TT 560 part four: Interview with Wynton Marsalis
on CONGO SQUARE and much more, from 2008
When I called Wynton to set up the interview, he told me his address. His apartment number ends in “J.” I choked back a laugh and asked him, “‘J’ as in ‘jazz?’”
He replied, very quietly, “No doubt.”
Transitional Technology has been hosting a succession of Wynton Marsalis-related reposts prompted by the public announcement that Wynton is stepping down from Jazz at Lincoln Center.
A large part of Wynton’s aesthetic is directly informed by the writers Ralph Ellison, Albert Murray, and Stanley Crouch.
Part one: Ralph Ellison in counterpoint with Charles Mingus, Cecil Taylor, and Martin Williams
Part two: Albert Murray and the Murray memorial at JALC
Part three: Interview with Stanley Crouch
The final part of this series was originally pegged to a major Wynton Marsalis composition, Congo Square. The astonishing complexity of the West African rhythmic matrix as played by Yacub Addy and Odadaa! forces something experimental into the basic sound of the Jazz at Lincoln Center big band—perhaps not unlike the way the busy innovative drumming of Jeff “Tain” Watts forced something experimental into the sound of Wynton’s most famous albums from the 1980’s.
Wynton and I spent four hours together in 2008, and the eventual interview was originally presented in two parts. Today the order is reversed, beginning with a blindfold test/general discussion, which includes a description of the internal band process on “Knozz-moe-king” on Live at Blues Alley. This eight minutes of audio on “Knozz-moe-king” is one of my biggest coups as an interlocutor; at the time, it went moderately viral thanks to an appreciative link from Questlove’s MySpace page. (Questlove was a fan of Live at Blues Alley and Jeff Watts, and wrote something to the effect that “I sure wish I had heard this when I was younger!”)
We then proceed to a detailed discussion of Congo Square with numerous audio examples trimmed by myself. I worked hard leading up to this interview, because I really wanted to understand what Wynton was thinking about, step by step, in one his big suites.
At the very end there’s a bit of new 2026 commentary on Wynton’s work behind the scenes and within the community.
INTERVIEW WITH WYNTON MARSALIS (originally posted 2008)
I wasn’t planning to give Wynton a “blindfold test,” but he seemed to want to hear these trumpet solos without me telling him anything in advance. Wynton immediately sang along with the whole first Miles Davis solo.
(Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Red Garland, Paul Chambers, Philly Joe Jones: “Blues by Five” from Cookin’, 1956.)
Wynton Marsalis: I remember that. When I was in high school I listened to that. I think it’s called “Blues by Five.” A lot of what Miles is playing is like Louis Armstrong. That’s good organization.
Good interplay between him and Philly. Him and Philly Joe Jones—they loved each other. Like they had a real close relationship. They would go on the road together and just play gigs, pick up other cats in the band. I had the chance to hang with Philly Joe Jones and rap with him a lot about that.
The thing is they had a similar type of intelligence. Philly Joe Jones: Very smart. Very, very smart. Miles also. Very smart. Philly had a lot of range of interests too, reading and a lot of stuff. That type of intelligence comes out in their playing.
And the trumpet and the drum are always connected. You know, the first depiction of a trumpet is on a kind of a vase. It’s on a vase, an Egyptian vase, with drummers. We’re always with drummers. In a Haydn symphony, the trumpet and drums play together.
That solo is such a good organization of ideas. Miles, by that time, had really worked on how he organized the material in his solos so he could go from one point to another. Umm. Good. You know.
What I also like about it that it sounds like “local” music too. You know what I’m talking about? It sounds like people in a room playing. Cats out of tune a little bit. But it’s got a local sound. You can hear the camaraderie. Paul Chambers all out of tune but playing all kinds of bad shit. You know what I mean? Nice lope on his swing. You can feel the ebb and flow.
Miles and Philly Joe: they’re taking up a lot of space, but they leave space, too. They play good with each other. Real good. There’s a lot of interesting dialogue with them that later was continued with him and Tony. That kind of trumpet-drum thing.
(Dizzy Gillespie, Duke Ellington big band with Jimmy Woode and Sam Woodyard, “U.M.M.G.” from Jazz Party, 1959.)
WM: Dizzy. Man! That’s one of the great solos. Sometimes you can listen to a track and you can hear other people listening to somebody. There’s an Aaron Copland record like that with William Warfield singing Copland’s Old American Songs, and on one of the songs I can hear the orchestra listening to him.
This is also one of those moments. I can hear Duke Ellington’s band listening to Dizzy.
Dizzy was ready. He said he used to play that on the piano for a long time before he had to record it. Duke gave him that song, he said, “Shit.” That’s a hard tune to play. You hear a lot of where Miles came in there, too, when Dizzy plays in a real syncopated style.
Dizzy’s another very intelligent guy. His intelligence comes through in his playing – when he stops, what he decides to do … this and that – very sophisticated harmonically and rhythmically.
Ethan Iverson: This is one of the greatest Dizzy solos I ever heard. I’m actually not a student of Gillespie’s playing like I am of some, but when I first heard this solo, I said, “Man, he really feels the heat.” Or something…
WM: Oh, he was putting the heat on them.
Although Dizzy loved Duke and respected him. And everybody knew who he was. Believe me, Duke’s trumpet section knew who Dizzy Gillespie was. Clark Terry and everybody else, they wasn’t up there saying, “Let’s see if he can play.” It was like a thing – a generation of cats… He loved all of them. And all of those guys came from a similar spirit of the age.
When Dizzy was a boy, he looked up to Duke. He saw a film with Duke on it and Duke was clean and he was like, “Damn, I want to be like this.” Duke meant a lot to black people at that time. There wasn’t any minstrel shit. That meant a lot. Kind of what Miles Davis meant to people in the late 50’s and early 60’s. He kind of had that feeling of the younger musicians. This was a guy, early modern and getting far away from the minstrel thing.
But Dizzy was Dizzy Gillespie too. In a way, it’s gleeful. He wants to show them, “Okay, I’m here with you all.”
EI: I dig few special tracks showcasing non-Ellington master soloists sitting in with Duke. I also think of Coleman Hawkins playing “Mood Indigo.”
WM: Wow! That whole record, man…
Me and Jon Faddis talked about that damn solo Dizzy played. Because Faddis knows so much music, too. Not just Dizzy’s music, but Faddis knows a whole pile of music. He’d be interesting for you to talk to. He did a transcription in Downbeat of this solo, and I studied it.
EI: In the first chorus when he’s playing the melody you get to hear him do his paraphrase of that great melody and how elegant it is.
WM: Pure sophistication. He waited. He played something he really didn’t want to play at one point but he worked with it.
EI: That’s one thing about Dizzy. He takes chances and not everything always comes out exactly right. I like that.
WM: He’s phenomenal. He’s the one who really carried the tradition and kept the memory of the music for the musicians that came after him. He didn’t eschew Roy Eldridge. He moved around the corner from Pops.
Dizzy used to tell me all the time, “Man, it’s not an achievement to lose your orchestral music.” He was very deep, very interesting – rapping with him. Because he would always say to me, “Keep that Lincoln Center music thing going. Don’t just play small band music. You want to because it’s less hassle. But keep this. Keep it. You’ve got to keep the resonance of the music. If it don’t resonate in the culture, keep it resonant in you. Because it’s easy to lose it. If you’ve got that thread, you can find your way back. If you lose that thread, you can’t find your way back. You can listen to it on records, but playing it is different from hearing it.”
When he plays, you can hear what I call his “super syncopation.” The rhythm is played with a harmon mute that allows you to play soft with a lot of accent. When you play it at a certain volume, a soft volume, and with a lot of accent, it even has more force than with a microphone. It allows you to be much more nuanced as well as powerful. It’s one of the advantages of when you play that instrument at a fast tempo. Use that mute at a faster tempo. You can hear every tongue, every articulation.
EI: I’m eating this up, by the way.
WM: G’won.
(Sonny Rollins, Freddie Hubbard, Jimmy Garrison, Elvin Jones, “East Broadway Run Down” from East Broadway Run Down, 1966.)
WM: Never heard this solo.
EI: It’s “East Broadway Run Down” from the Sonny Rollins record.
WM: Never heard it. That was bad. Some bad shit. But it’s not bad because of the architecture of it or even the kind of exuberance of Freddie Hubbard with this big sound, playing in different registers.
