FC: It’s hard to think about doing something else after you’ve had the chance to do this. I would think it would be something involving science. It might also be something involving this conversation about science and faith. It might involve some music, yes. But some mix of those—God willing that my health holds up and I don’t crash my motorcycle.
DR: Would you ever consider the highest calling of mankind: private equity?
FC: I don’t think I have the skills and talent to be much use there.
DR: I’m sure you’d do very well.
5
Creation and Culture
“Here in the United States, hopefully, what we’re building are not just pyramids, are not icons to one pharaoh. What we’re building is a culture and a way of living together that we can look back on and say, [This] was good, was inclusive, was kind, was innovative, was able to fulfill the dreams of as many people as possible.”
—Barack Obama, “Exit Interview with Doris Kearns Goodwin,” September 21, 2016
WYNTON MARSALIS on Jazz, America’s National Art
Musician and Composer; Artistic Director, Jazz at Lincoln Center
“The music has three fundamental elements.
“The first is improvisation, which is our kind of individuality and what we believe in. We have rights and freedoms that are about the individual.
“Then swing, which is about nurturing common ground, finding balance with other people, working out an agenda as you go along under the pressure of time.
“And then the blues. And the blues is an optimism that’s not naïve. The blues also implies an acuity. That’s a democratic thing.”
Every culture tries to convey the essence of that culture through music. In the United States, our culture has produced a variety of musical forms over the centuries. But one particular type of music—jazz—for more than a century has probably been the most distinctively American form of music. It was initially created by African American musicians in New Orleans; expanded upon by African American and white musicians in Chicago, New York, and Kansas City; transformed into a variety of styles (swing, bebop, soul, gypsy, Latin, and big band, to mention a few); and popularized around the United States, and in time the world, by such legendary performers as Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, Dizzy Gillespie, Sidney Bechet, Benny Goodman, Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, Sarah Vaughan, Milton and Harold Batiste, Wayne Shorter, Earl Hines, Miles Davis, Ella Fitzgerald, Jelly Roll Morton, Billie Holiday, Dave Brubeck, and Herbie Hancock.
In recent decades, the royalty of the jazz world could fairly be said to be the Marsalis family: the late Ellis Marsalis Jr., a jazz pianist and educator from New Orleans, and four of his six sons—Branford, Wynton, Delfeayo, and Jason—all of whom carved out niches for themselves in the world of jazz.
Wynton, perhaps the best known of the sons, was actually trained initially as a classical musician, schooled briefly at Juilliard, and considered making a career in that genre. And he did begin his career that way, winning Grammy Awards two years in a row for classical music performance as well as jazz in 1983 and 1984. But, in time, the family tradition prevailed, and Wynton devoted himself and his trumpet primarily to the world of jazz and, like his father, to the world of jazz education.
For his jazz recordings, Wynton Marsalis has won six Grammy Awards. He was also the first jazz musician to win a Pulitzer Prize for musical composition. He is one of the very few Americans to be awarded both the National Medal of Arts and the National Humanities Medal, and he is a 2021 inductee into the prestigious American Academy of Arts and Letters. And to give jazz a prominent and permanent home in New York City, Wynton Marsalis helped to create and continues to lead Jazz at Lincoln Center.
While Wynton Marsalis’s first love is educating young people about the power, beauty, and wonders of jazz, he has a relentless performance schedule in New York, throughout the U.S., and around the world, while also managing to compose and proselytize about the magic beauty of jazz. During the COVID-19 lockdowns of 2020, Wynton found traveling and performing in person a bit more challenging. So he became a master at plying his many jazz talents virtually. And it was virtually that I had a chance to interview Wynton from his home in New York on October 25, 2020, for my Peer to Peer Bloomberg TV show. Just listening to Wynton talk about his life in jazz, and jazz’s meaning to his life, made me feel that I have missed a fair bit in life by not trying to better appreciate jazz.
* * *
DAVID M. RUBENSTEIN (DR): Do you get tired of people calling you a jazz legend?
WYNTON MARSALIS (WM): I like the word jazz. I don’t like legend.
DR: Sadly, your father passed away in April of 2020 at the age of eighty-five because of COVID. It must have been a very sad loss, because you were very close to him.
WM: Me and my brothers, we loved him so much. He was such an example for us. He was such a kind man, and a man with a large worldview, and also a large person. He didn’t do small things.
He was very philosophical. He wasn’t a touchy-feely type of person. There wasn’t a lot of hugging and “I love you” going on. But there was underneath a lot of resolve and seriousness and deep love, not just for us. He had many students who loved him and loved to tell stories about him.
DR: Your father was a prominent jazz pianist based in New Orleans. He had four sons, all of whom are jazz musicians?
WM: He had six sons, and four are jazz musicians. One of my brothers is severely autistic, and another is not a musician. That’s the one who actually is the most like him.
DR: When you were growing up, you looked up to your father. Was he somebody who said, “I want you to be a jazz trumpet player”?
