Wynton Marsalis on What Jazz Can Teach Us About Democracy

WALTER ISAACSON: Thank you, Bianna. And Wynton Marsalis, welcome back to the show.

 

WYNTON MARSALIS: Hey, thank you Walter.

 

ISAACSON: You just announced that after 40 years you’re gonna be stepping down from Jazz at Lincoln Center. Take us back then, I think you’re about 25 years old. You had just been recording with your own quartet, I think you did “Live at Blues Alley.” What happened when they got you the phone call?

 

MARSALIS: Well, the thinking was it came from someone from visitor services of Lincoln Center. Could we do a summer series of three concerts, would I do it for no money and could I call musicians? So I thought, great, in August, we’ll do three concerts. And we did the first three concerts. And I didn’t really think about it because it was at the year that I probably did 200 and something concerts that year. But I was working with Alina Bloomgarden, and I was working with Dothaan Kirk, who was at WBGO. And our go-to call was Betty Carter, who was of course the great genius of our music and a singer and teacher. And at that time, I didn’t think about the fact that it was three ladies. They were much older than me, but they had a vision for the community.

And then the next year we did three more concerts. And one of them was a Duke Ellington concert,  and the Duke Ellington concert got really bad reviews. And, and the – when I saw that those concerts got really bad reviews, I thought, next year we need to do two of them. So we did two of them the next year because the critique was that we shouldn’t be playing his music. And that’s what galvanized my understanding, my – it made me really understand how important it was for us to build this as an institution. And then we got a board put around and all the different things. So many people from the community came to help us build Jazz at Lincoln Center.

 

ISAACSON: So wait a minute. They’re resisting Duke Ellington. So you doubled down on Duke Ellington. You are, you are a big Duke Ellington fan. How important is Duke Ellington and us understanding him?

 

MARSALIS: Well, Duke is our greatest composer of the 20th century. American Bard, covered more music, recorded 800 albums, over 2,000 compositions, played everywhere in the world, represented us as well as anyone could possibly represent the breadth and diversity of the nation, created an enduring body of music, genius on so many levels, innovative, so many things, blues, harmony, orchestration, how to use solos in the context of a group. I could go on and on and on about him. But the whole thrust of jazz, I grew up in a generation where we didn’t play big band music. We largely played in small bands. I didn’t want to play in a big band, but I called Dizzy Gillespie and asked him, should I, do you think I should do this? And he told me, “one should never consider it an achievement to lose one’s orchestral heritage.”
So from that, I took it to, yeah, we need to learn how to play this music. So we called surviving members of Duke Ellington’s great 1955 to 1974 band, the end of Duke’s life. And members of the Thad Jones Mel Lewis orchestra played at the Village Vanguard. So we had members in their sixties and seventies, members in their forties and fifties, and me and the members of my septet, we were in our twenties and thirties. And that’s how we went about learning how to play the music.

 

ISAACSON: So when you come there, there’s this committee called, I think it’s Lincoln Center’s Committee for the future. And what they’ve decided right before you’ve come is, no, we don’t need special things for jazz. Jazz doesn’t have a real place here.

 

MARSALIS: Right. But George Weissman, who was the chairman of the board of Lincoln Center at that time in our time, had been a, he was a submarine commander in World War II. And he told me, look, man, I used to take every furlough every time I got off, I would go see Charlie Parker. This is going to get in. So he loved Bird. And also Irene Diamond, who was one of our biggest donors, she had been in Hollywood, she understood like how, kind of, how these systems work and the injustice of things because she, as a woman writing and stuff, her work was stolen and she had to deal with a lot of different challenges. And she was contributing to a lot of people. And she said, this is gonna get in. So we had people and we had supporters, let alone our board, Lisa Schiff, Gordon Davis, you know, the leadership we had and still have. They worked around the clock and we, we got in.

 

ISAACSON: And so how important was it to resurrect in some ways, jazz at a time when all sorts of new music is coming along and you were kind of a resistor to that new music, some of the hip hop.

 

MARSALIS: Right. It wasn’t just hip hop, it’s the whole overemphasis on rock and roll is the national identity. And you take just the whole rock and roll thought of “rebel without a cause,” “kids versus parents,” all the kinda stuff that it introduced into the culture that was good maybe for 10 years, but it’s not a 50 or 60 year vision as we’ve come to see now. All of these kind of ideas that – hip hop became a part of that. But my initial focus was not hip hop. It was what the rock and roll mentality represented. Once again, not the musicians. Because musicians are not, are not the ones who are mythologizing it in this way. The marketplace is demanding that. 

And you can go back into the beginning of jazz and understand that the pressure Benny Goodman got when he was trying to deal with integrating the American public space in the 1930s, it was not from musicians. It was from the system that wanted to stay segregated. We didn’t – in my time…We didn’t, we had that, of course, with the contemporary jazz writers. Ironically, they invented like a warfare between us and some downtown musicians, White versus Black. It was all stupid and crazy, and it was not grounded in any fact. But by and large, we received unbelievable support from people, from all walks of the community. You know, get this in here, deal with our traditions, play our music, develop the orchestra, build your library. And the one thing that shocked me is how much support we got from people all over the community who were not necessarily involved in jazz.