EI: Incredible time is just pumping out of his horn.
WM: The rhythm section is, you know—bad!
EI: Definitely.
WM: Do you know what I’m saying? It’s just—it’s more the flamboyance of it. Making the space at a certain time, making decisions. You can hear it. It feels like jazz, you know. It has a feeling to it. And Freddie’s feeling is so unique and so much him. It’s so personal. The communication is not in the technical breakdown of it. (Although you would be like, “Damn!” if you looked at that, too.) It’s just the exuberant intention of it. It’s got a lot of joy in it. Very youthful.
EI: I don’t think you’ll know this next one—we’ll see.
(Thad Jones, Frank Strozier, John Gilmore, McCoy Tyner, Butch Warren, Elvin Jones, “Contemporary Focus” from Today and Tomorrow, 1964.)
WM: Who’s that?
EI: It’s Thad Jones.
WM: Thad? No, no. I never heard that.
EI: It’s called “Contemporary Focus” from a McCoy Tyner record.
WM: It don’t even sound like him. Really. You know what I mean? What’s interesting about him is sometimes he’ll play the time really high on the beat, you know. Roll it back again. Let me just hear what he’s playing again.
(…)
WM: When the backgrounds came in, it took him out of his thought. He was hearing a certain thing and had to stop.
Yeah. That was bad. That was some bad shit. In a way it had a similar thing to Booker Little. Thad is older than Booker but it’s got a certain kind of intelligence and organization and a kind of pathos in their sound. Booker has it a lot. But Thad can get to that. I can hear it in that.
EI: For me it’s interesting to hear him play on one chord and do it so comfortably. It’s not what I associate with him.
WM: I think by this time, all the cats played on one chord. Thad was writing music and arrangements so he’s hearing a lot more of the shit than the average guy anyway. He’s not limited by too much!
I didn’t really know Thad.
EI: I think you knew the next trumpet player.
(Dexter Gordon, Woody Shaw, Ronnie Mathews, Stafford James, Louis Hayes, “Fenja” (somewhat based on “I’m Getting Sentimental Over You'”) from Homecoming: Live at the Village Vanguard, 1977.)
[During the playback, Wynton made gestures that he didn’t like the piano comping and, especially, he didn’t like the amplified bass sound.]
WM: Mmmm. Notice how he’s playing like a half-step above the chord.
EI: You knew Woody Shaw a bit, right?
WM: Yeah, I knew him well.
EI: I think he’s underrated, actually.
WM: Trumpet players like him. I mean, he’s not underrated among trumpet players. He wrote a lot of interesting music. When I came to New York, he was the one who was holding the mainstream down and had a forward looking way he was dealing with his group. You could depend on him. He would be swinging every time you heard him.
Back then I would go out a lot, man. That’s when they had the clubs like the Tin Palace, Jazz Mania, the Jazz Alley, 7th Avenue South, the Village Vanguard—now, only the Vanguard’s still here. I would go hear Woody Shaw all the time. He was always playing.
Back then the question would be, a lot of times, when you would go hear people, “Are they gonna be bullshitting or not?” You never knew. Sometimes they would be playing funk tunes. But with him—he was always up on top of playing.
EI: Some of his melodies snake through the changes in a way I never heard anyone else do quite like that before or since.
WM: Right. He’s got a certain concept of time and also how he interprets the harmony. Everyone is always talking about him using fourths. But the foundation of his playing was not fourths. In fact, here he was not playing a lot of fourths. He’s playing just kind of traditional, basic harmony.
I think he had perfect pitch too. He could hear this concept of how he wanted to play. He liked to play really long lines. Even when he stopped he would be continuing a line that he played. In this solo a couple of times, he stops, but when he starts again, he’s continuing what he was playing.
EI: Almost on the same breath sometimes.
WM: Right. Right. He was an interesting guy. He had a lot of ambition for the music that he didn’t realize, you know. He had a lot of stuff that he wanted to do. But he held it down at a rough time.
EI: You might recognize this one, also.
(Wynton Marsalis, Marcus Roberts, Robert Hurst, Jeff Watts, “Knozz-Moe-King” from Live at Blues Alley, 1986.)
WM: Some sad shit. [He said this within 3 seconds of the track starting.] Me and Tain are not really playing together.
EI: You aren’t?
WM: No, we’re not. We’re not playing together. Marcus is playing with me. But not him. We’re not in sync.
EI: I never thought that listening to it.
WM: Yeah. It’s not together.
EI: It’s “going for it” though.
WM: Yeah, he’s playing, and we’re playing, but…there’s a difference. If you listen to that track with Miles and Philly Joe Jones—they’re playing with each other.
[For this next crucial section, I have included the audio file where you can hear Wynton’s discussion of how the structure of “Knozz-Moe-King” works, which doesn’t make much sense on the page.]
Yeah, I can hear it now. I haven’t listened to that since we recorded it. That was 22 years ago. That’s a long time. I’m setting out to play a certain thematic thing. He’s not with me.
We’re just playing. It’s okay. It’s all right.
I don’t think anybody else ever played no shit like that.
EI: That’s for sure.
WM: But it ain’t no good.
EI: You don’t think it’s any good? C’mon.
WM: It’s all right. We’re not playing together. We’re not really playing with each other.
EI: I admit that I’ve never known what was going on, and I’ve always liked that.
WM: I can show you what’s going on. Go back. I’m going to show you what’s happening.
Okay, it’s a concept we have called… Where you’re supposed to set up a rhythmic stretto with different rhythms and then you resolve them. But people give cues when you resolve it. Here’s an example. I wrote that. Now, I didn’t know he was going to go “ting-ting-t-ting.” He never does, that’s what he did that time. Now I’m going to start grooving in his rhythm. “t-t-t-t-ting,” Marcus does it too. Okay, now he finishes it. I’m leaving him a gap to answer me. I’m keeping that theme going. Marcus is going to start answering me now. See… How he’s playing that rhythm. So I hear them doing that. He [Tain] should’ve stayed up there. I played that theme. That means come out of that rhythm that you’re playing. (EI: Ahh!) But he didn’t do it. He’s not listening to what I’m playing. Check it out. Cause I need a certain amount of breath or I can’t keep playing. If you hear that long phrases of… No, it’s not long. I’m playing. It’s the end of the cymbal. It’s almost like a breakdown a little bit. I was telling him, “When I give you the end of a phrase, you need to listen – cause I’m going to run out of air,” so, I’m still gonna figure out how to resolve the phrase. First way they broke down, he should have stayed on the cymbal. When we improvise in that style I have to latch on to whatever they all are playing. See, Marcus peeped it [missed] so he fills the space up. That’s the style. Now he says… I had to stop places. When he sees I don’t play. He didn’t expect me to play in when I played. Normally I would but I had to take a breath. Shit. Now they are playing two different—two five rhythms on opposite sides of the beat. I’m hearing what they’re doing. So, in other words: he’s going “ding ding—ding ding.” Marcus is going “d’goon’t d’goon’t…” Check it out. Now, he caught that one. [Laughing] That’s the first time he played with me was just there. Do you know what I’m saying?
EI: Well, I hear what you’re saying…!
WM: I played what he played. Check it out. Then I took his theme that he played and I start playing with it. “Bruuuup.” He’s playing that rhythm. That’s what he played. [missed in here] I used to sing the rhythms to him. Like, “Do this.” The rhythm that he played came out of the time I was playing in. “Shog at–shog at—shog at.” [Etc… – better listen to the tape!] That’s an example of them catching it. What I would do, when you were getting ready to end a rhythm that you’re spending on [not sure of this phrase] you have to give a cue. That cue is when I stop repeating that phrase. Now if you listen to them playing the same rhythm again displaced. Now if you play… displaced on the other side of the beat. I’m trying to listen to Bob. Check it out. Now, there’s a cue…
EI: He’s on it though.
WM: On that one. He should’ve been on the shit before! [Laughing – more missed] He’s waiting. He should’ve been on it before I was in three. [more missed] Again. 1 2 3 1 2 3 1 2 3, he caught that one too. 123 123 123 [clapping]… That was good. You see what I’m saying? He caught that one too. 1 2 3 1 2 3 1 2 3. He wants to play fives now. I’m going to go back to my theme. It’s a diminished theme. [Sings, and mimes Marcus Roberts’s pure diminished chords in response, pleased.] When I heard that rhythm that he played – that’s why I tried to fit my rhythm to the side of that… I haven’t played like that in so long, I forgot about it.
