Wynton Marsalis with the Jazz at the Lincoln Centre Orchestra feat. Wayne Shorter - ‘Yes or No’

Opinions vary about Wynton Marsalis. For one who plays the trumpet so brilliantly and composes so prolifically, he attracts a lot of opprobrium. Perhaps that’s the problem: it might all seem to come too easily to him. Big band, small band, classical orchestra, suite, dance piece; he can do ‘em all. ‘I’m a jazz musician who can play classical music,’ he has described himself. Perhaps that’s what upset the notoriously truculent Miles Davis, who (in)famously cold-shouldered Young Wynton at a concert once in Vancouver. Miles was a lifelong innovator with a limited technique; maybe he was a trifle jealous. Maybe it’s the way that Wynton does ‘em all: Shouldn’t someone so gifted, with so much class and style and technique, be more of an original? Perhaps his respect for the jazz elders he venerates is a little too respectful. Who knows? It’s evident that his father, the pianist Ellis, and his brothers Branford the saxophonist, Delpheayo the trombonist and Jason the drummer never attract the detractors in such numbers.

I certainly like Wynton Marsalis. Very much. Apart from the fact that he spells it with an ‘i’ and not a ‘y’ (which is akin to ‘u’ for ‘you’), his Citi Movement is one of my favourite studio albums of the modern era and the (count ‘em) 7-CD Live at the Village Vanguard is a monumental live recording. And I like him, too, as a commentator. On documentaries, he talks eloquently and passionately from a genuine love for and knowledge of jazz heritage.

All of which suggests that it’s high time to spotlight him in some capacity. I thought about that extraordinary live concert in separate rooms that he stage-managed during COVID lockdown. To my technologically-challenged mind, the logistics of getting the Lincoln Centre Orchestra together-but-apart to play note-perfect versions of numbers like ‘Walkin’’ that still manage to swing are mind-boggling. Extraordinary as it is, however, it does lack the chemistry or whatever it is that makes a live performance so special. More a curio for a curious time.

This one, though, is something else again. It’s made with more or less the same musicians, gathered together under Marsalis’ direction as the Lincoln Centre Orchestra, but it features an octogenarian Wayne Shorter and his music. And since Shorter got slightly short shrift as one part of Weather Report in an earlier chapter, it kills more than one luminous bird with one stone. It’s a homage to one of the finest jazz composers of his or any time while that composer was still alive, always a consummation devoutly to be wished. Moreover, despite the advancing years, Shorter clearly hadn’t lost his chops. It’s lovely to see him once again on tenor rather than soprano sax on this sumptuous version of a number that appeared on his second solo album for Blue Note, 1964’s Juju. Shorter’s is the first of three very polished solos, with Marsalis and then pianist Dan Nimmer following suit. The saxophonist’s tone still bears some distant echo of the early influence of John Coltrane, but it’s the almost imperceptible quality of melancholy that made him such an individual stylist and characterised so many of his greatest compositions. Marsalis solos almost nonchalantly with the burnished tone and lyrical precision of earlier gods, Fats Navarro and Clifford Brown. Outside of this orchestra, I’ve never heard Dan Nimmer. There’s a distinct note in his solo of McCoy Tyner, who was Shorter’s pianist on his first two Blue Note albums. 

 

One reason why I like Wynton Marsalis the human being so much is that he’s always so loyal to and generous about his sidemen, whether cohorts in the Lincoln Centre Orchestra or protégés and ‘homeys’ from his native New Orleans in his small groups of an earlier time. While critics like the almost infatuated Stanley Crouch were busy lauding him as the great new classicist, the keeper of the flame and the heir apparent to Duke Ellington, Marsalis has never appeared to let his ego get the better of him. His principal impulses seem to be those of (proscribed) experimentation, education and entertainment. Now there’s an idea for a book: Wynton Marsalis and the Three Es. For all his remarkable technical prowess – he learned trumpet as a child, was playing his first concertos as a young teenager and was assessed by the famous classical trumpeter Maurice André as ‘potentially the greatest [classical] trumpeter of all time’ – Marsalis is essentially a child of the Crescent City, where they like nothing better than to strut their stuff on the streets with the marching bands on Mardi Gras. He has never lost, as this video illustrates in my belief and to employ the title of his 1993 album, that essential Resolution to Swing.

