Wynton Marsalis

[Big Beat Steve]

4 hours ago, Scott Dolan said:

So are all artists that play Bebop simply imitators or museum curators? 

How about those who still play 60's-style Free Jazz? 

Just wondering, because I never hear them disparaged similarly. 

Good points.

As for this ...

(quote)

I think of it all as a shop, where Wynton and his disciples are specializing in painting very good copies of old masters paintings, for some weird reason thinking that's exactly what humanity needs. Anything beyond impressionists is anathema to them. They started emulating Renoir and Monet, but eventually that appeared too modern for them, so they went back in time and started making (almost) perfect copies of Dutch Masters and now trying at Caravaggio and Raphael. If market is right, they may even adjust their philosophy and start making copies of Picasso- (almost) perfect- but copies nevertheless.

That is not what jazz is about though. So, his (arguably) impressive technical chops aside, he's always been just an imitator and very likely will remain as such.

(unquote)

These pseudo-discussions about what's new are getting to be a bit wearisome. They have been led as long ago as at the time of the moldy figs discussions (remember how Ruby Braff was disparaged in the 50s by some self-professed progressists - or musicians like Scott Hamilton a bit later?)
Of course if someone touts a specific style or period of jazz as the ONLY valid form of jazz then this is highly debatable and unjustified. Just as it is highly debatable to tout what's come as the latest fad that tried to sail under the flag of jazz (even if it was lumped in only there by marketing whiz kids because it did not fit in anywhere else either) as the highest, best, ultimate, unsurpassable expression of today's jazz. It isn't either. It's just different. Besides, if it was only about what's totally and absolutely new that "it's about, though", then what's been said about rock might also be said about jazz by now: "Everything that can possibly be played in the style of xxx (insert your pet love or hate style of music) has already been played somewhere, sometime out there." So what would remain? Burps? Grunts?

But if you prefer to play in a specific idiom or style within the field of jazz that you like best and add new shadings, accents and nuances to that idiom (which I am certain Marsalis does - he is not one to do another series of Time-Life series recreations, after all ) then there is nothing wrong with it at all. Jazz takes many facets but it has a specific lineage that makes jazz music recognizable as belonging to that family (and therefore tradition) of jazz. IMO, yes ...

 

Edited October 20, 2017 by Big Beat Steve

[paul secor]

3 hours ago, Gheorghe said:

 

Maybe people expected from him more, that he will become the next logic step in trumpet styles after Roy, Diz, Brownie, Miles, Don Cherry etc.

 

If I listen to those people (and others from those eras), I don't feel any need to listen to him.
There have been others who have played in styles before their time whose playing I've enjoyed. Wynton ain't one of them.

[JSngry]

Yeah, seldom engaging for me. That live album he did for Blue Note a few years ago was solid, though, actually quite engaging.

But overall, that gumbo he's cookin', I ain't smellin' it. Sorry.

[Dmitry]

 

I suspect that there are musicians proper, i.e. those that can carry a tune,  and those individuals who use the sounds they produce out of musical instruments to "express themselves", and are otherwise incapable of playing actual music, or can play on rudimentary level. 

 

Edited October 21, 2017 by Dmitry

[Scott Dolan]

2 hours ago, JSngry said:

Yeah, seldom engaging for me. That live album he did for Blue Note a few years ago was solid, though, actually quite engaging.

But overall, that gumbo he's cookin', I ain't smellin' it. Sorry.

Interesting choice. 

While a very good date, I put that one behind Live At Blues Alley, and WAY behind the Village Vanguard box set. 

Now, I like a lot of his material, yet admit that he's also released a lot of duds. That said, if one only hears Black Codes (From The Undergroud), and the Village Vaguard box, I could say you're good as far as Wynton goes. 

[JSngry]

Black Codes, yeah, I heard that in real time and dug it for a while. It kinda ran out of steam for me after a year or so. That was around the time I began to become disenchanted with Wynton in general. But I did enjoy it at first.