Yeah.
EI: I don’t know, man. That’s pretty bad shit. It leads off the record, so you must have liked it enough at the time.
WM: Then, at the time, yeah. At that time that was what we played. [Sings the diminished theme twice more.]
EI: I think that’s an important band—that quartet.
[Tape part ends.]
WM: Yeah. We had a good time with it. It was good. We played. People liked it. But when I got the septet is when the people really started liking the music. It was interesting. The musicians liked that music less. I think! I don’t know…
EI: You’re right.
WM: The musicians liked the Blues Alley band. But the people liked the septet more.
EI: I will say that I saw the septet live. I never got to see the quartet, I was too young. But I saw the septet in Eau Claire, Wisconsin in about 1989 or ’90. I was still in high school.
WM: Damn.
EI: It was Marcus and Herlin and Reginald Veal. I think Todd Williams.
WM: Todd, yeah.
EI: The message was very strong.
WM: It was. People, at that time-–they would always say, “That was much better than that other shit you was doing.” That was just the general vibe. Promoters, people would come back and they’d be like, “That shit there. Keep them. Don’t do that other shit.” [extended laughter]
The other way we played just started to get boring. It was just loud.
EI: I don’t think you realize how influential this record and Marsalis Standard Time Volume One is.
WM: I swear I don’t. We played it a lot of course. People came to the gigs and checked it out.
EI: Marsalis Standard Time is almost like a dictionary or something. It’s very clear.
WM: Yeah. It’s just three or four different times against each other: quarter note time, triplet time…You know what I mean? It’s like what Mingus was doing but in another incarnation. Those time changes are put on songs. “April in Paris”—to play a third above the time—it’s hard. I know I never heard nobody try to do it on the trumpet. It’s difficult. I had to think about it a long time just to survive on it. I played good on it just to survive.
Ultimately it’s interesting. I still like it. I will still put time changes in all my music. But, ultimately, for me, it ended up being like meals with Tabasco Sauce. Tabasco sauce is great but—shit—without Tabasco Sauce is good too.
EI: I remember seeing you play at the Jazz Standard, maybe around 2003 with Ali Jackson as the leader. It was Greg Osby, Aaron Goldberg and Robert Hurst.
WM: Yeah, I remember that gig.
EI: You and Bob were playing together for the first time in a long while.
WM: A long time, yeah.
EI: There was a tune. It might have been “Autumn Leaves.” All of a sudden you and Bob…
WM: Started playing that time…
EI: It was so incredible in that moment. It was like: “Check out what those guys know: this language that only they know!”
WM: We used to work on that, man. Playing in different times and stuff like that. It was fun. It was interesting.
[On Congo Square: Love, Libation, Liberation]
Ethan Iverson: It seems to me that there is an academy of rhythm in jazz and American music. One thing I’ve felt more and more as I’ve gotten older is that people don’t understand the basic question, “What is jazz rhythm?” Or: “What is this music that comes from the African Diaspora?” Congo Square is a very explicit message about this academy.
Wynton Marsalis: Mm-hmm. Well, it’s all of the musics that have a rhythm that’s a combination of 4 and 3. They are related technically. It all comes from that kind of African mother clave, then our shuffle is added in.
The 3 rhythm is small and the 4 rhythm is big rhythm in the jazz language. Whereas in the African music, the 3 rhythm is the big rhythm that you hear. The 4 rhythm is the background rhythm. (Well, it’s a 6 but you know what I mean.) When they are playing they are hearing both of the times, and they are playingboth of the times. But they swing in the lower time.
EI: Barry Harris told me once that he thought Charlie Parker constantly played in 4 and 6 at the same time. That it was in there somewhere…
WM: It’s in everybody’s music. Billie Holiday is the most pronounced one. If we put on a Billie Holiday record and we tap quarter note triplets, a lot of her phrasing will line exactly up with those triplets. Put her music on and tap out a quarter note triplet. She’s always in that quarter note time. “Sailboat in the moonlight with you…”
With our music it’s more playing against the ground rhythm. We set the ground rhythm up and we play with the rhythms in the context of the ground rhythm. Monk is a great example of that. Or for today, Marcus Roberts. They both set up the ground rhythm and play a lot of really inventive rhythms that will resolve in the context of the ground rhythm. And this is like African music with the exception of the fact that African musicians are playing in the two times at once. In our music it’s kind of over here in the lower of the 4 time. We’re playing in the upper three – if you got to be technical about it – we’re not hearing it like that of course. But we’re super-imposing all these rhythms and melodies on top of it and trying to resolve them with a certain type of feeling in time.
A cornerstone of what I believe is that all of the shuffle music is the same. The rhythm is the same. It’s just about where you put the accent on the triplet. It seemed like there was a big difference to people when they were trying to be current – or not – in the past. But when you remove the pressure of novelty from how you hear, it doesn’t make a difference. It’s kind of like if you read the language of Shakespeare or you read the language we use: the substance of it is not hindered by the way they use the language. You just make an adjustment in your understanding of English. What he’s talking about is not something you have to adjust, it’s the style of it. You know what I mean? Because Louis Armstrong is talking about stuff that we still talk about right now. It’s your style of playing in the twenties or thirties was different.
It’s like if Tony Williams played with some people… Even modern players, if he decided he did not want to play with you – if he wanted to superimpose rhythms – you would have trouble playing with him. I don’t care who you are.
If he decided he wanted to play with you, he could play his style with anybody. He could’ve played with Lester Young. He could’ve played with Pops. There’s actually a Benny Goodman record from the sixties with Tony Williams (and Herbie Hancock too): a gig at the Rainbow Room. I’m sure he didn’t have problems fitting in – the music is all connected in that way.
EI: There are plenty of Tommy Flanagan and Hank Jones records with Tony Williams and it’s totally comfortable in terms of the agreement on the quarter note.
WM: When jazz musicians come together, the question is only, “Are we going to play together?” When people decide that they will play together, the vocabulary is so much the same. Otherwise… It’s only hard if you want it to be hard. It’s very different from flamenco music. Then you have a problem. Or play latin music. Then…
EI: I saw you play, sit in, with the flamenco guys in Vitoria, Spain… wherever that was, two summers ago.
WM: Uh-huh. Then you have a problem, because it’s not 4/4 swing.
EI: You still sounded good.
WM: I had to find something. They were kind to me. When we were rehearsing, they picked songs I could play. They could have treated me differently!
EI: One of the great moments of my life was watching Joe Temperley clap the bulerías rhythm with the other men in your big JALC Vitoria/flamenco suite. Obviously, no one has a bigger heart than Joe Temperley. All you need to do is hear him play the baritone saxophone and know this is what he is supposed to do with his life. But watching him solemnly clap the bulerías for you, man, that’s just too funny.
WM: But he loves that kind of shit. We laugh at him about it. We tease Joe all the time. “Sing it, Joe!” Like whatever part that has singing or something, we give it to Joe. [laughing] When we did this mass at the Abyssinian Church, we gave Joe a part like a preacher. “Oh Lord, My God.” [laughing] You know. So, it’s kind of like a joke with us and him.
EI: That’s great.
I’ve got these musical excerpts from Congo Square here. In case it’s not totally clear, I should maybe tell you what we’re doing: I don’t represent an official publication, but a blog. (I interviewed Stanley on it.)
WM: I never get to talk about the music, so I’m happy just to talk to you.
EI: I’m going to post these excerpts on the blog so people can hear what’s going on. Some of these are as short as 10 seconds; I assume you don’t object to my posting them.
WM: I don’t care. It’s not a concern.
EI: Alright, let’s begin at the top of the suite.
EI: That’s Herlin Riley vocalizing, a musician I think is really important to you; someone who you care about a lot.
WM: I love him – lemme show you a picture of him in this book, Moving to Higher Ground, where we are both in a New Orleans parade in 1970. This is when we both played in Danny Barker’s band, he was playing trumpet then too. It’s very deep with Herlin and I; we are like family.
I didn’t write that, what Herlin does in the beginning: I just said, “Do something in the beginning, Holmes.”
