage for the first time in a quintet led by Ali Jackson. While the chemistry was lacking in the first set, the front-line pair cut loose at one point with Wynton blowing fiery lines that were met by Greg’s equally speedy low-toned sax runs. “It was a great pairing,” Greg said afterward. “We prodded each other into areas we don’t normally go. Wynton has such a strong personality that you can get drawn into his vortex. He embodies the bravado that great jazz trumpeters should possess.”
Another area in which Wynton has come under attack has been his perceived narrowness of vision for JALC’s programming. However, in recent years, the booking has become more adventurous, with evenings devoted to Brazilian jazz, tango, last fall’s Steve Lacy–Martial Solal showcase and most recently a celebration of Ornette Coleman’s avant-leaning music featuring Dewey Redman as the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra’s guest. Part of that can be attributed to veteran jazz impresario Todd Barkan, who has been serving as JALC’s artistic administrator for the past three years. He works closely with Wynton on the booking.
“I honestly didn’t know what to expect when Wynton hired me, but it’s worked out extremely well,” Todd says. “We’re very much a team. We alert each other to music that we end up booking here. Wynton loves to swing, but he’s like Duke, who ranged far and wide. Wynton has a much broader appreciation of jazz harmonically and rhythmically than a lot of people realize or give him credit for.”
**
Given the demands Wynton has every day, how does he ever manage to fully invest himself in the music? “Busy? Yeah, but writing is part of the being busy,” he says. “It’s my passion. You do it. You don’t find the time to do it. You do it.” He contends the songs on The Magic Hour weren’t hard to write and didn’t take much time. “All Rise, with all the horns and the complex forms took six months. Then you figure in the time it takes to distill the information to your band mates.”
Wynton says that the ditty McFerrin sings, “Baby, I Love You,” was a tune that came to him while talking on the phone to a friend. He developed a bridge later and Bobby finessed the words. As for his manifesto “The Feeling of Jazz,” sung exquisitely by Dianne, he wrote that in a hotel in Europe after performing at a jazz festival where there was a dearth of jazz acts. “The music wasn’t bad,” he says, not willing to name names. “In fact, it was good. But it wasn’t jazz.”
The longest track on the album is the suite-like title tune, which Wynton says started with the concept of playing a “diminished melody against an augmented chord base.” Again, he claims, the composing went quickly. “After doing this for so many years, your experience kicks in. It’s like the fiddle influence in ‘Free to Be.’ I studied fiddle music years ago for four months when I was writing a piece for the New York City Ballet. I absorbed it then.” He pauses, and then adds with a wide smile, “I love old country fiddle music.”
On the surface it appears the Wynton machine is well-oiled and operating at optimum capacity. Yet, could all the peripheral duties of his jazz life impede his creativity? Could it be keeping him from crafting that classic album that has eluded him?
He dodges the questions, just like, well, a politician. “All that I do is my art,” he says. “All the things I do deal with my music. I’m very natural and honest in everything I do. I don’t have to make deals. That’s how I’ve been able to maintain my integrity all these years in the music business. I don’t have any aspiration to be liked or vilified. All I can do is develop the gifts that I’ve been given, whether it’s teaching or fundraising or writing.”
But in the long run? “I do the things that I can do and what I can’t do I don’t do,” says Wynton. “For example, I don’t write film music. I’ve tried but I can’t do that. If you’re good at rebounding, shooting jumpers and giving out assists, why not do all of them? Even if you’re a big man and you can dribble, you should do that too. Don’t let someone tell you you can’t do them all if you’re good at them.”
If there’s one topic that Wynton has no patience for, it’s the allegations made by some insiders at Columbia that he helped sink the jazz ship there with his deluge of CDs (the Columbia Jazz imprint that issued masterpieces by Miles, Mingus and Monk ceased to exist in 2000). Why did he issue so many albums in 1999?
“Like I said, it’s just gratitude,” he says. “I said a prayer every morning that year. I wanted to put out all the music I had at that time. Plus it was a nine-year and those are very important because you’re going in to a new time. I came to New York in 1979 and here it was 1999. It’s important to make a statement of intent in a nine-year. It’s not a question of sales. It’s intent.”