A lot of my enthusiasm was that finally somebody was referencing Plugged Nickel Miles, which had seemed on the verge of falling into the limbo of the generally unknown. I had gone through the Japanese LPs and wanted more of that type of group playing. But then the Plugged Nickel box came out, and there was a lot more of that, and it sounded more organic than did Wynton's things. Combine that with his really ill-informed pronouncements, I just said, hey, Julius Hemphill's still making records, Henry Threadgill's still making records, LOTS of people still making records, I got the Plugged Nickel box now, what am I getting out of THIS guy NOW. And that question pretty much answered itself as time went on.

[Scott Dolan]

I still wonder how he'd be judged if he'd never said a single word publicly. 

Seems to me that he's so weighed down by his well-earned karmic luggage that there really is no way to judge his Music in a vacuum. 

Edited October 20, 2017 by Scott Dolan

[JSngry]

I think he's a great trumpeter, seriously. And obviously a very good businessman and bandleader. His bands always reflect his musical POV, which is to his credit.

I just don't care for that musical POV. It seems kind of.....elaborately stunted. And I think I'd feel that way no matter his public pronouncements. When he first broke, the records were all, like, wait, something's coming, something bigger, better, more fully formed, and that something just never came.

To me, he's kinda like a better funded, more sociologically loaded Bob Wilber. I like Bob Wilber well enough, but I can - and have -  gone through all parts of life hearing a minimal amount of Bob Wilbur and feel plenty well-served.

[Scott Dolan]

I guess I had the benefit of discovering him well after the initial hype, and subsequent disappointment. So I have a more "this is well done, and I can appreciate it in its own level" thing when it comes to his music. 

But, I CAN see how following his career in real time would have introduced a problematic angle. Hell, I didn't even have any idea how much he and Crouch besmirched 60's Avant Garde, and I was heavily INTO 60's Avant Garde when I discovered Marsalis. Though I still have to admit that I couldn't care less. Not being a player in the Jazz world, all the politics and bullshit mean nothing to me. 

[mandrill]

7 hours ago, Scott Dolan said:

So are all artists that play Bebop simply imitators or museum curators? 

How about those who still play 60's-style Free Jazz? 

Just wondering, because I never hear them disparaged similarly. 

Frankly, I have little respect for all those late Coltrane & Ayler wannabes either. And I'd agree with you that for every genuine practitioner and developer of that style (David S. Ware, Joe McPhee, William Parker, Dennis Gonzalez, etc.) there are countless imitators, especially in Europe. And someone like Ken Vandermark would probably fit a definition of a curator in a Museum of Free Jazz, even that he's driven by the best intentions and the genuine love of that music.  

But:

1. That style of jazz is rather a fringe movement (many of current practitioners won't even consider it jazz and rather use "free improvisation" for the lack of better term). The reason those folks are not disparaged similarly is because they are not in a forefront, like Marsalis and not getting anywhere near his access to money and resources needed to grow and promote this music. Neither they have a mission to make jazz "great again" by looking at the past only.

2. To the best of my knowledge, none of those people disparage any other/older styles of jazz (unlike Marsalis, who at some point was openly hostile and made disparaging remarks about free jazz, fusion, etc., to make all those styles sound illegitimate in the jazz canon), they just for one reason or another choose to play in a different idiom.

 

3 hours ago, Dmitry said:

Bwahaha. Like! 

I suspect that there are musicians proper, i.e. those that can carry a tune,  and those individuals who use the sounds they produce out of musical instruments to "express themselves", and are otherwise incapable of playing actual music, or can play on rudimentary level. 

 

You be the judge. That's the closest I could find to Mats Gustafsson playing "straight ahead" jazz.

 

Edited October 20, 2017 by mandrill

[mandrill]

3 hours ago, Scott Dolan said:

That said, if one only hears Black Codes (From The Undergroud), and the Village Vaguard box, I could say you're good as far as Wynton goes. 

Kind of telling that for an artist who's been in a forefront of jazz for 30+ years, his best work is something he's done in the very beginning of his career. But even those albums are nothing special or innovating in a wider view- just an (almost) perfect copy of Miles 2nd quintet sound.

[Scott Dolan]

So what?! Within the Jazz genre, everybody now sounds like someone that came before. So nobody can simply have their own voice, right? 