He just made it up: “Now the brothers done come from across the way – When we play our drums we say Hu-Na-Nay.” I was going to do it myself, but when I started, I said, no wait, let me get Herlin up in here. “The brothers that come from across the way” (talking about them), “when we play our drums” (now you’re talking about all of us) – “…brothers that come from across the way, when we play our drums, we say Hu-Na-Nay. I want you and you and you over there – to know we coming in peace and love from Congo Square.”
EI: So, then, immediately we hear this beat, a very special beat. Again, I feel that what you are trying to say as an artist with this record is to celebrate this elusive academy —
WM: No. It’s less to do with the rhythm then to say, with all of the music, “We are together.” Especially when we play with people whose music is not really like ours. The question is, “How do we find the things we have in common, that we can play together and be challenged by playing it?”
After the part we just listened to, the “Hu-Na-Nay,” both ensembles [the JALC and Odadaa!] play together. We are doing a Black Indian New Orleans-style 3-3-2 and they are doing the rhythm that’s also in “Kolomashi,” the Okpiyii. It’s hard not to drag, since we feel the rhythm a little differently. Their eighth-note is more even than our shuffle. So this piece had a tendency to drag, and pull, and sway.
They are also less overtly welcoming than us: Odadaa! is saying, “Colonials get out!” as compared to our “Hu-Na-Nay,” which is “welcome.” But their piece is not not welcome. I like the fact that it’s two opposites. “You’re welcome, but you’re not welcome to come in and rule us.” So in a way it’s saying the same thing.
Our “Hu-Nay-Nay” is supposed to balance with the next track, “Awo,” where they celebrate their ancestors.
WM: That’s like our church music, when a choir sings “peace” and there’s a high descant against it.
EI: It’s a fabulous sound.
WM: They hear it that way too: when they hear us harmonize a third up they want to get next to that. We want to get with them and they want to get with us. And that’s what Yacub wanted too, from a philosophical standpoint.
EI: He seems like a very special person.
WM: Yes, he is.
The whole piece is kind of about being at home, coming away from home, and coming back together. It’s a circle.
EI: In fact, the next piece, “Home,” is the longest on the record. I have a few excerpts from it.
One thing I liked, right away, was that it was a great groove in seven – but I didn’t realize it was in seven at first, since it felt so natural.
WM: [Pulls out handwritten score] It’s supposed to be like the weekday and the weekend. That phase builds up and comes down. [points at difficult stacking horns moment with numbered entrances on single staff] I just write it out for Jonathan Kelly, my brother that copies for me… We’ve been together for a long time so he understands that shorthand.
A lot of the other movements are based on the thematic layout in this piece. [whistles: B, F#, A#, G#]
EI: One tune that recurs I called the “clarinet theme”:
WM: Yeah, ragtime. A little bit of bitonality there, too, since it’s over a pedal.
EI: So you do call that ragtime?
WM: It’s like ragtime. But the flat 9 on the chord, that’s bitonal. Well, not really: going C# to F# – it’s really a B chord giving in, like a lot of Western harmony.
It starts to spread out. It’s all about up and down. “Home” is all up and down. Then going away from home.
EI: I think this is really important. The fact that you put the ragtime tune in there, that is important to your aesthetic.
WM: All the music, together. I believe this. I’ve been believing this for years now. I had that concept in about 1983, but I didn’t know enough music yet.
Coming from New Orleans, I did know that African music and New Orleans music was related. Also, since I was in New Orleans, I got to play classical music: If I had been in New York, I wouldn’t have been good enough to get gigs. But there weren’t so many classical trumpet players in New Orleans, so they would call me to play a Mahler symphony or Gabrieli’s Canzoni. I also played with the symphony Brass Quintet, at the circus, at the Joffrey Ballet…
My main gigs were funk gigs. And some traditional jazz on the weekends.
So, after I had played all that music, in 1983 or ’84 I asked myself, “Why I am I playing much less music now? It’s all ‘modal music,’ and ‘complicated…’” Another question was, “Why should we come to the conclusion that European classical music made (where the avant-garde was considered the only current music), and instead accept all the music?”
EI: Sort of like, “Don’t throw anything out”?
WM: I also played with Kidd Jordan at SUNO, who played the avant-garde music. We’re family: in fact, Kidd’s son Kent, who plays flute, is the one who made me start practicing when I was thirteen. I saw Roscoe Mitchell and George Lewis this past weekend and I said to them, “Make sure you tell Kidd hello!” (And Marlon – Kidd’s other son – is a trumpeter, and I was like a mentor to him when he was young.)
Anyway, so I began to think more in that way: what if all the music that you actually know was together? What if you were actually truly experiencing playing music?
Like, I heard my daddy play ragtime. I heard ragtime my whole life! Maybe not always the best version – although my daddy played it well – but the echo of ragtime.
I played in a marching band, John Phillip Sousa: well, that’s ragtime; march forms, and Sousa himself played rags. And I played Bernstein’s Overture to Candide in a community orchestra…
So I started to think: what if you were to express everything you truly knew in music?
EI: Maybe this is the right time for me to tell you a story I know that you’ll appreciate: I was teaching at a really excellent jazz workshop this past summer, and the pianists there were all playing some really interesting things. One was improvising in twelve-tones, another had these fancy variations on “Donna Lee”…
But then, in my masterclass, I played (not very well) the opening strain of “Carolina Shout” and not one of the ten pianists recognized it.
WM: They didn’t know it! Well, that’s typical of our music.
EI: Then, when I told them the name of the composer, James P. Johnson, I didn’t feel like they had ever even heard the name.
WM: But that kind of ignorance is connected more to our overall culture. The reason we don’t know that we are together is that we don’t realize that we have been together in many ways. So when you can’t build on the achievements of your ancestors, you regress or repeat the same thing over and over again. Sure, they don’t know who James P. Johnson is; they don’t know any music from the 1920’s!
To be fair, why would they know that? I only knew ragtime because my father played it. When I started out, I just wanted to play funk music, or like Freddie Hubbard or something in the 1970’s. Something hip! I met Roy Eldridge in the 1970’s, and I had no respect for what he played. I couldn’t hear it. Harry “Sweets” Edison, too: I knew all those guys when I was in high school, but I could only think, “Man, you guys need to hit on some sus [suspended] chords or something!” I didn’t have the knowledge to appreciate them.
EI: Okay, back to Congo Square and this ragtime quote: I’ll be honest with you, the first time I heard this phrase, I was taken aback. It was so bold!
We’ve heard so many other postmodern pastiches from the Art Ensemble of Chicago, John Zorn, and others that it was hard for me to take it seriously. But then, upon relistening, I heard the integrity beneath.
WM: I don’t look at it in those terms. I grew up in New Orleans, I didn’t need to take out a book to learn what ragtime was.
And this phrase, you know, is three and a half measures in four; so, if I’m in seven, I’m trying to figure out how to turn the phrase around in an elegant way. And that’s mainly for Victor Goines: he’s from New Orleans, too, and he’s going to play it…well, when he first heard it, he started laughing, “Aww – I hear you!”
EI: The more you know, the more you’ll understand this record. Of course, that’s like anything…
WM: When I first started reading poetry, I didn’t like it. Why use all these metaphors? You could just say what you wanted to say. But when I started to understand the point of it was that the metaphor brings in a whole world of other things, not just what it was referring to. It’s a way to get a lot more information in a shorter space.
This is a paraphrase, but somewhere Beethoven says, “If you want to write church music, go to the ancient modes themselves, not your memory of church music.” I try all the time, in all my music, to put as much music as I can.
When people can’t hear my music or where I’m coming from, I don’t feel bad about it, because I remember when I was younger and couldn’t even hear Roy Eldridge!
Talking about my music with you, this is interesting, because I never talk about my music with someone who isn’t one of the cats in the band. I’m 46: I don’t think one interview I’ve ever given before has been about my music. Well, I remember one, where I pulled out my scores and everything, but then that turned out to be a negative piece. He was trying to prove that I had committed fraud by getting a Pulitzer Prize! I had a laugh about that one…
EI: When I interviewed Stanley, I sent the transcription to him for vetting before posting. I’m happy to do that with you, too.
