“Let the ass-whipping begin,” Wynton remarked, a bit of opening commentary as he walked onto the courts behind the Sixty-fifth Street projects. Nothing personal, the musician said; with him, ass-whipping need not be adversarial. It can be more a statement of loving engagement with the material at hand, be it Mahler, another take on “East St. Louis Toodle-oo,” or a supposedly friendly game of one-on-one.
Still, it was probably a mistake, snickering when the trumpet player started in about his jumper, how sweet it was. Somehow it seemed unlikely, unfair, creepy even, that Wynton Marsalis—only forty but already into his second decade as the semi-officially anointed “most important musician of his generation,” the only jazzman ever to get a Pulitzer Prize (for his symphonic-size Blood on the Fields), winner of both jazz and classical Grammys on the same night, one of Time magazine’s “25 most influential Americans”—might be good at basketball too.
But here they came, the jumpers raining down. “Money in the bank,” Marsalis gloated, canning his seventh in a row, which is a bitch when you’re playing winner’s out, which is the way Win-tone, as he is sometimes known, always plays. There was nothing to do but watch the perfect ball rotation and flawless follow-through, all that immaculate, Apollonian form. After all, a lot of things, nasty and nice, have been said about Wynton Marsalis since he arrived on the scene with his brother Branford back in the late seventies, a Jazz Messenger with an unbeatable New Orleans pedigree, formidable upper register, and decided lack of shyness in matters of cultural-aesthetic polemicizing. No one, however, has ever knocked Marsalis’s technique.
Except now our contest had taken a critical, potentially calamitous turn. You see: When Wynton’s got that J going, you’ve got to play him close. In such proximity, a defender’s elbow might—inadvertently of course—come in contact with the jazzman’s wry, moon-shaped face. That elbow might even bash into Wynton’s lip. Hard.
“Uh,” Wynton grunted, checking for blood.
“Oh man, sorry. You all right?”
Wynton did not answer, only smiled, that chubby-cheeked best-boy-in-the-class smile, so down-home sincere, so full of you’re-going-to-get-yours. It is a marvelous, disorienting Cheshire sort of smile. Like the twenty-one words Eskimos have for snow, it is a smile with multifarious definitions and intentions, including innocent. It can suck you in, make you forget exactly who you are up against. Like those scowly gym rats uptown a couple of weeks ago. Hip-hoppers all, they took one look at Wynton’s somewhat stumpy body and scoffed, “Hey, Winston, where’s your flute?” Maybe he had a couple of dollars to lose in a little, friendly contest of HORSE. Wynton just smiled and canned a dozen or so in a row. Before it was over those boys just shook their heads in genial surrender. That’s the secret of Wynton’s game. The way he does it, you don’t even mind the ass-whipping.
“Yeah, man,” Wynton said. His lip was okay.
This was a relief, because you don’t want to be the guy who split Wynton Marsalis’s kisser. Only the night before, in the claustrophobic kitchen-dressing room at the Village Vanguard, after playing three sets of (mostly) bop with Charles McPherson’s quartet, hot on “Night in Tunisia,” mournful on “Pork Pie Hat,” Wynton had been talking about his lip, how sore it was. It happens to trumpet players, that puckered stress on the obicularis oris. During the thirties, Satchmo himself’s own immortal chops suffered near permanent ruination from hitting those high C’s every night. But throughout a history that includes the classic lips of Roy Eldridge, Sweets Edison, Clark Terry, Rex Stewart, Dizzy Gillespie, Clifford Brown, Miles Davis, Lester Bowie, and a hundred other bugle geniuses, never has so much been riding on singular embouchure.
That much was clear a couple days later, 100 feet above Columbus Circle, amid the swing of giant cranes and the hot blue blind of welding torches. They’re building the new Twin Towers here, a pair of eighty-floor, 750-foot-tall spires, on the former site of Robert Moses’s squatty old New York Coliseum. It is the biggest construction project in post–September 11 New York, a $1.7 billion complex that will include the new headquarters of AOL Time Warner, a five-star hotel, two hundred or so condos (with Trump-priced penthouses), and a vast, no doubt brutally upscale shopping mall. This is also the site of the new home of Jazz at Lincoln Center, Wynton Marsalis, Artistic Director. And today, Wynton, hard hat over close-cropped hair, has arrived along with other J@LC board members and officials to inspect the progress of their $130 million, 100,000-square-foot digs.