[JSngry]

I dissent from the opinion that Wynton just "copied" the 2nd Quintet. That group was very improvisational and fluid, very "real time".

What Wynton successfully did (and was presumably his intent), was to codify the elements of those improvisational moments into a mainstream-able compositional language for jazz combo. Andrew hill, actually, had been working on that type of thing in a more macro sense years before, but again, Andrew Hill was an improvisational spirit, and his devices (such as they were) were utilized in that spirit. Wynton kinda used all that shifting type stuff as means to set ends.

And that was interesting at first, because I was kinda thinking, well, it's about time somebody started looking at composition that way. But then it just...stalled out, and the longer it went on, the more it became apparent that this was not the seeds of a new thing, it was going to be the end result, and I was like, ok, you're not going to keep going, are you...and that really disappointed me, because, you know, here's this guy with this massive skill set as a player, a really solid business backing, and all he's going to do is codify and pontificate? And then the longer form works started happening, the concept albums and "ambitious" things, and, like...oh lord jesus, please don't keep doing this, but it kept getting done and done and done, all this potential not being embraced, and yet all this institutional empowerment and....yuck. It just turned into yuck.

Enough time has passed, and although Wynton has seriously firmed up his business position as far as "institutional" power, musically, he's pretty much a non-power these days. enough music has bypassed him in terms of the "overall jazz audience", that he no longer seems a real "threat" to anything I care about, the damage was done, and now we go forth in the aftermath. THAT'S jazz, going on in spite of the damage, you can't kill it, it will evolve by any means necessary because it's not about any kind of "style", it's about spirit. You can kill a body, but not a spirit, a spirit will live in whatever body it can get.

[Scott Dolan]

1 hour ago, JSngry said:

And that was interesting at first, because I was kinda thinking, well, it's about time somebody started looking at composition that way. But then it just...stalled out, and the longer it went on, the more it became apparent that this was not the seeds of a new thing, it was going to be the end result, and I was like, ok, you're not going to keep going, are you...and that really disappointed me, because, you know, here's this guy with this massive skill set as a player, a really solid business backing, and all he's going to do is codify and pontificate? And then the longer form works started happening, the concept albums and "ambitious" things, and, like...oh lord jesus, please don't keep doing this, but it kept getting done and done and done, all this potential not being embraced, and yet all this institutional empowerment and....yuck. It just turned into yuck.

 

And that's one of my only issues with his material. Once the long-form "hey look at me, I'm the DUKE!" material kicked in full-force, so did his musical long-windedness. The biggest problem being that amongst those long and meandering pieces lie some truly great tunes. But they get so lost in the denseness of the overall pieces that they're woefully lost art. In This House, On This Morning, Citi Movement, and Blood On The Fields all have astonishing moments hidden within their deeply-in-need-of-an-editor length. 

I almost think that had he had even the slightest conception of brevity, many would judge his Duke-esque pieces differently. Unfortunately, what history leaves us with is moments of greatness obscured by interminable stretches of tedium. 

[JSngry]

Well, see, that's the thing. Duke/Strayhorn, they were there own editors. The great ones usually are.

Duke got SO much shit about BB&B, and so much of it was misguided, but it did need some editing, imo. And he kept editing it, although to/for what ends, I'm still not sure. But still, he did it. A guy who keeps rambling, not for effect, but because he doesn't know any better, that's just....stunted.

[Scott Dolan]

Yep, and Crouch mentioned Black, Brown, & Biege several times in the liner notes for the THREE disc Blood On The Fields. 

Some dots put themselves together. 

[JSngry]

Yeah, well, you can spend your life either trying to do the next or creating the first, but seldom does one successfully result in the other.

[Larry Kart]

A 2004 take on "Blood on the Fields" from my book:

 

"Almost twenty years have passed, and it now seems clear that despite  the prominence that the  engines of cultural politics and publicity have  given to Wynton Marsalis,  his music  (especially  his latter-day  orchestral  work)  is a non-issue  aesthetically and has been for some time.  Such  Marsalis pastiches  as  the oratorio Blood on the Fields (1997), the suite  In This House,  On This Morning  (1993) and  the ballets Citi Movement  (1991), Jazz (1993) and Jump Start (1995) seem to come  from  a strange  alternate  universe --one in which some of the surface  gestures  of Duke Ellington (Marsalis’s chief model)  have been  filtered through the toylike  sensibility  of Raymond Scott. 