WM: No, it’s cool. I’m not worried about that with you. You’re a musician. There’s a different vibe, man. You play music. A lot of time people writing articles will create a vibe between musicians that don’t even know each other because somebody says something in an interview. We all have opinions and we all think things. That’s part of being different people! But whatever we think, we know that we’re each musicians. You sat down at my piano and you started playing progressions. Okay. I know that. We’re talking about James P. Johnson. That’s more important to me that whether you liked my songs.
EI: I guess one of the reasons I run the blog is to put more of a musician’s perspective out there.
WM: Right. I agree with that. Yeah!
EI: Here’s the next excerpt. The trumpets sound like they are in displaced octaves. I never heard quite that sound before.
WM: Yeah. Displaced octaves, that’s right. That’s sort of like natural trumpets, before valves.
EI: Did you ever play a natural trumpet?
WM: Oh yeah. I was into them in high school; I had a collection. I played them only in my house, though, not on gigs! When I came to New York, I didn’t bring them.
EI: Now, what is that break?
WM: Carlos Henriquez showed me that one. If you hear it in 4, it’s easy, but if you hear it in 6, it’s hard. But in 4 it is square, right on the beat, but maybe we “place” them a little bit. We have to adjust to the 6 Odadaa! is playing, especially since they are in the middle of a phrase. As conductor, I adjust to the bell.
EI: That’s a mysterious moment; that’s why I like it so much.
WM: The hardest thing is to get us to play with the bell pattern.
EI: The up-and-down of the beat is not American.
WM: No, it’s not, it’s more like a clave. And like Yacub told me: “In order for us all to play together, y’all will have to play with us.” For me, it was a blessing to have Carlos and Ali Jackson, who spent a lot of time at night working it out; a real labor of love. They would sit up with me and go through rhythm patterns and say, “No, that’s not it.” Then, eventually, “This is it.”
EI: I have one more bit of “Home” here; what do you call this quotation?
WM: New Orleans shuffle.
EI: I love that mean, swinging phrase right afterwards, too.
WM: That’s Marcus Roberts. That’s the way he phrases. Look at that written out [finds place in score]; that took a long time to notate, all those nested triplets.
The New Orleans shuffle with the trombones happens twice as a transition.
EI: Again, for me to buy those bars [the New Orleans bars] requires the ultimate belief in your sincerity.
WM: Really?! It’s interesting, I don’t… [long pause]
EI: You don’t notice it.
I think if people – including myself – really understood how natural this was for you, the perception of you in the world would be different.
WM: The whole vector of the tune and the harmonies is what I’m thinking about… If you hear something and write it down…I don’t know what it means to other people, but I know what it means to me.
It’s like Jelly Roll Morton, or really like a blues I play from Hoghead Harris. I play this at parties at my house.
I can’t really play the piano, but:
I’d always do that, and sing this song called “I Takes My Time.”
Also, that beat signifies the train: “Chug chug chug chug.” I write the train all the time. I grew up down the street from the train. I love the train; it’s evocative of a lot of stuff for me.
So, look, I don’t really know how somebody else hears it. They might hear it like a cartoon, I don’t know.
EI: H’mm. [long pause] Early jazz has sometimes been played—arguably defaced—by a presentation that is sarcastic.
WM: Huh. Well, I didn’t always like that kind of music, either. But I learned as I went along…
It’s a matter of us codifying our culture. We’re still young. But we will. It will be there. We’re not going to produce another Jelly Roll Morton. We’ll produce whatever we’ll produce but he’s there. It’s like Walt Whitman. He’s there. He’s in that time frame. If you want to deal with American writing and poetry, you’re going to deal with him. You will deal with Mark Twain. You will deal with Faulkner. You will deal with Hemingway. You’re going to deal with those people because they exist in that time.
If you want to write counterpoint, you are going to deal with Bach. If you look around, that’s who’s there. If you want to improvise, you’re going to deal with Louis Armstrong because when you actually start to look at it, he’s who’s there. The consciousness to do that and to want to be great at something in the American Arts is not here right now for a bulk of the people. But it’ll come.
Our job is more to keep it going and to conduct ourselves with integrity and keep all the references and get as much of the music in our music as we can get—so that when there are people who want to check it out, it’s there for them to check it out. It’s a bridge for them to develop it however they want to develop it.
As long as there’s not a bridge for them, then it’s hard.
EI: Speaking of Pops, I think maybe my favorite solo on this record is by a trumpet player.
WM: Marcus Printup: a very expressive player.
Yacub said he wanted to talk about the different aspects of the diaspora of the music and how it spread. Because Congo Square is also Caribbean. Manuel Perez, one of our trumpet players, isn’t from the Caribbean, but he was from Cuba. The early New Orleans musicians, the early French music has a lot of the Caribbean. A lot of that music around the Congo Square time is Caribbean sounding.
Yacub listens to all the music. He loves Los Muñequitos de Matanzas. He’ll listen to them a lot. He listens to Caribbean music.
EI: It sounds so natural for Odadaa! to be playing this.
WM: A lot of that is Carlos too.
EI: That’s for sure. It probably helps that Henriquez is there!
WM: It helps a lot, man! I’m not going to lie. I should have made a special dedication to him on this record because he worked a lot over time just to make sure it’s right. “No. No. This not right. This is not right.” Or “It don’t feel right.” He’s very diligent.
EI: I like the sound and the way he hits the notes, too. It’s got a lot of weight.
WM: Yeah. I love him. He’s like my little brother. I knew him when he was young and I was a lot older than him. I love him. It’s more of a familial thing with all of the cats. Ali too. It’s not really so much just the music. We’ll sit up and argue about rhythm until 3 and 4 in the morning. He’s the type of guy that is very serious about stuff being how it’s supposed to be.
EI: Well, that’s where I tried to start with this, but I wasn’t sure how you felt about what I was saying. It’s an academy: to understand this music, you have to understand the rhythm. You’re not going to get to first base with it unless you understand that.
WM: That’s the heart of it all—the rhythm and the dance.
EI: Yeah. This next thing is pretty unbelievable. From the same song.
WM: That’s Duke Ellington. “Flaming Sword.” I try to keep elements of Duke Ellington’s music in my music all the time.
EI: That couldn’t be more clear!
WM: Duke. You know, Jimmy Mundy. Any of the cats. Benny Carter sometimes in the voicing. So that people will be able to see the continuum. Not: “Well, he did that and now let me run from that.” I don’t believe in that really. I believe that it’s all one big mainstream, one continuum.
EI: I certainly think there’s no more underrated and misunderstood musician than Duke Ellington.
WM: Yeah, he’s so great that it’s hard to assess him.
EI: Of course, he’s the heart of jazz. But he’s almost outside jazz. His world is so specific. He had that family with him for so long and it always sounds this certain way.
Sometimes I’m disappointed by certain excellent jazz musicians that don’t know much about Ellington.
WM: Well, I think we can’t take this present time as an example. We have to think across time. Sometimes you get caught up in thinking about the time of your lifetime and this and that.
Duke Ellington’s music is all available. All those records were made. The Smithsonian has all of his music and people take care of it. You can go there and see it. It’s incredible how much of it is here. Somebody knew it was important. They kept it. Scores and recordings. There will be a time when it will be assessed. (You would hope the time is now.)
As our culture, as we mature, we start to understand all of this. It’s the same with Ellington as with any great American cultural figure. Stuart Davis. People don’t really know who that is. I’m not comparing him to Duke, but…You know what I mean? There are other great figures in our culture that we don’t know.
EI: I want to talk about Duke more in a second when we get to “Bamboula” but since we’re going in the order of the record:
WM: Church music. I put some blues in it. “Momma’s little baby got shortening bread.” – I’ll show you. It’s for the tenor saxophone. “Momma’s little baby got shortening bread.” You can barely hear it.
EI: I can barely hear it. [this is a very faint line in the horns near the end of the excerpt when all the other instruments are unison] Oh, yeah! Barely in there.
WM: “Momma’s little baby got shortening bread…”
EI: Speaking of Duke, the connection couldn’t be more explicit in the next piece.
WM: This is a sensual piece. It’s two tenors. It’s not that involved, really. Walter is making up his part I think. Him and Victor trade off.
EI: That’s the Ellington aesthetic too – giving the soloist room to create a melody.
WM: Yeah, room to play. What was I thinking about? Not so much about Duke, just the tune. But it does have that Ellington vibe. That sensualist kind of tenor saxophone sound.