WM: No, he didn’t push any of us into anything. My father really struggled when I was growing up. He was trying to play modern jazz in the era of segregation, in clubs, with a populace that didn’t like that style of music.
So much of my experience was going to sparsely populated clubs with him in colorful areas. I loved to go because I was always the only kid in the room. It started when I was three, four, five years old, and it continued till I got into high school and started to work myself.
But I always went with him and identified with his struggle, because he continued to play even though he didn’t get audience support. He was not well known. He wasn’t famous. He struggled financially. He never complained. He was very high-minded in his belief in jazz and in his belief in the necessity of it as a tool for healing people and raising consciousness.
DR: When you were growing up, you experienced racial discrimination. It was a segregated area then?
WM: Segregation, discrimination, racism—that was just a part of life. This is not philosophy I’m talking now. It’s just how it was. Your neighborhood looked a certain way. The white neighborhoods were a certain way. Black people generally lived in our area on one side of the railroad tracks. We still had ditches in our streets.
Any type of systems always worked against you. It was just what the system was. You didn’t have distance from it. When you grew up in it, it was very much a fact of life. I fought with it a lot and had a lot of problems in that system.
But most people adapted to it and were okay with it. They didn’t like it, but sometimes you’re in a bad situation. In this case we’re talking about racism. It could be anything. It could be a health situation. The degree to which you’re willing to fight against it is based on your ability to accept the pain of fighting against it.
DR: Are you surprised about the Black Lives Matter situation? Here we are in the year 2020, well past the time that you grew up, and we still have racial problems of the same type.
WM: We’re not anywhere near advanced past what I grew up with. So no, I’m not surprised by it. We have a segregation in our systems in general.
DR: Today, you’re recognized all over the country and around the world. Do you still feel you are not treated the same as you would be if you were white?
WM: Yes, I feel that.
I feel it in terms of the kind of intellectual patronization that I receive, the low-level criticism of our music. I’m subject to things—of course, nothing like what I grew up with, nor do I make a habit of complaining about it constantly, because I’m also treated with so much respect by so many people that for me to complain would be past gratuitous. It’s not a part of what I talk about.
But if you ask me the question directly, yes, I would say I’ve been treated unfairly by newspapers like the New York Times. The way Jazz at Lincoln Center has been covered is abominable. Even though we get articles, those articles are always very poorly researched. The writers oftentimes, down through history, lack the intelligence and depth of engagement with the form to be qualified to speak on it in the paper of record. Because it’s jazz, it doesn’t matter.
That’s only in direct response to your question. I don’t want to confuse it with when I was growing up, or the situations that I found myself in, or my father’s situation, or my grandfather’s. I’m very, very grateful for how I’ve been treated by people all over this country.
DR: Many African Americans of your age and my age have told me that they have given their children the so-called talk about being very careful about how they interact with the police and to be careful to not do anything that would be misinterpreted by police. Have you had that talk with your own children?
WM: Of course. I just give them examples where I was not as mindful of my mouth in an instance when I didn’t have the power. I always tell them, “Deal with them like you would deal with a dude in the street with a gun.”
That does not apply to certain people. But it’s been that way for a long time. For my kids, it was never a big dramatic thing to tell them something that’s a fact of living in this country.
But my kids have had run-ins. I’ve had run-ins. There’s a level of compliance you have to follow, just as you would have to do if you were on the street. It’s shameful that you have to be that way with police officers. But that’s the environment that we live and have been raised in.
DR: There’s a story that your father had you sit down with, I think, Al Hirt and Miles Davis, and they said, “How would you like to play the trumpet?” and they gave you a trumpet.
WM: My father was playing with Al Hirt, and Al Hirt gave me a trumpet for my sixth birthday. Before Al got me a trumpet, my father was talking to Miles, and Miles said, “Don’t get that boy a trumpet. It’s too hard.” So that is a true story.
DR: As you grew up, you were actually a classical musician more than a jazz musician. When you went to Juilliard, you were interested in classical music?
WM: I grew up always wanting to play jazz. But jazz was much more difficult to learn, in that time especially, than classical music. Because my father was a jazz musician, I was always around the music. I was raised in the culture. I love the musicians.
My father was a modern jazz musician. He wasn’t playing New Orleans jazz. But at a certain time, when I was maybe ten or eleven, he started to play New Orleans music.
It was difficult at that time for a person my age and my generation to figure out what it was, because it was not a part of the American mythology. Whereas with classical music, you had competitions and classes you could go to, so you could get a track record on your résumé. It will say that when I was fourteen, I won a competition to play the Haydn Trumpet Concerto with the New Orleans Philharmonic.
I was playing jazz the whole time. But what could I say that I did? That I played in a club called Tyler’s Beer Garden on a Wednesday.
My sensibility was always that of a jazz musician, because that’s the environment in which I was raised. From birth, I always loved my father and the other musicians. And they were living very difficult lives. I always wanted to help them and do whatever I could do to become a good enough musician for them to respect me.