"Marsalis remains  a skilled instrumentalist,  but, despite his early promise, he has not become a strikingly  individual soloist. As for his  orchestral  works,  their relative  poverty of invention  becomes clear when  they are placed   alongside  the likes of George Russell’s Chromatic Universe  and Living Time,  Oliver Nelson’s Afro-American Sketches,  Bill Holman’s  Further Adventures,  Muhal Richard Abrams’s The Hearinga Suite,  Bob Brookmeyer’s  Celebration,  John Carter’s Roots and Folklore, and,  of course,  the more successful orchestral  works of Ellington himself.  A brief comparison between one of the  major  vocal episodes  in the Pulitzer Prize-winning Blood on the Fields,  “Will the Sun Come Out?” (sung by Cassandra Wilson), and  the opening  vocal movement   of Ellington’s  otherwise  instrumental  Liberian Suite (1947), “I Like the Sunrise” (sung by Al Hibbler),  might be revealing.   The works  are comparable in theme--the subject of Blood on the Fields  is slavery in America, while Liberian Suite was commissioned  by the  West African republic  of Liberia, which was founded  by freed American slaves in 1847--and   both “Will the Sun Come Out?” (which  lasts nine  minutes)  and “I Like the Sunrise” (half as long) are meditative   semi-laments in which hope,  pain, frustration, and doubt  are meant  to joust  with each other. The melody  of “I Like the Sunrise” has an equivocal, sinuous grace  (climbing  in pitch toward a point  of harmonic  release  it cannot  reach, it expressively  stalls out  on the words “raised up high,  far out of sight”), while  the key  turn in the lyric--“I like the sunrise…it brings new hope, they say” (my emphasis) is commented upon  and deepened  by a tapestry  of orchestral and solo  voices  (particularly  those of baritone saxophonist Harry Carney and clarinetist Jimmy Hamilton). By contrast,  the three  verses  of “Will the Sun Come Out?” go almost nowhere  in twice the span of  time. The melody itself, despite Wilson’s attempts to  shape  it, is hardly  a melody at all but a lumpy  recitative  that sounds as though  it had been  assembled  bar  by bar,  while  the ensemble’s  instrumental interventions  and the solos of pianist  Eric Reed  merely  distend  things further. It could be argued that within the overall  dramatic  scheme  of Blood on the Fields, “Will the Sun Come Out?” is meant  to be an episode of near-paralysis,  and that the music ought  to mirror this. But listen to “Will the Sun Come Out?” and ask yourself  how often you have  heard nine minutes  of music pass this uneventfully."

[Larry Kart]

5 hours ago, Scott Dolan said:

I still wonder how he'd be judged if he'd never said a single word publicly. 

Seems to me that he's so weighed down by his well-earned karmic luggage that there really is no way to judge his Music in a vacuum. 

As I've said before so often that I'm boring myself, my sense is 1) that Wynton as a player initially was something of an imp -- technically dazzling and with a pocket full of firecrackers, a la latter-day Charlie Shavers perhaps, but then 2) either on his own hook or through the influence of Crouch and others, he re-conceived himself as the Noble Young Prince of the Realm, and began to try to play accordingly -- as though every solo were a lecture-demonstration of how to be solemn , noble, heroic and all grown up.  (Was this all some  sort of jazz takeoff on "The Lion King"?) But  faux anything, especially  faux nobility,  is not only fairly easy to detect in jazz but also fairly hard to take.

P.S. I didn't mean "latter-day Charlie Shavers" but all Charlie Shavers. BTW, I once played, IIRC circa 1979 or '80, the title track of that great Swingville Shavers-Coleman Hawkins album "Hawk Eye," for the young Wynton in a Blindfold Test-manner, not trying to trick or challenge him but merely to get his reaction to some terrific trumpet playing that I thought he might feel was akin to his own at the time. Unfortunately, he did feel like I was administering some kind of "test" of his jazz knowledge and thus he was guarded and noncommittal.|

Those exchanges between Shavers and Hawkins!
 