Wynton says American jazz is “the most abstract and sophisticated music anybody has ever heard, short of Bach.” But the music of Mingus, Monk, and Charlie Parker has never seen anything like what’s happening here on Columbus Circle. Columbus Full Circle you could call it, since it was here, where Eighth Avenue meets the park, that in 1910 a new music called ragtime made its New York debut at Reisenweber’s café, a cavernous joint famous for $1.25 fried frog blue plate special.
Touted as “the world’s first performing-arts facility built specifically for jazz,” the new hall will have three separate performance spaces: a 1,100-seat, concert-style Rose Hall, named for the late, civic-minded Frederick P. Rose, who provided funds for the new planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History; the 600-seat, nightclub-style Allen Room; and a smaller “café” slated to accommodate 140 fans. Also in the plan are recording and rehearsal studios, plus a large jazz-education center. On square footage alone, you could fit twenty Village Vanguards in here, several Five Spots, Slugs and Minton Playhouses, the whole Cotton Club, and still have plenty of space for strung-out musicians to get high, not that any Wynton-fronted organization, however tradition-minded, would condone such unhealthy habits.
Wynton has long been thinking about a “permanent home” for the music he first played marching through the Vieux Carré streets with Danny Barker’s Fairview Baptist Church Brass Band. The topic often came up back in the eighties, during the semi-legendary conversations-plotting sessions Wynton engaged in with his great friends and mentors (some say Svengali figures): the ever combative essayist Stanley Crouch and novelist-philosopher Albert Murray, a longtime confidant of Ralph Ellison and Duke Ellington, who called the dapper eighty-five-year-old Murray “the most unsquarest man in the world.”
It was up in Murray’s apartment on 132nd Street and Lenox, surrounded by “all these books, Faulkner, Hemingway, Malraux, most of which Stanley and Albert had actually read,” Wynton recalls, “that I began to envision my life on a bigger scale than I previously thought possible…. I mean, you go to the bathroom and there’s a photograph of the Army Air Corps, 1943. There’s about two hundred uniformed officers, and Albert—the only black guy in the picture…. I knew a few things about music because my father was a musician. I’d grown up around jazz musicians. But I was just a kid, from New Orleans, with a New Orleans education, which is basically no education. This was something else altogether.”
Amid much holding forth on the issues of free will in Thomas Mann and the majesty of Louis’s solo on “Potato Head Blues,” the conversation at Albert Murray’s house always came back to the future of jazz, how this priceless heritage would survive the dark ages of ascendent pop idiocy and Sypro Gyra–style fusion. The need for the establishment of a jazz canon and a place where the music could be preserved through both repertory performance and instruction was paramount, everyone agreed.
Already involved with a Lincoln Center “Classical Jazz” series, Wynton was the logical point man. Armed with Crouch’s social critique of how to play Establishment (read: white) organizations, that unbeatable smile and country-boy manner (even though Kenner, where he grew up, is a New Orleans suburb), Wynton offered an undeniable package. He was, after all, the ultimate crossover artist, arguably the best single jazz and classical trumpet player in the world, a most presentable and courtly young black man who had performed Haydn’s Trumpet Concerto with the New Orleans Symphony at fourteen—someone to whom race and class barriers simply do not apply.
“That was what really a
mazed me,” says one old-line Lincoln Center board member, “watching him play Purcell…. I said to myself, ‘This is a once-in-a-lifetime individual.’ If we ever wanted to do something with jazz, he had to be the one.”
“Look,” Wynton told the blue-blood board of Lincoln Center, his voice deep and smoky, the informality of his manner only adding moral authority, “I play classical and I play jazz and jazz is harder.” There was no reason, Wynton said, no reason at all, that jazz, America’s “greatest art form, a democratic triumph of order and beauty over chaos,” shouldn’t be accorded the same status as “European” Lincoln Center “constituents” like the Metropolitan Opera, the New York City Ballet, and the New York Philharmonic.
Smitten, the board agreed. However, it wasn’t until 1998, when the decidedly un-hepcat mayor Rudy Giuliani idiosyncratically mandated that any plans submitted for the highly sought-after Coliseum site include a performance space for JLC, that Wynton set down, in the manner of Yahweh ‘s deca screed from Sinai, “Ten Fundamentals of the House of Swing.”