 

ISAACSON: You say, support our traditions. Sometimes, whether it be Preservation Hall in New Orleans, Jazz at Lincoln Center, whatever. You got a tension between preserving the traditions, but then making sure they’re not in amber and they can’t move. How did you deal with that?

 

MARSALIS: We never had that problem because we improvise. We are all writing new music.
In the last 14 years – our band alone, we have 10 arrangers – so we’ve added 1,200 new arrangements to our library. And for me, and Sherman and all of us who – Carlos Henriquez – who work on the music, we come up with new stuff all the time. And I never worried about that because my vision of the music was always improvisation, which means no matter what you’re playing, you are adding to it. And there was never a paucity of ideas like, what are we gonna do with this? Or how are we gonna write this music?
We did so much new music, so many collaborations, wrote so many ballets, played with musicians from all over the world, new things that had never been heard, that was never our problem. Our problem was forcing the experts in our country and the so-called intellectuals to understand that there was a source of American greatness that came from quarters that they were against, which is a part of the just basic cost of racism in our country.

 

ISAACSON: You talked just now about race and resistance to jazz, and the white power structure. How important was that in shaping what jazz became?

 

MARSALIS: Well, it’s, the opposition is important because it makes you stronger. But if you let the opposition – ’cause opposition also is intelligent. Like it’s not just fighting you on the same quarter, Hey, I come to New York, man, I figured I’m getting out of the racism of New Orleans in the South. You come up here and you have people who are not even from your system of segregation, and they’re worse than the people in the South, what they’re gonna write and the way they’re gonna undermine the greatness of your cause. But you also are gonna have people of all races, of all walks, every background come together to support this art form and create something great. And that will not be mythologized the way it should have been. So it’s our job to continue to talk about it. What we did, how our coalition was – we were all together. It wasn’t just black people or just white people. We were all working on it, and we all continue to work on it.

 

ISAACSON: There’s been a pushback in the past 10 years against the idea that diversity is our strength and that’s where our creativity comes from. Is jazz a refutation of that?

 

MARSALIS: Most definitely. That’s why it caused so much problems. But, you know, foolishness is always something you have to fight against. 

 

ISAACSON: And growing up in New Orleans, as you did, big family, musical family, there are a lot of influences that flowed together there from the French Opera House to Congo Square. Tell me how those flowed together to create jazz and your music.

 

MARSALIS: Well, just in my generation, a lot of those traditions had been lost. But because of my father was such a great educator, and he was always an advocate of doing things and being places I was able to play in Danny Barker’s Fairview Baptist Church Band, which played traditional music. I had a band director who was Armenian American, and he played in a band of all kind of older band directors on Tuesday night, we would rehearse at University of New Orleans, they played mainly John Phillips Sousa marches. So ’cause of him, I would go out and do that. I played the circus.
So, you know, the type of influences in the music largely, we played funk in New Orleans, popular music. But we knew, we knew and learned a lot of different music, French songs, stuff that my great aunt, my great uncle would sing, Mississippi River Songs, church music of all kinds. Mahalia Jackson is from New Orleans. The soil still produced a wide body of music of all kinds.
And remember, we are French and we were Spanish, and we have Caribbean influence. So if you were open, even in my time, which is, you know, seventies, sixties, seventies, early eighties, you would’ve had a lot of influences just being there. And I was fortunate to receive a lot of that information.

 

ISAACSON: I do remember the story though, when you go up to Julliard and you’re like looking down on Louis Armstrong and the white handkerchief and your daddy, the great Ellis Marsalis, had to set you right.

 

MARSALIS: Yeah. Because when you don’t know your history, and you, and you don’t – even if you’re taught it, my father taught Afro-American history at Xavier University. It wasn’t like I wasn’t in the classes with the college students hearing what he was saying. But when you fall into your generation, you have to overcome your generational ignorance, because generations will think things that are – what’s the evidence of it. So yeah, my father was like, man, learn one of pops’s solos. So he challenged me to learn a solo. I’d never learned it. I thought, man, this is old handkerchief head music. And you know, I’m from the, from the sixties and seventies, we got our Afro black power. We not – Louis Armstrong singing to a horse and all that. We didn’t respect that aspect of his personality. 

When I went to learn that solo, it was on a song called Jubilee from the 1930s. Man, I couldn’t make it through the solo ’cause of his endurance and ability to play in a high register for a long amount of time. And keep in mind these recordings were less than three minutes. So it’s like two minutes and 20 seconds straight of playing. And then from a musician standpoint, I said, man, I got to listen to Pops and understand who, who he was. 

 

ISAACSON: You learned a lot about improvisation when you’re doing jazz and you say that’s the core of how you made things work. How did you apply that to actually being an executive who had to lead Jazz at Lincoln Center?

 

MARSALIS: Well, the main thing in jazz is you, you have to have – every member must understand the overall form, right? So if you just take an organization with a budget, whatever your division is, you need to understand your percentage of the budget and how the overall works, what your procedures and your processes, the fonts you use on things, what you repeat over and over again. In jazz, there’s a lot of repetition, what you repeat over and over and over again is how you train yourself. And then, the main thing in jazz is listening. We spend most of our night listening and trusting. So the fundamental, the first is just the numeric accuracy of the music.
So just the accuracy that jazz demands, if you really are gonna be on a certain level, can be, can be applied to business and the type of numeric rigor that’s required to function as a team.

