Playing Changes
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Partly this was because of a winner-take-all order circumscribed by the popular media. Partly it was the result of a conservative ideology that envisioned the jazz tradition as a stricter set of practices, a smaller circle. The influence of that constriction was pervasive enough to be almost invisible for a time, functioning as a new baseline reality. The saxophonist Branford Marsalis unintentionally illustrated the point in an interview for Ken Burns’s Jazz.
Speaking of the music’s situation in the 1970s, Marsalis said: “Jazz just kind of died. It just kind of went away for a while.”10 He went on to soften the point, noting that there had been outliers who kept the fires burning under adverse conditions. But when Burns’s film was broadcast in 2001, it presented the quote without qualification, laying out the Death of Jazz as a concrete historical event, rather than an offhanded generalization. This left out a lot of context but served an irresistible narrative function for Burns and his team. For as Western orthodoxy has it, where there’s a death, you can count on a resurrection—and naturally, a savior—arriving close at hand.
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Wynton Marsalis was born in 1961, a little over a year after Branford. Because he hailed from New Orleans, the cradle of jazz, and brilliantly played the trumpet, its alpha horn, a certain notoriety was his natural due. He and Branford had played in funk and R&B bands with a halo of black pride—“For us, the dashiki-clad, big-Afro revolutionary was it,”11 Wynton once recalled—but his identity was forged in a conscientious blaze of inheritance and generational respect. That and an intimidating level of self-confidence, backed by feats of bravura.
Jazz musicians of a certain age still describe Wynton’s arrival in New York, as a first-year student at Juilliard, in terms befitting a rare meteorological event. Steven Bernstein, a trumpeter almost exactly the same age, encountered him immediately. On one of his first nights in town, Bernstein showed up to play with a rehearsal band led by the saxophonist Paul Jeffrey:
Wynton and I were in the trumpet section. It’s obvious we were kids, almost wearing out our high school clothes. He played lead on a song, and he played it perfectly. Then we did Coltrane’s “Moment’s Notice.” He played a solo, just an incredible solo. Then we did a blues, and everyone got a chorus. He did two choruses of eighth notes, circular breathing. I was just like, “Fuck. Whoa!” Then about a week later, someone called me to go to Giardinelli’s trumpet shop, because Yamaha was showing new instruments after hours. I walk in and hear someone playing the Brandenburg Concerto on a piccolo trumpet. “Oh, shit!” It’s him. Everyone’s jaws dropped.12
Some version of this scenario was surely repeated in other settings. “Two weeks into it, everybody was saying, ‘There’s a kid in town,’ ” Bernstein remembered. “My trumpet teacher told me: ‘You just can’t worry about it. You could practice all your life and never be able to do that.’ ”
Marsalis’s undeniable virtuosity, in multiple modes and traditions, would have been remarkable at any point in jazz’s development. At this point in particular, it seemed like the answer to a plea that few had been bold enough to make. More than twenty years later, the Atlantic critic David Hajdu recalled that “Marsalis was ideally equipped to lead a cultural-aesthetic movement suited to the time, a renaissance that raised public esteem for and the popular appeal of jazz through a return to the music’s traditional values: jazz for the Reagan revolution.”13
That’s a barbed appreciation, but it bears down helpfully on one factor critical to the young trumpeter’s reception, which was timing. Within the jazz fold, Marsalis receives grateful credit and scathing criticism for the emergence of a neoclassical strain in the music, as if he were the sole author of the shift. In fact, he was neatly positioned to catch that wave just as it was cresting. He arrived in New York a few years into the repertory boom and its accompanying jazz-is-back ballyhoo, warmed up and ready to go. His clarion tone and unassailable technique were as striking as his youth and composure, but there was a larger story unfolding, one precisely primed for the rise of a diligent young hero like himself.
A key part of the narrative around jazz’s resurgence was a passing of the torch from one generation to the next—another trope made tangible by Marsalis, whose father was a noted pianist, Ellis Marsalis. And in 1980, while still at Juilliard, he was hired by the redoubtable hard-bop drummer Art Blakey, who took pride in his mentorship of younger musicians. Marsalis went on tour with Blakey’s ferocious band, the Jazz Messengers, quickly becoming its star attraction.