But why 15 CDs?
“Because I could.”
Wasn’t he concerned that if sales tanked, heads might roll, including his own brother’s? Branford was head of A&R at Columbia at the time. “I had frank conversations with Don Ienner. He didn’t think it was the most intelligent thing to do. He said that’s a lot of records and retail might not want to stock them all. But I had been there for almost 20 years, so Don agreed to release all the albums out of respect for me.”
Suggesting that he contributed to Columbia Jazz’s demise infuriates Wynton. “That’s totally off the wall. You’re putting two things together that aren’t related. People can suggest anything. They can suggest that you’re a mass murderer just because some people got killed and you lived nearby.”
Some of Wynton’s critics even go as far as speculating that he was deliberately shooting Branford in the foot by undermining his A&R position. Sibling rivalry? Contention over their diverse definitions of what constitutes jazz? Wynton bristles. “Let me explain this to you, man,” he angrily says. “That’s so far from anything that’s true. First thing, my brother taught me how to talk. We’re brothers. We have disagreements, but he’s my brother and I love him because he’s my brother. To suggest that I would do that amount of work to mess with my brother is beyond absurd.”
Wynton says he’s got material for eight more albums right now. Does he think Blue Note would release them en masse? “Yes, in 20 years,” he says.
Blue Note exec Tom Evered disagrees. “Releasing that many CDs at one time is the past,” he says. “The topography of the retail world has changed. You have to be much more strategic today to get positioned in the market.”
Tom admits that he was hesitant when Blue Note was negotiating with Wynton. But he says, “Honestly, it’s been nothing but a pleasure working with Wynton. And the new record is smoking. That was clinched at IAJE [International Association for Jazz Educators conference] when we were playing it at our booth. People kept stopping and asking, ‘Who is this?’”
**
Certainly Blue Note inherited a much more mature and diplomatic musician than the Wynton Marsalis of the ’80s when he was known for his brashness that polarized opinion about him. He recalls those times well, especially how he alienated some jazz elders. “That’s part of growing up,” he says. “You can’t be a puppet. You have your voice. I remember I was 20 or 21 and doing an interview and I was just firing. I was being honest about how I felt, but I rubbed people the wrong way. Everybody was saying, you shouldn’t have said all that. But Dizzy [Gillespie] told me, no, what you were saying is true. But he warned me to be ready for the return.”
Legendary jazz bassist Ron Carter recalls the teenaged Wynton who took leave from Art Blakey’s band to record Herbie Hancock’s Quartet album in 1981 with him and Tony Williams. “Wynton was eager and very curious,” Ron says. “He wasn’t brash because the music was so demanding. Plus he understood that he couldn’t be on the top in this band. In fact, he seemed to be surprised at the respect we all had for each other and how we all saw the music as being number one. That might have been his first awareness of that level of commitment.”
While Ron hasn’t had much contact with Wynton in recent years, he feels that he’s been placed in a difficult position. “Wynton’s been seen as the savior of jazz,” Ron says. “But if that were true, there’d be more jazz labels and clubs and concerts. But that’s not his fault. People have tagged him. People either love him or hate him. If you say negative things about him, you’re seen as Wynton bashing, and if express positive things, you’re seen as kissing ass. But I say, why don’t people just let Wynton breathe.”
And breathe he will. An insatiable student of jazz, Wynton fully recognizes there’s plenty of fresh air ahead. He has a long laundry list of things he wants to learn, including understanding the complexities of Don Redman’s big band arrangements, new ways to play on the trumpet that will bring shadings and colors to his ballad performance, achieving expertise in playing technical forms. And, Wynton adds, delving deeper into the music. “It’s a never-ending depth. You can never get deep enough. It’s broad, but the deeper you go, the sweeter it is.”
By jazz standards, Wynton is still young. He’s poised, persistent, hungry, driven and haughty enough to keep playing with the kind of abandon that can blow the chaff away. And, who knows, maybe one day he’ll even record that masterwork that will complete the big picture.