 

ISAACSON: One of the leadership lessons I sort of take from you, is I’ve watched you play with your orchestra a whole lot. I’ve watched you at Dizzy’s, and you lead, but you lead from behind. You always stand behind the orchestra.

 

MARSALIS: Yeah, that’s democratic leadership. It’s  like a flock of geese. They make the calls from the back. Right. So you can’t, you – if you really are leading, everybody is leading.
Like with our orchestra, my hardest job was we had 15 soloists. So every night I have to program the concert so that all 15 people play at least one time. Now, that’s a challenge with 10 songs, I knew the orchestra was going to really be great when our trombonist, Chris Crenshaw, who sits in front of me, much younger, he looked at me for the last two songs and started to tell me who hadn’t played. I said, okay. So then we all started to look out for each other. Well, this person has not played, this person. Then we start to negotiate the song so that we all make sure everyone plays.

 

ISAACSON: You know, about three years ago I went and saw it. You did Democracy! Suite right at Lincoln Center. And you, you said Jazz music is the perfect metaphor for democracy, right? Tell me what you’re feeling about democracy now and what jazz needs to teach it.

 

MARSALIS: Now for us to be, to come into alignment with our American mythology, we are far away from it. We can make all the movies we wanna make, making the heroes into the one person with integrity. The level of corruption we are seeing now, we always been on the way towards it. I’m a nonpartisan attacker of the corruption I see. I’ve been doing it for 40 years. And what you’re seeing in the public space now is the type of arrogance and criminal activity that we were always working our way towards. Now you see it. 

And the question is, how do the people at large respond to this? Are we gonna say, no, we, we can’t – the judicial system is not saving us the way it should. There’s a level of corruption that we have to wake up and say, we’re tired of this *bleep*. And if we do it, okay, if we don’t, we’re gonna be just like all other things that could have been something. 

And it is related to jazz, because in jazz, you can plug the bass amp in, the drummer can play loud. One soloist can play 400 choruses, and the next one can fight by playing 430, the music breaks down. You have to balance your freedom to improvise with restraint that comes with swinging and recognizing other people. Democracy dies when you do not understand the need for leveling and to create wealth for everybody.And to see in your neighbor, not an enemy, but a friend, and for elites to manage themselves. That’s what I have to do as a band leader. I can’t say, well, I’m here. I’m gonna solo on every tune. Every time somebody plays it’s me. That’s not the solution.
So yeah, we are in trouble right now, but I’m more invigorated about it. You know, a doctor doesn’t go into a place where a lot of people are sick and say, man, a lot of people are sick here. You the doctor man, come in and help people. So let’s roll up our sleeves. A lot of talking always goes on about democracy. Let’s see.

 

ISAACSON: And so you are the doctor. What are you doing now?

 

MARSALIS: I’m the doctor of democracy. Let’s go.

 

ISAACSON: And what do you do with your music to be the doctor of democracy now? 

 

MARSALIS: Hey, we getting ready to – we have a whole three months that we getting ready to dedicate to it. That’s called Jazzcall for Freedom. We’re putting out three records. We got 12 videos of younger and older people of all generations singing freedom songs about democracy. We announcing some education that we’re gonna do in Minnesota. We already do it, education program called Let Freedom Swing. And we’re re-releasing an album I did in 2017 or 18 called The Ever Fonky Lowdown. And if you listen to that, you’re gonna think I’m writing the blueprint for right now. It’s ever funky and it’s low down and you’re seeing it play out.

 

ISAACSON: So you got a big piece of music you’re writing right now?

 

MARSALIS: Yes, sir. I’m writing my fifth symphony is called the Liberty Symphony. And I’m late. Like I’m always late, but that makes me, get me the energy to stay up dead night. And it’s dealing with this, a celebration of America’s 250th. And I’m gonna deal with subjects like I always try to do that are serious of a serious nature. And let’s see.

 

ISAACSON: You’re dealing with the 250th of the nation, of the Liberty series. How do you do that?

 

MARSALIS: Deal with major American themes and forms and of my whole time of writing music, I’m always dealing with the American mythology as expressed in music. So I got church music, rag time, use of the blues, American Anglo Celtic music, stuff that comes out of the different vernacular traditions, like gospel music, country music, bluegrass, Texas swing. I’ve studied Afro Latin, forms of Afro Latin music. I’ve studied American music my entire life. And just I put all of these, these things into chorus format and things we have that make our music unique. And I’m gonna make just another statement about who we are and the possibilities of us. But it won’t all just be rah rah optimism, even though it has to be that for me, or it doesn’t make sense for me to write it. It will be rah rah optimism, but it will also be movements like: this you did despite the word of the Lord. It will also be serious because I take all of this very seriously.

 

ISAACSON: Wynton Marsalis. Thank you for joining us again, sir. 

MARSALIS: Walter, great to see you, man. Always.