 

[JSngry]

1 hour ago, Larry Kart said:

 (Was this all some  sort of jazz takeoff on "The Lion King"?) 

The Lion is not amused at this notion...

[Scott Dolan]

Good stuff, Larry. 

You really underscore something I was saying earlier. Will The Sun Come Out? Brother, I couldn't have even told you that was a song from Blood On The Fields. While songs like Calling Out The Indians, You Don't Hear No Drums, Blood On The Fields, and God Don't Like Ugly are all quite good, IMO, they're so buried in the muck and tedium that they simply get lost. 

My son's named Wynton Coltrane, though not because Wynton is my favorite artist. I actually wanted to name him Thelonious Coltrane. But the wife wasn't having it. So we were preparing Thanksgiving dinner for us and a few of our elderly neighbors and I loaded up some fairly tame background music in the ol' 5 disc CD carousel changer (remember those?!), and one was a Wynton Marsalis album (Midnight Blues, IIRC, which opens with what I think is an outstanding version of The Party's Over, but drops over a cliff after that). So the wife suddenly blurts out, "let's name him Wynton. That's a cool name." 

I tell you this story because it just struck me that that really sums up Wynton quite a bit. Harmless background music, with the occasional flourish. I have 34 discs of Wynton's music. But if I broke them down, I could probably produce about 8 really great discs (V.V. box, and Black Codes) and then maybe 3 decent compilation discs. So yeah, less than a third of his output that I own. 

Editing, man...

Though I'm still befuddled by Jim paying lip service to In The House Of Tribes, of all albums. Not that it isn't good, because it is. But because of his live albums, I'd rank it the lowest. Excellent playing, but the friends and sycophants that made up the "audience" that night do get rather tiresome after the first few tunes. 

Edited October 20, 2017 by Scott Dolan

[clifford_thornton]

8 hours ago, Dmitry said:

Bwahaha. Like! 

I suspect that there are musicians proper, i.e. those that can carry a tune,  and those individuals who use the sounds they produce out of musical instruments to "express themselves", and are otherwise incapable of playing actual music, or can play on rudimentary level. 

 

I dunno, I've heard very little contemporary music that recalls in any way the Free Jazz of the '60s. 

The blowing sessions in that mold that I have seen performed by younger (slightly) players have not been all that interesting. 

[Scott Dolan]

Brotzmann, Gayle, Mateen, for example? 

Not that I have anything against any of those three. Just saying. 

Though, I thought Dimitry was talking more about the Euro Free Improv guys. 

[JSngry]

3 hours ago, Scott Dolan said:

Though I'm still befuddled by Jim paying lip service to In The House Of Tribes, of all albums. Not that it isn't good, because it is. But because of his live albums, I'd rank it the lowest. Excellent playing, but the friends and sycophants that made up the "audience" that night do get rather tiresome after the first few tunes. 

I like it because the cat's just jamming on tunes. No pretense, no reach exceeding grasp. Just jamming. He's a helluva trumpet player, and an excellent musician. He's just not a creative force of any real merit, at least not in my world. But he's not aspiring to anything like that here, he's just a cat jamming. It's refreshing.

[HutchFan]

1 hour ago, JSngry said:

I like it because the cat's just jamming on tunes. No pretense, no reach exceeding grasp. Just jamming. He's a helluva trumpet player, and an excellent musician. He's just not a creative force of any real merit, at least not in my world. But he's not aspiring to anything like that here, he's just a cat jamming. It's refreshing.

I'm with you, Jim. House of Tribes convinces me more than any of Wynton's other live albums -- MUCH more than the Vanguard recordings. (I have the Blues Alley recording, but I haven't listened in a long time and I don't have any strong recollections of it.) 

Listen to "Green Chimneys" on House of Tribes.  Wynton actually sounds like he's having fun.

OTOH, the fun on the Vanguard recording is "fun" -- forced fun that isn't fun; it's a put-on.  (At least it sounds that way to me.  I cringe when I hear it.)

 

As always, others' mileage may vary.