Jazz & Me - Part 7 - The New Sherriff in Town

Jazz’s evolution toward rock fusion naturally generated a backlash among musicians, but none were more damning that a young New Orleans trumpet player named Wynton Marsalis. A rising star in the 1980s who played with Herbie and Wayne while also showing impressive talent as a classical musician, Marsalis led a revival of the traditional jazz as it was known between the early swing days through the bebop era and into the 1960s.

He launched a six-album series of jazz standards entitled Marsalis Standard Time. He led a movement to bring back the work of Duke Ellington, who he declared the greatest jazz composer of all time. He was the driving force behind the creation of Jazz at Lincoln Center, which brought new talented musicians into the limelight and even created the world’s first performance venue that was acoustically designed for jazz music.

I actually listened to a fair amount of Wynton’s music when I was in highschool, before I had really thought much about jazz. The music seemed accessible but at the same time different and even experimental – which is perhaps odd given the controversies he was known for.

I particularly enjoyed his capacity to bring gospel sounds into jazz, like the song I See the Light from his 1992 Citi Movement album.

He then arranges the same theme for a jazz orchestra, with an equally haunting effect.

Daylight Dinosaurs is another that grabs my attention. 

Citi Movement is a very innovative album that’s worth really listening to. Wynton around the same time put out a three-album series called Soul Gestures in Southern Blue harkens back to the sounds I described earlier, including the opening track of the first album called Harriet Tubman.

But in jazz circles, Wynton was not as famous for his own music as he was for his opinions about the music of others. He ruthlessly lambasted fusion as mercantile bastardization of the genre that compromised tradition in favor of commercial success, giving himself the role of jazz’s New Sheriff in Town. A 1988 New York Times Op-Ed blunted summed up his views:

Despite attempts by writers and record companies and promoters and educators and even musicians to blur the lines for commercial purposes, rock isn't jazz and new age isn't jazz, and neither are pop or third stream. … I recently completed a tour of jazz festivals in Europe in which only two out of 10 bands were jazz bands. This is esthetic name-dropping, attempting to piggyback on the achievements of others, and duping the public.

This came across as not only as an open declaration of war on contemporary jazz musicians like John Scoffield, Chic Corea and Pat Metheny, but an affront to the likes of Herbie and Wayne, who had been pioneers of traditional jazz but had also gone on to blaze new trails. The harshest vitriol was directed at none other than eminence grise Miles Davis, who had been at the forefront of every sea change in jazz since the bebop era. The dispute between Miles and Wynton would culminate in a now famous clash at the 1991 Vancouver Jazz Festival, when Wynton went uninvited onto the stage during Miles’ set in an attempt to engage in something of a trumpeters’ duel, with the latter reportedly shouting at him to “Get the f*** off.” 

The most consistent criticism of Wynton, which his often wrapped up in gripes about his intransigence, is that he’s too mechanical and not sufficiently expressive or creative. After going back to listen to Wynton’s albums one after another, the way I did for Wayne and Herbie and McCoy, I found it didn’t quite grab me the way other jazz did. Going back to listen to the Soul Gestures series, I did feel like it dragged the same themes out in song after song and eventually just got boring.

Much has been made of the smackdown between Wynton and the generation of musicians that came before him. Less discussed is that fact that many of those stung by his criticism, including Wayne and Herbie, have applauded Wynton’s efforts to revive jazz and recognized his good intentions.

And Wynton himself seems to have buried the hatchet, although perhaps more quietly than he raised it. Few things could be more emblematic of this than a concert last October at Lincoln Center in which Wayne joined Wynton and his orchestra to play a swing version of the a song called Endangered Species, which was an obvious example of the sort of music Wynton 30 years ago would likely have called “duping the public.” Wynton’s introduction of Wayne said a lot in few words:

It is with great, great pleasure that we welcome a genius and master, Mr. Wayne Shorter.