Written on cocktail napkins during a red-eye flight, “The Vision,” as Wynton calls it, reads like what it was intended to be: “a metaphorical blueprint of a groove, to be articulated into design, and then made real.”
Fundamental No. 1: “the entire facility is the House of Swing … we want all 100,000 square feet to dance and sing, to be syncopated and unpredictable, but not eccentric.” Fundamental No. 5: “The two main performance spaces should represent two sides of the same thing, like night and day, or like a man and a woman.” The rest, as they say, is commentary, that is, “The Rose Hall, representing “woman, or night—this is not Jazz at Lincoln Center’s main hall, because like a family we play no favorites—should sound like Lester Young, Billie Holiday, Paul Desmond, and Miles Davis.” The front, or “male,” Allen Room “should have the feeling of a street parade … an ancient Greek theatre … there should be a question of where the band ends and the audience begins … the room should feel like Duke Ellington’s Orchestra—sensuous, spicy, and able to accommodate all tempos.”
The project’s lead architect, the flamboyant Uruguayan Rafael Viñoly, who claims to be a former Tupamaro revolutionary and is mostly noted for designing massive convention centers, read Wynton’s manifesto and was inspired. “The Fundamentals of Swing transcends every boundary,” Viñoly says, “it is an architectural plan immediately translatable into the language of art and love. Wynton’s Vision guided my hand in everything I did at JLC.”
A copy of the “Fundamentals,” accompanied by Viñoly’s plans, now fills a bedroom wall in Wynton’s homey and spacious riverview pad on Sixty-sixth Street, directly behind the Juilliard School he once attended as a seventeen-year-old trumpet prodigy. The apartment is just a few steps, past Balducci’s, from the stage door of Alice Tully Hall, where Wynton has conducted the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra for the past decade. The move to Columbus Circle will mean a longer walk to work, but it will be worth it. “Sometimes I’ll get up in the middle of the night and look at the plans,” Wynton says. “It’s like a dream, one I always knew would happen.”
Truth be told, however, Wynton, hard hat on his head, but unhappy with heights and deep water, isn’t thrilled be on the rickety catwalks of the rising House of Swing. Not that he’ll ever let on, decked out in his Brooks Brothers casualwear. Being cool is part of being the star, the front man, the artistic director. Besides, Brooks Brothers is a corporate sponsor. This is no problem, since Wynton, who’d rather play backup for Kenny G than be caught dead in Phat Farm, is pretty much Brooks Brothers to begin with. Hands on, he does all his own ironing, the board in the cedar closet of his bedroom, alongside twenty or so hats, each on its own hook. On the road, he sometimes irons the clothes of the guys in the band, too. “They bring them to me because they know I’ll crease them right,” Wynton says.
Clutching a naked girder as the late-fall wind whips through the open superstructure, Wynton says, “This is jazz steel.” It is a phrase he likes, “because we’re not after something that is going to disappear. We’re building an institution, one that is going to endure.” That’s what people don’t understand, Wynton says—the need for permanency. It is an issue, after all—this notion of an institutionalized House of Swing, especially a $130 million one crammed into the middle of the commercial colossus of the AOL Time Warner corporate headquarters.
“Institutions create institutional music, and that is not what jazz is about. This is a music where nothing is ever played the same way twice,” says Howard Mandel, a writer who’s president of the Jazz Journalists Association, echoing the often-heard objection against the supposed canonization of what is referred to as “the Marsalis-Crouch-Murray version” of America’s music. It isn’t that anyone doubts Marsalis’s 100 percent dedication to the future of jazz (of the opinion that knowing the chord changes to “C Jam Blues” will absolutely save your soul, he’s a tireless jazz educator, offering several dozen lectures and demonstrations each year). Problems arise with Wynton’s alleged “neo-traditionalist,” anti-avant-garde bias against everything he personally deems as “unswinging,” that is, much of the past four decades. The fear is, while the legacies of Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington will be forever celebrated on Columbus Circle, such post-Coltrane artists as Cecil Taylor, Don Cherry, Albert Ayler, and Sun Ra will be written out of the music’s history.
Some just can’t stand the imprimatur of the uptown big-money squares. For her part, Lorraine Gordon, who owns and operates the Vanguard, the club started by her husband Max sixty-six years ago, says, “I love Wynton; he’s my favorite. But jazz in a shopping mall? What’s that about?”
