INLSA

Barney's Version

Nine time Grammy Award winner, the first person to win Grammy Awards in both the jazz and classical music categories in the same year, and the first jazz musician to win the Pulitzer Prize for Music. He is also the artistic director of Jazz at the Lincoln Center in New York. All this can only relate to one person, the highly critically acclaimed trumpeter, composer, bandleader and educator, Wynton Marsalis, who will be the headline act at this year’s Standard Bank Joy of Jazz, which runs in Joburg from August 25 to 27.

I first heard the trumpeter when he was 19 years old and playing with Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers at Keystone Korner in San Francisco in 1982.

On Monday February 8, 1982 The Star Tonight published a story in which I wrote “All the soloists were ‘cooking’ and played well but none could touch 19-year-old Wynton Marsalis, who just has to be the hottest trumpet player on the scene today... Remember the name because Wynton Marsalis is going to be big.”

While we have had some giant players in Joburg, ranging from Buddy de Franco to Branford Marsalis, Lee Ritenour, Barney Kessel, Teddy Wilson, Stan Getz, James Moody and Chick Corea to name but a few, there is no doubt Wynton Marsalis is the biggest jazz artist to yet grace our shores.

That is not to say he has not been controversial. He is a dyed in the wool traditionalist. He says: “Jazz has the misfortune of having been mystified from the beginning. And it has the misfortune of being invented by a segment of the population of the United States of America that has always been scorned. It also has the misfortune of having an intellectual community surrounding it that doesn’t actually like it. But the one thing that jazz has, it has that body of music. It has Duke Ellington’s music, Monk’s music, the music of Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker’s music, the music of Lester Young, the music of Billie Holiday. The list goes on and on.

“You could name thousands of people from Bix Beiderbecke. All those people had the same things in common, they played improvised music based on the shuffle rhythm. It was collective improvisation and the music was based in the blues. So no matter what has been done to replace that with another type of music, or with other styles and say that that is jazz, the collective weight of the achievement of all those people, just proves at every step that it is not jazz,” he said.

There was a furore when he once said that what Miles Davis was playing was not jazz.

At a press conference in Montreux in 1994 Herbie Hancock had made an almost derogatory remark about him. Hancock was promoting his album Dis is da Drum using hip-hop and rap. “I said it’s not jazz, but it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s not good. Why does it have to be jazz? Why can’t it be something else?” Marsalis commented.

Wynton was accused of being biased in his inserts on the Ken Burns 10-part documentary titled Jazz. He pushed what he believed were the creators of the music and ignored some of the white musicians. When he took over the Lincoln Center jazz department, including the big band, he presented a series of concerts by black composers which again caused racial snide remarks. I believe he had to start somewhere, therefore it had to be with the African-American artists, Louis Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton, Fletcher Henderson and of course Ellington.

His definition of jazz is simple: “Swinging and addressing the Blues.” As for his opinion on what passes as jazz, “as instrumental pop music it’s not bad, but it’s not jazz. Jazz has never been a major seller, it’s just been an artistic music. Why is everyone using jazz as the hook? I don’t know what that is. I think they equate the name with a certain level of aesthetic excellence. The use of the name is just to create an illusion,” he said.

He doesn’t believe that jazz came from Africa? “No. I think jazz came from America. There’s a different sensibility in jazz. I think it’s strongly influenced by African music, but it’s strongly influenced by European music also,” Marsalis said.

He is controversial, but he’ll explain the reason on each point. He is very erudite.

One thing though that can never be in doubt, is his sincerity and honesty to the music, and he’ll prove that when he puts the trumpet to his lips and plays the best damn trumpet playing you have ever heard in South Africa.

l Although he hasn’t settled on a pianist yet, the others in the band to play in South Africa are his regular musicians, namely Walter Blanding Reeds, Carlos Henriquez bass and Ali Jackson drums.