By 1981 Marsalis was also touring with Hancock, Carter, and Williams: the sterling V.S.O.P. rhythm team, and a direct link to the legacy of Miles Davis. One result of that association was Quartet, a Hancock album on Columbia in ’82; another was Marsalis’s self-titled debut, issued in the same year and on the same label (and with the same personnel, in parts).
Wynton Marsalis, produced by Hancock, wasn’t a V.S.O.P. album by another name, despite the fact that it included one composition apiece by Hancock, Carter, and Williams. (One of these, Carter’s “RJ,” had appeared on Davis’s E.S.P.) The album also introduced three pieces by Marsalis, including “Hesitation,” a brisk tune designed to highlight some brotherly sparring between Wynton and Branford. A variation on George Gershwin’s standard “I Got Rhythm” progression, “Hesitation” features a melody with an intriguingly off-balance tonality, patently influenced by Ornette Coleman’s early quartet writing. (The brothers articulate a few notes in the line with a Colemanesque scoop reminiscent of chortling, or the musical equivalent of “Humph!” As in Coleman’s band, there’s no piano in sight.)
Elsewhere on the album, Marsalis steps out of the V.S.O.P. matrix to lead a rhythm section of his peers: Kenny Kirkland on piano, Jeff “Tain” Watts on drums, and either Charles Fambrough or Clarence Seay on bass. Their comportment suggests something other than a junior varsity crew. On the album’s curtain raiser, a tune by Marsalis called “Father Time,” they shift between cruising swing and a higher polyrhythmic gear, periodically modulating tempos in a way that the Davis Quintet helped invent. The audacity is impressive: on an album that otherwise features one of the superlative piano-bass-drums alignments in jazz, these youngbloods (only Fambrough was out of his twenties) proudly held their own.
The historicist tone of the age is one reason why Marsalis—recognized as a major acquisition by his label, Columbia—made his debut in the company of elders, who could lend experience and an implicit cosign. Another reason might have been simple expedience; he had already established a rapport with V.S.O.P. But having proven that much, Marsalis didn’t need to repeat any intergenerational gestures in 1983. His next jazz album, Think of One, featured Kirkland and Watts. And in what proved to be an effective bit of marketing, Columbia released it only a few months after Marsalis’s classical debut, Trumpet Concertos, consisting of works by Haydn, Hummel, and Leopold Mozart, and recorded with the National Philharmonic Orchestra under Raymond Leppard.
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In the decades since Marsalis’s arrival, it has become all too easy to forget the magnitude of the impression left by his multivalent talent—by the notable fact that he was at once a virtuoso in the classical mold and a dashing young paragon of jazz. It’s easy to forget because those two ideas aren’t as incongruent or discordant as they used to be, which is one measure of his project’s success.
What’s striking now about the presentation of Marsalis back then is how shrewd and brand-conscious it seems. Consider for a moment the 26th Annual Grammy Awards, celebrating achievements in the record industry for 1983. Held at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles on February 28, 1984, this edition of the Grammys is often remembered as Michael Jackson’s night: still basking in the world-beating success of Thriller, he won a record eight awards. Partly as a function of Jackson’s celebrity, the network broadcast reached 48.3 million viewers, the highest rating in Grammy history, not likely to be sur
passed. This was a peak moment for the monoculture, that chimerical ideal of true popular consensus, reinforced by the image-making apparatus of a new and explosively successful music video channel, MTV. Jackson’s video for “Billie Jean” was one of the first by a black artist to receive heavy rotation on the channel, after considerable pressure from his label. Instantly iconic, it helped cement MTV’s place in modern life, and Jackson’s stature as the King of Pop. The Grammys were effectively his coronation.
But more than one young potentate was anointed that evening. Marsalis, twenty-two, arrived with nominations in both jazz and classical categories, another unprecedented achievement in the awards history, and one that the show’s producers amplified with clever pageantry. After a respectful introduction from John Denver, the evening’s host, the young trumpeter appeared onstage in a dark tuxedo jacket, next to a studio chamber orchestra that, like the set design, was festooned in formal white. With extravagant ease and precision, Marsalis performed a selection from Trumpet Concertos: the Rondo from Hummel’s Concerto for Trumpet and Orchestra in E Major.