Even Ellis Marsalis, father of Wynton, Branford, Delfeayo, and Jason, reveals mixed feelings. Ellis, considered by some observers to be the “hip-pest” of the Marsalis clan, once drove for fifty hours straight from New Orleans to Los Angeles to see Ornette Coleman. “I went with Alvin Batiste, my friend. We didn’t stop, except for gas. We just wanted to hear Ornette and tell him thanks, because he was really doing something new.” This is the same Ornette Coleman whose “harmolodic” approach has been found deficient in swingingness by the JLC brain trust, an aesthetic judgment that caused Ellis Marsalis to roll his eyes and shake his head. Standing in the crowded Vanguard dressing room, the elder Marsalis, a large, friendly man, casts a loving gaze at his famous son and says, “Jazz at Lincoln Center is a great thing. A lot of musicians are going to get work because of it. But Wynton’s New York, you know, it’s not my New York. My New York had clubs, little places to go, to relax and just play. This New York, it’s kind of cosmetic. A really shiny surface. What’s underneath, I don’t know. But times change; you have to accept that.”
Wynton, of course, has heard it all before. Bestride the construction site like a jazz Howard Roark, feet on the six-inch-thick rubber “isolation pads” that will muffle the rumble of the A train Billy Strayhorn said was the quickest way to Harlem, Wynton decries, “Who could be against this? … Who says jazz has to be played only in dark rooms filled with curls of cigarette smoke? Always on the margin. That outlaw thing. That’s a romantic, limiting fantasy. This is the greatest music ever produced in this country, made by the greatest musicians. You think it doesn’t deserve something first-class, like any other great art?”
Yet even now, with people talking about Marsalis as a New York cultural leader-commissar on the par of a Balanchine or Bernstein, there is another kind of permanency to think about: the tenuousness of life around here these days. Wynton was in L.A. during the WTC nightmare, getting ready to put on his most recent magnum opus, All Rise, at the Hollywood Bowl: “I saw it on television. The planes, over and over. All I could think about was how perishable everything was.”
Indeed, our little tour of the future home of Jazz at Lincoln Center was held up for about half an hour that very morning. Bruce MacCombie, the JLC executive director, Laura Johnson, the general manager, and Jonathan Rose, the chairman of the building committee, wer
e there. But Ted Ammon, chairman of the board, was not. It was strange, everyone said, because Ted, the investment banker–jazz fan who had contributed more than $2.5 million to JLC, was not the type to be late. It wasn’t until the next morning that people heard Ammon was dead, murdered in his Hamptons home.
A week later, at a memorial service for Ammon at Alice Tully Hall attended by several representatives of the Suffolk County homicide squad, Wynton eulogized, “We want to know the particulars of death—it repulses us, it calls us, it fascinates us … but only the dead know the facts of death, and they never tell.” Then, along with Wycliffe Gordon, Victor Goines, Walter Blanding Jr., and others from the LC Jazz Orchestra, Wynton broke into Jelly Roll Morton’s “Oh, Didn’t He Ramble”—“Didn’t he ramble … Rambled all around, in and out of town … till the butcher cut him down”—a tune that has been played at New Orleans jazz funerals for a hundred years. They really ripped into it too, with Wynton, seemingly on the verge of tears, playing the happiest music he could muster, which, of course, is the N’awlins way. It was a priceless kind of thing, because even if Ammon’s much-battled-over estate was worth $100 million, no amount of money could buy this: being sent off by Wynton Marsalis. Except the people at Alice Tully didn’t quite get it, how to behave when a soul passes on. They sat there mute. Eventually Wynton had to say, “You know, you don’t have to be so quiet.”
A couple of hours later, Wynton, up in his apartment overlooking the Hudson playing chess with saxophonist Walter Blanding, remained puzzled. “To me,” he said, “death is not morbid; it’s people’s reaction to it that’s morbid … nothing lasts, that’s a given, but that’s exactly why you’ve got to keep on working.” It was like on the final cut of the album Last Date, when Eric Dolphy, who would die less than a month later, says, “When you hear music, after it’s over, it’s gone in the air forever. You can never capture it again.” It was like Charlie Parker dying at thirty-four. If you’re a player, you take that as an inspiration to keep playing, harder than ever.
American Gangster Page 24