 

Madeleine Peyroux - 'Dance Me To The End Of Love'

I confess. I once owned a 7” single by Dean Martin: a slurred version of the bluegrass musician John Hartford’s song, ‘Gentle On My Mind’. The song won a number of Grammy awards, which justifies my purchase with the benefit of hindsight, but I sold all evidence of it at the time when I became a serious fan of prog-rock in my youth. In those days, it wasn’t even cool to own a 7” single, let alone one sung by a member of the Brat Pack.

What, you might ask, has all this got to do with Madeleine Peyroux? Well, she banishes all traces of any residual embarrassment by transforming the song into something lush and beautiful on her album, The Blue Room. Despite the presence of musicians of the calibre of Larry Goldings on organ and Dean Parks on electric guitar, for a Madeleine Peyroux release, it’s just a little too awash with strings for my taste and you could argue that it’s more quality pop (even veering into country territory at times) than it is jazz. But that would be to deny her legitimate jazz singer’s ability to transform material by the likes of Buddy Holly, Randy Newman, Leonard Cohen and Warren Zevon – in a similar way to Cassandra Wilson – into something that takes on a new dimension – and to do it with a voice that reminds many punters of Billie Holiday.

So that’s by way of prefacing this wonderful example of a genuine jazz singer’s art: a live version of another Leonard Cohen, ‘Dance Me To The End Of Love’, the first number on her breakout second album, Careless Love, and arguably the definitive interpretation of a Cohen song. In fact, there are two versions and it’s very hard to draw a line between the two. There’s her performance from 16 years ago, which is slightly shorter – and therefore suggestive that the instrumental introduction heard on the version I chose finally has been elided. The band play impeccably on both versions, with an electric organ and violin added on this more recent live-in-LA rendition, while the accordion from the older one has been dispensed with. But it’s her voice itself that finally clinched it. On the older version, she sounds ever so slightly more mannered, and one or two commentators even complained that she strayed off tune on occasions. In fact, the singer had to have a cyst surgically removed from her vocal chords back in 2004 and she revealed that it took so long to re-train her voice that she even considered giving up singing. So we should lend her a little compassion and understanding. Even so, I feel that on the later rendition the ‘distinctive, honeyed croon’ (as it’s described on her website) and the Billie-esque timbre are slightly more evident. Listen to both and see what you think…

When I first came across young Ms. Peyroux, I thought for some reason best known to myself that her fluency in French suggested she must be a French Canadian. Not a bit of it. She is as American as pumpkin pie, born it seems in the hip university city of Athens, Georgia, which spawned the B52s and R.E.M. among others. She was brought up in New York and California, then moved to Paris with her mother as a 12-year-old. That by now familiar cover of Careless Love, showing her as a barefoot street urchin, became synonymous in my mind with her time spent busking on the streets of Paris, playing apparently with street musicians in the Latin Quarter. Having done her time and learnt her trade, she was discovered by Atlantic Records, who released her debut album, Dreamland.

She recorded the best-selling follow-up on Rounder Records with Joni Mitchell’s ex, Larry Klein, in the production seat. And if all that failed to add up to someone seriously hip, she worked subsequently with the likes of Walter Becker, k.d. lang, Marc Ribot, Allen Toussaint and Meshell Ndegeocello. Enough to make you spit were it not for the fact that Madeleine Peyroux seems to be a seriously decent and thoughtful human being, who acknowledges Louis Armstrong and Nina Simone among her teachers and heroes, who cites the dub poet Linton Kwesi Johnson as a ‘spoken-word genius’ and who suggests that ‘African American music has been the one constant, true path in [her] life.’ Her recent, ninth album, Let’s Walk – featuring more of her original songs this time than covers – was selected as one of the albums of the year by Konstantin Rega on All About Jazz. 

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I rest my case: Madeleine Peyroux is a serious and seriously good jazz singer.