EI: In terms of saxophone sonority, I don’t think you’ve ever had someone who had that post-Coltrane, post-Michael Brecker sort of focused, harder sound.
WM: Yeah, I don’t really like that sound that much. I’ve had so many tenor players in my band but I don’t know if I’ve recorded with them. James Carter played with me. Don Braden played with me. Craig Handy. You know, it’s not cause I don’t necessarily like that sound…
EI: You know, I won’t use his name in the interview but I was talking to X [tenor player] one time…
WM: Yeah, he played with me.
EI: He told me that there was a lot of pressure not to play the Coltrane type of sound.
WM: Yeah. Pressure from me. Yeah. I don’t like that. When somebody plays with me, I don’t like for them to sound like they are imitating. I don’t like to play like everybody else is playing. My feeling always is “Man, why are we playing 1980s jazz clichés? Why? What is the gain of that?” Once you put it in that context of me talking to him, I can understand. I never really thought of it like I was pressuring cats not to do it.
But, for me, my whole thing is not the contemporary clichés. That’s my whole thing. Whatever is the thing, contemporary thing, that everybody does – I don’t want you to do that. Try not to do that.
EI: I feel like the culture of the tenor saxophone sound has gone down a little bit from back in the glory days.
WM: Yeah. Because they only play one or two things. Play a lot of things, man!
EI: I was watching a Duke Ellington DVD recently with Paul Gonsalves was playing “Happy Reunion” and that was absolutely in another place sonically.
WM: I was in the Modern Museum and I told my son, “Earn your prejudice. Don’t be prejudiced against something you don’t know. Look at the man’s work. Look at all of this stuff.” We were both looking at something that was a big pink rectangle, okay. “If I brought that home, would you say that was…what?” You know, dude, check everything out.
I like the sound of all kinds of music but I feel like when you are too much like the clichés of your era—you can’t stand out later. You’re liked in that time but later you don’t stand out. I would always pressure cats not to play like the clichés of that time. Especially piano players. They’re driving me crazy playing like… snare drum parts – tink tink tink. I hate that. Play melodies. Come up with something. Invent your own style.
It’s like how Monk was viewed. People misunderstood Monk. They said this shit about Monk but he had his style.
Over the last 10 or 15 years I’ve lost track of how I’m critiqued. I don’t even know if I get critiqued so much. It’s kind of out there. Like when they said, “neo-conservative” or “plays older jazz”—I understood that. That was kind of out there but as I got more serious about music, I don’t think so. Something like Congo Square, I’m not really critiqued about it. None of the pieces, really, like All Rise—that’s 8 years ago. I never got a critique of it. Or the music I play with my septet. It was not critiqued.
I always tell a musician you have four avenues of creativity. You’ll fall somewhere in those four. The first is the sound of your era. We all sound like that. All of us who came up in the 1980s sound like we did. You come with your group of people and you will play like them. People who came up playing in the 1920s sound like they played then. Even the great Louis Armstrong, Sidney Bechet and a little earlier than that – they have a similar sound. So, we all have that. We choose to do different things with it. You don’t think Thelonious Monk is from James P. Johnson’s era. And it’s not all just because of the sound quality. He doesn’t play like those people.
The second is the history of your art. A few of the people will be into that. That means somebody like John Lewis: you can’t really tell where he is. Sometimes he sounds like Teddy Wilson. Sometimes it’s like Erroll Garner. He didn’t really sound like any of them. He always sounds like John Lewis but he has that echo in his sound.
Later, he’s evocative of the whole history of music, in fact all of the arts, not just music… all the arts and musics from all over the world like tango music, flamenco music, you know, commedia dell’arte – John Lewis was really into that. And that’s another path: all the things that are removed from your kind of sphere but you can kind of… You can take things out of it. Like somebody can take something out of that Japanese music – Noh – and they can find something to hear in the musical space or dramatic moments or…
Then you have your own creativity. That’s the richest of all of them. You just invent. You’re inventing stuff all the time. Like if I would move through this – piece – some things I took from people but a lot of it is just shit I came up with. It didn’t come from anybody. It’s not like I thought, “Here’s Duke Ellington or…” Sure, there would be moments of it where I’d say, “Let me put this in.” When I hear something that IS what somebody else heard, I don’t not do it because they heard it. Because I know that I’m going to hear a pile of shit that I only heard.
And I always felt that even with my trumpet style…even when I was playing stuff that I had heard other trumpet players play, I felt like, “Yeah, but I play so much of my own shit that I don’t not want to bring them with me. I don’t want to be out there alone.”
EI: Well, you can certainly hear Louis Armstrong and Miles Davis…
WM: And Freddie Hubbard. You know, Sweets was my man. Sweets. I mean, that’s my man that I hung with and learned from. Clark Terry, of course. When I was in high school, I loved him. I listened to him. Don Cherry. That was another cat. I was close with him, knew him. Clifford Brown.
EI: Well, all right. The next thing here is one of my favorite melodies on this record.
WM: That’s an example: I never heard something sound like that. Me and Branford used to do that all the time, play half steps like that.
EI: Well, that’s all over Black Codes, of course.
WM: Yes. We always count our half-steps like that.
EI: I hope you don’t take this the wrong way, but this would be really great film music.
WM: I won’t take it the wrong way.
EI: I see an old-fashioned adventure movie unfolding.
WM: I’m so appreciative of you listening to it.
EI: So, I have two excerpts from “Tsotsobi,” the first thing on side two. Here’s just the beginning of it.
WM: This is a hard one to count. It’s hard to come in on this. They were playing it on a balaphone. That’s where I learned it. It’s hard to figure out where “1” is. It’s 3 and 1/2 beats away from where we would normally hear it. [demonstrates]
EI: Oh, no!
WM: It’s the difference of accent. They have a bell pattern they play all the time. I was really shedding so I could hear it. A lot of times in these parts I put that bell pattern inside of our part.
EI: You wrote…
WM: I wrote the clave into our music…
EI: So that there’s a guide for the players?
WM: No, I just use it as a reference. We’re not guiding off of it, they’re playing it. But I’ll play around with their clave all the time in our parts.
EI: Do you know what Kosmigroov is? It’s a style of music. Anyway, this song made me think of it a little bit. It’s just sort of funny: “Wynton Marsalis plays Kosmigroov.”
WM: I don’t even know what that is.
EI: Let’s listen to Carlos here, It’s a little Garrison-esque for a minute.
EI: Some great bass playing.
WM: With the rhythm, yeah.
EI: It’s a nice moment. That’s an effect I really like, when the bass starts sort of wandering down there and everything else is solid.
WM: Rhythm on the top. Something John Lewis used to always talk about—getting motion in the bass. Always. He would always say, “You’ve got to get better bass motion. The bass doesn’t have to be tied to the drums all the time.” But it’s hard when you’re writing music. With improvising, it’s easier—if the drummer is playing a soft enough volume. It’s always a balance. Because if the bass goes too far away from the rhythm for a solo, then it starts to sound like another type of style of music. It’s kind of complicated. Like how much “bass vamp,” how much “walk” and how much “improvising.” I never tell them; I leave the bottom alone. “You all will figure it out how to make the bottom.”
EI: The question of the bass is very interesting.
What do I got here:
EI: Yeah. This is bitonal. There’s some shit in here I can’t hear, man, and I’ve got very good harmonic ears. What the fuck is going on here?
WM: I don’t know. I just sing that kind of shit.
EI: It sounds a bit like “Wade in the Water.”
WM: That kind of stuff I started doing around when I was doing Blood on the Fields. I would write counterlines that would be kind of disjointed. So that’s like an A… I don’t really know what that is. [hums] I guess that would be an A minor over a C.
Not really.
EI: Sort of a C7 chord, yeah, but those B naturals…
WM: I don’t understand what I was dealing with. I don’t really know.
EI: But that’s great! I have to say, you’ll always have my ear when you’re doing that. Do it more!
WM: That kind of bitonal counterpoint?
EI: Well, just a clear melody that’s colored in an abstract way – or something that’s not immediately obvious. That’s really beautiful. Of course, that’s Monk and Mingus and even Duke sometimes.
WM: Duke wrote more counterpoint than anybody except for Jelly Roll.
EI: Shortly after that part, the ragtime comes back.
WM: Oh. Yeah.
EI: It’s got a Monkish minor second now.