I had to be able to swing and play on changes and improvise for them to have a certain level of respect for me. But I later developed a love for classical music because a guy gave me an album of the great French trumpet player Maurice André. When I saw it was a classical record, I was disappointed. When you live in segregation, you think classical music is for white people.
The guy—it was a white guy—went in the back of the streetcar, where white people didn’t really go at that time, to give me that record. He put his trumpet case down by mine. He was a college student, and I was twelve, thirteen years old. I read the back of the album, and it said that Maurice André’s family were coal miners. “Man,” I thought, “I’ve got to hear a coal miner’s kid play a trumpet.”
When I went home to put it on, man, the playing was so unbelievable and beautiful. So I started to learn these concertos off of the record. Because I was trying to learn John Coltrane’s solos and Clifford Brown’s and Miles Davis’s songs. I learned those off of the record. I learned the concertos the same way.
So I loved classical music after I encountered it. But I always came at it from the standpoint of a jazz musician.
DR: You’re the only person to ever win a Grammy in jazz and in classical music in the same year. That must have been pretty impressive.
WM: I didn’t really know what the Grammys were. There’s a funny story about my father. He went to the Grammys. He was not into those kinds of things. He sat through the whole show.
At the end of the show, I won. I was back in the hotel with him and my mother. My daddy looked at me. He said, “So that was the Grammys, huh? Don’t get me wrong. It’s great that you won. But you don’t think this means you can play, do you?” I started laughing, because I was, like, twenty-two.
I knew what he was saying, because I still, of course, had a long way to go to learn how to play. No way was my father ever small, so I didn’t take it as an insult. He didn’t care about awards and all of that. I said, “No, man, I was raised by you. I’m not looking at it like that.”
DR: Explain why jazz is so popular. It’s one of the most unique American forms of music. Classical music came from Europe, but jazz was invented in the United States. And it’s a classic American kind of invention, I would say.
You make it sound, in your book [Moving to Higher Ground], like it’s almost a religious experience to play jazz and to understand jazz. Can you explain why jazz is almost like a religion to people who care about it?
WM: Jazz is our national art form. As such, it objectifies a lot of our basic principles.
In different periods, different times, people are good at different types of arts. We know about the Dutch masters and the great playwrights of the Elizabethan period, the great Greek playwrights, the French Impressionists. I could go on and on about the German symphonists in the classical style. America was blessed with a group of musicians and the social conditions that produced this music.
The music has three fundamental elements. The first is improvisation, which is our kind of individuality and what we believe in. We have rights and freedoms that are about the individual.
Then swing, which is about nurturing common ground, finding balance with other people, working out an agenda as you go along under the pressure of time.
And then the blues. The blues is an optimism that’s not naïve. The blues also implies an acuity. That’s a democratic thing.
I’m giving you a thumb line of what jazz is. I’m giving you a thumb-line understanding of the music.
Now, suffice it to say that everything in the music ties into things that we do, down to the three branches of government. How to amend the Constitution is like adding to an arrangement. I could go on and on.
These are not superficial things that are contrived. They come out of the American way of life. This is going to be a longer answer. But it’s important, because the central question of jazz’s position in our country concerns the relationship of slavery to the American identity and our mythology as a country.
Black Americans by and large in our country have little or no knowledge of jazz. And jazz is the greatest achievement of the Afro-Am
erican culture in the context of American culture, meaning it’s Afro-American but it applies to all Americans.
Our poor public education system makes sure that a certain group remains ignorant. And the average white jazz writer is actually a rock fan who has for a long time wished that jazz would be something else without Black folks at the core of it, that maybe jazz would just die away. That’s why, if you study jazz, there’s a long-standing tradition of article after article, and decade after decade, saying, “Is jazz dead?”
Now, all of this investment in the destruction of jazz is to further obscure a big lie that jazz uncovers. It’s important to look at this, because it’s a serious thing to consider if we are to transform our nation.
If we say our nation is based on human freedom, and we are the first on earth founded on the glorious celebration of human freedom, dignity, and life, how do we then reconcile and correct the systemic dehumanizing ownership and brutalizing of a large underclass of people for free labor because of their skin color? It’s too much injustice to correct.
So we’re forced to say that those people are responsible for the problem. They’re less than human. It’s just their condition. But if it’s not their condition, it means that our mythology and belief about ourselves is not true.
DR: If I were to go to listen to a Tchaikovsky concert or a Beethoven concert, it’s going to be mostly sounding the same no matter where I’m going to listen to it, no matter what orchestra. They might play it slightly better, slightly different, but basically you know what you’re going to get when you sit down. A jazz musician can expand on what has been composed and play it differently every different time? Is that part of what jazz is all about?
WM: That’s the improvisation part. You have a lot of latitude to do things. That’s like the way Americans conduct business—all the innovations we have, the freedom we have to speak, the fact that we think we can step into a space and use our personality to transform a tradition.
The American Experiment Page 29
