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.
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