WM: Once I was learning a King Oliver solo and I noticed how much he played on the beat. I said, “Damn, this sounds like he’s playing a lot off the beat, but he’s not.” So I’ve tried to go with that: here, a lot of it is on the beat.
EI: If you’re paying attention, there is a thematic transformation between hearing it an hour earlier in “Home” and now in “Bamboula Dance.”
WM: Right.
EI: There’s some journey you’re expressing as a composer.
WM: I didn’t really evolve the theme as the movements went on. They’re just themes. It depends. In Blood on the Fields, the themes evolved as I went along. Or on Blue Interludes, every time a theme would come back there was an evolution of the theme. For Congo Square, though, I wasn’t so much trying to evolve the themes. The overall theme is more the journey of us getting to a certain point, fighting with each other, coming together and then coming back home.
EI: However, the next three excerpts are three treatments of the tune from “Logo Talk,” which I think are all really happening. Is this your melody?
WM: Yeah. Had a lot of trouble organizing this one.
EI: Here’s the tune again, with another note added:
EI: And then there’s this one, with more new notes and a wild background.
EI: What are you saying there?
WM: “I’m tired.” We’re rushing.
EI: Yeah, that last thing sounds almost like the trumpet isn’t with the rhythm—like it’s hanging on for dear life.
WM: We had to just listen to the bell.
The organization of this piece gave me a lot of problems. I had to try to figure out a way that we would line up with what Odadaa! was playing. That was the hardest thing. Because when they gave the rhythm to me, it was just drums playing, and I put the music around it. They were going all off of cues. So I had to figure out how can we make the music go off of cues. But they were also playing a melody inside of the drums. So I had to make my melodies line up with them. Then when we started playing on the road, they could hear where we were so they would adjust what they were playing to go with us. So that was one of the examples of where we really came together in a way that was very unique. Because they were making a lot of adjustments too.
EI: This track is one of the highlights of the album, for sure. It’s in B; and you said it was in B because of the tuning of the drums?
WM: Yeah.
EI: A lot Congo Square is in B, I guess.
WM: I think it’s all in B, baby!
EI: You were talking about these rhythms that you can hear one way or another. On “War” you can hear a bell pattern that sounds quite different whether soloed next to by the American drummer (Ali Jackson) or the African drummer (Yacub Addy).
EI: I am aware of the “4 versus 6” controversy, but I don’t think I’ve ever heard it quite so explicit as in that trading. “Okay, there’s Ali playing with it in four. And then there’s Yacub playing with it in six.”
WM: With a guy like Ali, he knows so much music. His uncle, Oliver Jackson, was a jazz musician. His father played too.
EI: The same Oliver Jackson that played with Hank Jones?
WM: Yeah. So he has a lot of respect for the music. Sometimes with the American musicians, they get around musicians from other cultures and they believe so much in the other culture’s music that they don’t play their own music. That’s the thing Yacub is always saying: “Play your music. Play your music, man. Let’s hear your music.”
EI: I see you put Herlin Riley back behind the set for this next piece.
WM: Whew! Back in that parade.
EI: I was struck by how it simply seems like a normal blues, but it’s actually got chorus after chorus completely written out, not just riffs and solos.
WM: Yeah, it was a pain in the ass to write it out too!
EI: And of course, after I started counting on my fingers, at a certain point I realized I was going to get to twelve – twelve choruses, of course, just like the twelve bars of the blues.
WM: I didn’t know that! I’m really not bullshitting! I swear!
EI: Oh, come on!
WM: If you look at this, I don’t know where my choruses are at all. This is the actual sketch of it. Let’s see if I took any of the choruses out. One. Two. Okay.
EI: Is the tuba part written out? No.
WM: The tuba part is not written out. But there’s a rogue trombone part: See, give him the melody and the changes. He has the melody but he makes up stuff.
I got a four note voicing. That’s like a big band voicing but everybody is packed in tight. It’s not a spread voicing. There’s one trombone to be played: that part is a rogue part. I don’t like to write out any extreme parts. I don’t like to write out the top or the bottom part. I think that’s a mistake. It seems like when you write out a top part and a bottom part, then it starts to sound like written-out music.
But when you have the bottom and the top free, something else happens… It’s like the ride pattern and the bass…
EI: It’s a helluva tuba player, man.
WM: Andre Hayward, he’s a trombone player. He don’t even play tuba that much. He’s from Houston too, so he got like that stuff too. – 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, … Twelve. It damn sure is twelve.
EI: Twelve twelves.
WM: Okay.
EI: It’s interesting. There are 12 choruses of written-out close voicing with a second-line beat.
We’re at the end of the record. The last two excerpts I have are of “Kolomashi” with and without piano and bass accompaniment. I was really struck by Dan Nimmer double the bell parts high on the piano which is a great idea.
vocal:
with piano added:
WM: He just would choose to do that. I didn’t tell him to do that. I just tell him to get out of the way of the middle register. I don’t like when the piano is always in the mid-register. Because there’s a lot of stuff going on in the drums in a certain register. (The snare and the comping compete.)
EI: That’s a great choice, though, to do that.
WM: He did that. Nimmer did that himself.
[The last part of the interview is when we went outside to walk around a bit, and spent some time watching kids, mostly black, play basketball on an open court.]
WM: I’ve been lucky. Everywhere I go – I come out and I get treated with respect. I basically treat people like that in return. I’m cool. You and me standing here talking. You don’t have to have your tape recorder on. You understand what I’m saying?
It’s what I believe. All of that comes from this music. I’ve learned so much from this music. How to treat people. How to be. When I left New Orleans I was mad, man. My upbringing was so hard, man. You know I had a hard time. I took it hard. All this shit. Not just dealing with white people. You had a lot of shit to deal with if you wanted to survive a certain way. Everybody does.
The music taught me a lot about being a human being and about dealing with people in the world. With those lessons, I’ve been blessed beyond belief. I can’t even describe it. Just the blessing of the insight of the music. Playing and being given the opportunity to develop a musicianship, to be able to form a coalition of people around something like the music, being able to go to thousands of schools and talk to people’s kids. I’ve done over twenty-something – 2400 gigs – 2500 gigs and at almost every gig somebody comes backstage with their kids. I’ve got thousands of letters. One day, when I’m old and I’m depressed, I’m going to pull those letters out.
I had guy come in from Chicago with a bunch of kids from West Chicago, some of his roughest kids. He said, “Man, I brought these kids all of the way here to your thing cause I knew you love these kids and you would talk to them. Can you talk to my kids?”
Man, I put my hand on the one kid and started talking to him and he started crying. You know these were kids that you would look at and think…[that they were lost for good].
My thing has always been to be honest with motherfuckers and tell them what I thought. It don’t mean it’s right. But what I’m telling you, I’m going to tell them. I don’t have no two groups. I don’t assume a white person is going to like me because I’m distancing myself from these people. I don’t assume they’re going to like me because I’m distancing myself from you. Fuck, you’re here with me. I’m not going to distance myself from you ‘cause of them.
EI: That’s hard to do for most people, including me.
WM: It’s not hard for me.
EI: You were born with that one, huh.
WM: I fit in where I’m at. I’m a human being.
I’ve been misunderstood, but I have nothing to be bitter about. Man, I’m not. I’ve had a great fucking time. Like any of these guys, any of my guys… Like I told you, my man, Jay—he’s like my son to me. I could rely on him. He’s got integrity. We’ve been through a lot of shit. I’ve seen him go through a lot from when he was a boy. It’s not like a thin bond. It’s years.
This shit these motherfuckers be writing about – jazz journalists and all…I don’t know what that shit is, man. I’m just out here playing music and writing. I’ve got kids. That shit is childish. When you’re 20 or 21 you got time for that shit. I’m 46. You know what I’m saying? A lot of them talk to me like I’m 19. I’ve got a boy that’s 19. I’m not 19.
Over the years I just realized it’s going to come out the way it does. A philosophical perspective does not make you unhappy if you know how to be happy. Me and this one [Jay] had so many fucking good times. Oh, shit. If I wrote some of that in a book! Just the times we’ve had. Hanging out. Playing. Closing clubs down. My main man.
EI: What about the AACM community and that sort of scene?
WM: I just talked with George Lewis and them last week. I don’t really know. I didn’t know them. I know Kidd Jordan in New Orleans, I never hung with them or nothing. I played with Lester Bowie for a little while, but I didn’t really know them.
