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Wynton Marsalis is fired up about backsides.
It's not that the legendary trumpeter, who brings his Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra to Clearwater tonight, doesn't like derrieres. He's just concerned that, with all the sex-driven music young people see and hear these days, it's nearly impossible to get them pumped up about jazz and other art forms.
And Marsalis, 44, the artistic director of Jazz at Lincoln Center in New York - not to mention jazz's greatest ambassador - sees that as a very serious problem.
"You cannot make something in the arts exciting for somebody who is raised looking at videos of the most well-buffed people in the world with their a-- hanging out," says the Pulitzer Prize-winning musician during a recent phone interview.
"You cannot make a Beethoven symphony that exciting. . . . It's very difficult for art to compete with semipornography. I'm talking about hip-hop, whatever term it goes by. It could be a truck commercial showing somebody with their a-- out."
But Marsalis, who has helped create dozens of jazz education programs for both young and old, won't be giving up any time soon.
Especially now that the New Orleans native and master drummer Yacub Addy have written one of the most important - and heartfelt - pieces of their careers: Congo Square, a Big Easy history lesson intended to educate and entertain.
Congo Square premiered Sunday in New Orleans.
At Ruth Eckerd Hall tonight, Marsalis, Addy, Addy's ensemble, Odadaa!, and dozens of other musicians in the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra will perform this tribute piece, which explains how African slave music helped forge New Orleans' musical identity in the 18th and 19th centuries. Congo Square, Marsalis explains, was the only place in New Orleans where slaves were allowed to play music. (Today that area is known as Louis Armstrong Park.)
Marsalis and Addy had been working on the concept of Congo Square for several years. But it wasn't until Hurricane Katrina changed his hometown forever that Marsalis started writing. "It was always intense," Marsalis says, but it also became a message of uplift.
"It's about celebration and a good time," he says about the 80-plus-minute work, which combines jazz playing and African beats.
"Our pieces are always positive. It's an affirmation of humanity.
It's always about an affirmation of humanity. It has a nice length to it. Lot of improvisation. Lot of grooving and improvisation."
Though Marsalis acknowledges that New Orleans still has a long way to go before it returns to normalcy, he says with vigor, "The spirit will come back. That's what people do. We're just having a hard time right now."
The trumpeter won't be at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, which starts Friday, because of this tour. But he helped recruit big names for the fest.
Marsalis knows New Orleans and its rich jazz history better than most; in fact, some detractors say Marsalis is only concerned with history.
The son of legendary jazz pianist Ellis Marsalis (not to mention brother of saxophonist Branford and trombonist Delfeayo), Wynton Marsalis' insistence on celebrating jazz's traditional past instead of welcoming abstract innovation has frustrated many practitioners.
If you want to know just how much of a purist Marsalis is, ask him what's on his iPod:
"I listen mainly to jazz music and classical music. And anything that doesn't have electronic instruments on it. I don't really like electronic instruments that much," he says.
"I'll listen to rock or whatever, as long as it doesn't have an electronic instrument on it. The sound of a machine playing music, it sounds like (Marsalis talks in a robot voice) somebody talking like this. And I don't like when people make music and they're not all in the room together. I don't find that music to be as compelling as people playing together. And I love symphonic music.
And I love the sophistication of an orchestra."
A jazz fan who dislikes hip-hop trying to reach hip-hop fans who know nothing about jazz is a recipe for disappointment.
But Marsalis, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his 1997 work Blood on the Fields, might be jazz's best hope. For he knows better than most that the only way to keep the music alive - and to make sure pieces such as Congo Square resonate for years to come - starts with young people.
And thus, it all comes back to the battle against those exposed backsides.
"We, in the United States of America, really need to revamp our education system to include the arts. The fact that we don't have a viable arts education for a majority of our kids hurts us as a free country," he says. "Meaning that we're susceptible to anything that's sold to us."
c.2006 St. Petersburg Times