He happened to play the same piece months later in a concert at Lincoln Center, where he was reviewed in The New York Times. “There was enough virtuosity for three concertos,” wrote Will Crutchfield, singling out the Rondo. “Impeccable scales, faster than one would have thought possible; rapid-fire repeated notes; delicate echoes; dazzling arpeggios—there was something for everybody. Near the end came a rising chromatic chain of trills such as to leave the sourest critic with a silly grin of delight on his face.”14
The impact was much the same at the Grammys, loud cheers mingling with the applause. Then Denver announced that Marsalis would show another side of his talent, performing “Knozz-Moe-King,” the opening track from Think of One. Stepping to another part of the stage, Marsalis joined his young quintet, looking slightly and uncharacteristically nervous. After a tentative start, this, too, became a demonstration of prowess: a four-minute mile stamped by chromatic tensions, with an entirely different tempo set by each soloist.
Afterward, the band filed into the wings to await the announcement of Best Jazz Instrumental Performance, Soloist. When Marsalis was declared the winner (out of a nominee pool of his elders, including Blakey, on whose album he was featured), he walked to the podium and gave an off-the-cuff acceptance speech with a transparent subtext. First thanking his parents for enduring his many hours of practice, he then acknowledged the staff of CBS Records “for presenting my work with the quality that’s necessary to get to the elite jazz audience.” (He put a slight but discernible emphasis on the word “elite.”) “And I would like to thank all of the guys in the band, because without the band I wouldn’t be able to play anything; this music is very difficult.”
There was more: “And last but certainly, certainly not least, I’d like to thank all of the great masters of American music: Charlie Parker, Louis Armstrong, Thelonious Monk. All the guys who set a precedent in Western art, and gave an art form to the American people that cannot be limited by enforced trends or…bad taste.” The last two words came with a crooked grin, raised eyebrows and a little head waggle, as in the delivery of a punch line. It seemed clear that Marsalis had a target in mind—Hancock, who appeared on this same awards ceremony to perform his single “Rockit,” the winner of Best R&B Instrumental Performance that year.
Hancock was forty-three, and while he had been serving as an advisor, bandmate, and producer to Marsalis in acoustic jazz settings, he was also riding his latest category-exploding pop smash. He’d made “Rockit” with Bill Laswell and Michael Beinhorn, whose vanguardist rock band Material was a staple of the downtown scene in New York. Along with Hancock’s synthesizer hook, the signature element of the track was the rhythmic record scratching of a prominent DJ from the Bronx, GrandMixer D.ST.
“Rockit” was the breakout single from Hancock’s album Future Shock, whose title perfectly conveyed the impression made at the Grammys. Hancock took the stage with a keytar slung over a black leather jacket and a reflective silver shirt. His band had synth drums and a stacked keyboard rig, with D.ST on a raised platform behind a set of Technics 1200s, in a wireless headset and blocky sunglasses. The stage design echoed the frenetic, posthuman surrealism of the song’s music video, in heavy rotation on MTV. There were herky-jerky robots, including three pairs of disembodied legs kicking and flailing above the stage. (A few of the robots were revealed, in a climactic flourish, to be break-dancers in disguise.) The performance was a pop-culture milestone, often cited by future turntablists as transformative.
But it wasn’t befitting the highbrow ideals so firmly articulated—and so effectively embodied—by Marsalis. The reproach that he issued from the podium was in line with a few other points he implied: that his own musical pursuit was advanced (“very difficult”) and aspirational (for “the elite jazz audience”), with a seriousness of purpose worthy of its noble lineage (“a precedent in Western art”). Strongly implicit in Marsalis’s appearance at the Grammys, too, was the conviction that jazz deserved a stature and cachet equivalent to classical music. This was an audacious proposition even in the mid-eighties: Dr. Billy Taylor and others were still waging what seemed like a long-odds campaign.