I talked with Muhal and Roscoe Mitchell last week too. Regardless of the style of music that we play, like I was telling you, we are all unique musicians. For all that “talking bullshit in print” that we do, I never had a conflict with a musician in person. Ever. I’m 46. What’s my chance of having one if I didn’t have a conflict with them when I was in my twenties?
And I mean a musician of any style. Funk, rap, hip hop – even if they know I hate their music. Me and Chuck D, we don’t have a problem with each other.
EI: I’m reading this George Lewis book right now, A Power Stronger Than Itself.
WM: Yeah. I started reading it. A big book.
EI: It’s really good. I actually brought you a record, Nonaah. I never really checked out the AACM much before and just began exploring a little bit with the help of the book. I found this one Roscoe record that I really dig. There’s a piece with four saxophones on it that I want you to hear at some point. I’ll leave it with you.
WM: Yeah, I’ll check it out.
EI: It’s not swinging.
WM: No.
EI: But it’s pretty fucking intense.
WM: It’s improvised music.
EI: Well, this piece is very composed too. They play this one riff. They play it over an over again for about three minutes before breaking out.
WM: A lot of times they said it wasn’t jazz. They called it Creative Black Music.
“Jazz” – for a name that nobody wants – there’s been a lot of contest around it.
EI: Yeah, that’s true.
WM: I started saying at the beginning—I like the name of it. I like the music. I don’t have any problems with it. But it’s got to have a meaning. Everything can’t be it, if only because you can’t teach it to other people.
That’s a very pragmatic way to look at it. If I take my kid out here and say, “Everything that you do is basketball,” I can’t teach him how to play. You apply that to any field. You’re going to have a problem teaching people, if it don’t have a meaning. It’s great for you if you can realize something that intensely broad. But you’re going to have trouble with your next generation. Because to learn everything is hard.
And if there’s no standard of excellence, the most competitive students will not want to play. Maybe that will happen when the world becomes really advanced. That’s like “super-advanced” where there won’t be any concept of attainment…!
EI: I told Stanley Crouch this too, when I interviewed him: Part of me is getting more conservative because when I was younger I felt more like everything was jazz, but not so much anymore.
WM: In our world, in our era, that’s actually the conservative viewpoint because everybody holds that. You’re becoming more radical!
The thing about conservatism is the comfort of numbers. Everybody agrees.
EI: I’ll tell you one thing: since The Bad Plus really got going and toured the world, I’ve gotten to hear a lot at the jazz festivals in Europe and other places. Frankly, I’m rather appalled at the state of things on some basic level. That’s why I’m trying to write about music on the blog, and part of why I want to talk to you about it. Sort of to say, “A lot of shit has gotten done that has had a lot of integrity and more people should be more aware of precisely what that entailed.”
WM: That’s not conservatism, that’s just education.
EI: Like I was telling you: something snapped; I lost my mind when none of those kids recognized “Carolina Shout.”
WM: Think if you were black! Suppose you saw a group of people who produced the greatest music and musicians in the world and at the end of it you end up with less than the scraps on the table. Because now we have musicians in public insulting each other. Insulting our women in public. Not playing music. Pretending you shot a brother and went to jail or did something to some black people and now have the worst taste in the world. Don’t know whether somebody can play. Clap on 1 and 3 on anything that don’t have a big backbeat on it.
See, now, I know that to be the case. When I’m talking to you, I’m talking as an insider.
People need education. It should be our right for our whole country. You’d be taught how to listen to stuff. That’s not a revolutionary concept. People know it takes education to learn things – whether shooting a basketball, writing with your writing hand, putting a suit on, shining your shoes – there’s education all the time.
But someone like me has had to deal with a counter-education movement. How can you be against education? It’s possible when there’s the element of racism. You don’t know it for sure, because it continues from generation to generation in subtle ways, and you don’t realize that when you’re in school. You can’t see yourself in that position.
But they will see it. What will happen is when the time is all gone and enough will be at stake somebody will take a real look at it. “Oh, okay, that’s what that was: these people fought back.”
That’s why it’s important for us to keep that thread going. That’s when the thread is going to be important. It might not even be over the music. It might be philosophical. It might be as simple as when Dizzy saw Duke Ellington with a suit on and not doing a minstrel show. That’s a lot. That’s what it seems like to me. He said, “I saw him and I thought—wow! This guy is not doing the minstrel.” It might be as simple as somebody seeing you and me together. That’s how simple shit is. ‘Those two guys. I wonder what they were doing.’”
EI: I guess that’s the right note to end on! I’ll finally turn this machine off.
Back to today in 2026: There’s been a lot of debate about who will succeed Wynton Marsalis as the figurehead of JALC. I have heard all sorts of unreasonable suggestions; the two that make sense to me are charismatic Christian McBride or cutting-edge Jason Moran, both of whom have a proven track record at institutions (and thus certainly capable of dealing with all sorts of unmusical things like raising money and curating a series). However, it is mere speculation that either would be offered the job, let alone whether either would take the job.
In the interview above, Wynton complains that major works for his JALC big band were “not critiqued.” While undoubtedly there were record reviews and prizes, I think Wynton is essentially correct, in the sense that there has been little discourse or consensus.
It is also starting to feel like it is truly past time to properly assess Wynton’s contribution as a concert composer, what with all the symphonic and chamber music that has been premiered and recorded. Wynton is a workaholic, and it seems a good bet that he will continue to compose even more works for classical musicians after stepping down at JALC.
Of course, it is hard to find a critic who commands the full range of genres Wynton draws upon for his formal composition.
If you spend time around the inner circle of excellent jazz players, it turns out that Wynton Marsalis has a very good reputation. This has little to do with his public persona as the leader of JALC, but simply as a class act. The trumpet is the most recalcitrant and unforgiving of instruments, but any trumpeter, anywhere, any time, can approach Wynton and talk shop. He always has an encouraging word for a young person, he’s a big tipper, he gives to charities, he lends his signature and verbal support to worthy causes.
Wynton does unlikely favors and moves in mysterious ways. I myself was the recipient of an obscure “Wynton grant.”
In late 2016 I decided to leave the Bad Plus, a dangerous move career-wise, but I knew such a move was overdue. In early 2017 a Do the Math interview with Robert Glasper exploded in my face and suddenly I was canceled. (It was still the early days of soon-to-be-rampant “cancel culture.”) I may unpack that experience further someday, but for now I’ll just say my foreseeable future felt bleak and I had to find a therapist for a few sessions to deal with suicidal ideation.
To my immense surprise (for we were rarely in contact), Wynton asked me to join him for a panel on the topic of Jazz and Race at the January 2018 Jazz Congress hosted at JALC. It was only when I got there that I realized it was only going to be the two of us plus moderator Andre Guess.
Although we didn’t talk about it, I realized later that Wynton was probably showing public support. He stood next to me and validated my worth, at least terms of the hours and hours I had spent on the internet trying to unpack the mysteries of jazz. If that was his game plan, it worked, for after that day, people started returning my emails again and I no longer felt canceled. Life could continue. The “save his dumb white ass” tax levied by Wynton and Guess was minor: They jointly made fun of me for bringing up Gustav Mahler in the context of “jazz and race.” Fair enough! I paid that tax gladly.
Link to video and transcript at Wynton’s own site.
To close on a musical note, and in case you missed it in the wall of text above, here’s another listen to Wynton Marsalis playing blues piano at his apartment during the 2008 interview.
After he demonstrated this to me in person, I went home and looked in the mirror and scowled. I am supposed to be a piano player, but could I play a simple blues as well as Wynton Marsalis, who didn’t even play piano professionally? The answer, of course, was, no, I couldn’t, that WM could torch me in a session of this stuff not at the trumpet, but at the piano. I practiced a bit and now it is no problem, I got it together. (Cracks knuckles.)
Honesty, generosity, and a belief in the possibility of growth animate both your questions and Wynton’s answers. This is a profound piece for me— past time indeed! Thanks Ethan!
This is such a joy to read. I appreciate learning how Wynton composes and arranges. Your interactions sound so honest. There was a time when his music was ubiquitous, with multiple releases every year. I go back every once in a while and listen to his recordings from the late 80s––early 90s; there is some fine playing andmusic there. Thanks, Ethan!