For the arbiters of high culture, only a young hero with the cultural literacy and aesthetic mobility of Marsalis—somebody capable of pirouetting through a concerto in one moment and improvising through an obstacle course the next—could make this argument in good faith. As for the unwashed rabble with no appreciation for such an accomplished art form, Marsalis could still communicate with sheer mastery and evident sophistication. He didn’t receive the standing ovation that Hancock got for “Rockit,” but he did reach those 48.3 million viewers with his message. To the extent that a single turn in the spotlight can set the terms for a movement, this was that turn. And anybody who missed the broadcast, or somehow missed the point, would soon find plenty of additional evidence to support Marsalis’s serious-minded convictions, much of it emanating from the hand and horn of the man himself.
In 1985 he released the defining statement of his early period, Black Codes (From the Underground), an album that pressed advanced postbop techniques into the service of an expressive, volatile, and heroic music with ample precedent in the particulars but no exact precursor as a whole. Kirkland’s pianism was biting, harmonically restive, and set at a forward tilt, suggesting a targeted update to the crashing modalities of McCoy Tyner. Watts created a bulldozer propulsion that had as much to do with rumbling seizures and unexpected crashes as with a swinging ride cymbal. The accord between Wynton and Branford was sharp and jostling, often voiced with tight dissonance, as on a sixties-Miles set of trapdoors titled “Delfeayo’s Dilemma” (a nod to their younger brother, a trombonist). A superheated track called “Chambers of Tain” crystallized a proprietary band strategy called “burnout,” whereby the musicians attacked a tune with plunging intensity in a prescribed key but with a contingent tempo and no set chord changes, conveying the adrenalized, precarious feeling of racing along a ridge line.
These were not conservative values. Nor was the political thrust of the album, a reference to the postbellum laws in Southern states that restricted African-American freedoms. But Marsalis presented his argument in a context of disciplined erudition: the cover depicts a young boy in a classroom, looking thoughtfully in the direction of the chalkboard, where the album’s loaded title has been scrawled. The boy wears glasses, a tie, and a dress shirt with sleeves rolled up; it’s a portrait of the artist as a young man. Also within the trajectory of his gaze is a trumpet, planted upright on the teacher’s desk. And just beyond it, a globe.
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Marsalis and his granite convictions had an almost immediate effect on the culture of jazz, the public perception of jazz and, consequently, the business of jazz. He and his peer group became identified as a cohort, the so-called Young Lions. Major-label record de
als were handed out, tours and festival dates promptly booked. Along with Wynton, this early contingent included Terence Blanchard, a trumpeter who came up one year behind him in New Orleans, and Donald Harrison, an alto saxophonist from a Mardi Gras Indian family there. (It was no accident that Blanchard and Harrison, like the Marsalises before them, were also alumni of the Jazz Messengers.)
“The Young Lions of Jazz” had been the name of a concert in 1982 at the Kool Jazz Festival (formerly known as the Newport Jazz Festival–New York). The program was conceived by Nesuhi Ertegun and Bruce Lundvall, top executives at two leading major record labels, as a showcase of the youthful talent on their rosters. George Wein, the producer, came up with the “Young Lions” phrase, which for him was a reference to the World War II novel by Irwin Shaw. (Nesuhi, who like his younger brother, Ahmet, had been born in Istanbul, jokingly threatened to change the name to “the Young Turks.”)15 The concert’s lineup was stylistically diverse, including Marsalis and the versatile guitarist Kevin Eubanks alongside avant-garde operators like Abdul Wadud, the baritone saxophonist Hamiet Bluiett, the flutist James Newton, and the pianist Anthony Davis.
The Young Lions had also been the name of a short-lived band that released one self-titled album in the early sixties, with Lee Morgan on trumpet and Wayne Shorter on tenor saxophone. An extension of Morgan and Shorter’s smartly pugnacious hookup in the frontline of the Jazz Messengers, this band had long been a proud footnote in the hard-bop annals. Now, given Marsalis’s affinities with Morgan and Shorter—and his successive link to Blakey—its legacy found renewed purpose. An album culled from the Kool Jazz Festival concert was released on Lundvall’s label Elektra Musician, and its wild abundance of personalities and approaches hardly made for a coherent whole. This could be one reason why The Young Lions proved less durable than “the Young Lions,” as a marketing slogan and an update of hard bop’s aesthetic ideal. Another reason was articulated by the critic Robert Palmer in the Times: