|
Wynton Marsalis: The Marciac Suite
Article added on October 11, 2000
Wynton Marsalis Septet: The Marciac Suite, Columbia/Sony. Get the CD
from Amazon.com or
Amazon.co.uk.
- Sheet
music by Wynton Marsalis.
The Marciac Suite is named after Marciac,
the small French village with 1300 inhabitants which hosts, since the late 1970s, an
annual jazz festival. Born thanks to the initiative of the local major and
principal of Marciac's collège, Louis Guillhaumon, it started with
trumpeter Bill Coleman and tenor saxophonist Guy Laffite, both of whom lived
in the region. Today, the festival attracts more than 100,000 people during
ten days in August. Wynton Marsalis has been part of it every summer since
1991. He also taught master classes there. In 1997, Guillhaumon commemorated
the bond with Wynton by commissioning a life-sized bronze statute of the
trumpeter from sculptor Daphne du Barry. Marsalis reciprocated that tribute
composing The Marciac Suite. The over 76 minute long suite is a 13 part
composition. It ranges from ballads such as Mademoiselle D'Gascony to
the carnivalesque and circus-like Marciac Fun, which compose, together
with Jean-Louis Is Everywhere and the final Sunflowers, with its
underlying basic, simple rhythm, the highlights of the suite. Wynton Marsalis
often gets accused of being "retro", not up-to-date, playing a
nostalgic type of jazz. Okay, it may not be "avant-garde", whatever
that is, but as long as he composes works of quality and plays with great
musicians as on this CD, recorded in 1999, it doesn't matter.
P.S. For people who do not have the money or
the will to buy the sensational Live At The Village Vanguard eight CD
boxed set, there is a one CD alternative: Selections From The Village
Vanguard. Get the CD from Amazon.com,
Amazon.fr.
Get the entire boxed set from Amazon.com,
Amazon.co.uk,
Amazon.fr.
For people who want to know more about Wynton
Marsalis, I can recommend the book Sweet Swing Blues On The Road by
the man himself, with photographs by Frank Stewart (W.W. Norton & Company,
New York, 1994. Get it from Amazon.com
or Amazon.co.uk;
the German version on which these lines are based and where the photographs come from: Hoffmann und Campe, Hamburg, 1995. Get it from
Amazon.de). Wynton
Marsalis makes some funny remarks about trumpet players and their relation to their instrument. He presents the members of his Septet and gives some
insight into life on the road. He makes comments on politics and music in
general and gives his definition of jazz: Jazz is blues, and it has to swing
all the time. Jazz teaches you to think over a time span longer than 25
seconds. According to Marsalis, jazz critics celebrate new forms, which are
not based on the foundations of jazz, as innovations. But, according to him,
no new jazz style will emerge if one avoids the difficulties of this type of
music. He also states that musicians like Anthony Braxton, Cecil Taylor, Steve
Coleman, Miles Davis and others said themselves that they do/did not play jazz
and that they were right. In the lengthy discussion with a teenager, Wynton
Marsalis also says that he does not play Dixieland, but New Orleans music,
which makes use of the idiomatic means of jazz: riffs, breaks, vamp and
response, solos, grooves, polyphonic improvisation as well as the chorus
format. In jazz, one can listen to entire groups engaging in a dialogue with
each other. Jazz is a musical interplay of an improvised groove on melodies,
harmonies, rhythms and textures, which are based on the blues. Wynton Marsalis asserts that (jazz) purists have no money, no
power and no organ to diffuse their opinion and to have influence. That is of
course an understatement, to put it mildly, since Wynton Marsalis is one of
the most respected and most influential musicians and surely one of the best
paid musicians in jazz. Nobody can force me, the reviewer, to chose between
Wynton Marsalis and John Zorn, between Diana Krall and Dave Douglas. There is
only one criteria to apply: there is good music and there is bad music,
whether you call it jazz or not. Check
also the JazzTimes of March 2000 on the debate about the essence of
jazz, with extensive interviews with Wynton Marsalis and his stylistic
antipode, John Zorn. -
Sheet music
by Wynton Marsalis.
Added on December 13, 2002 (moved
here from Cosmopolis no. 1, December 1999):
Wynton Marsalis: Wynton. 1999 inakustik INAK
Marsalis is a re-release of the concert given by Art Blakey and
The Jazz Messengers at Art Blakey's 61st birthday party at Bubba's Jazz
Restaurant in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, on October 11, 1980. Unfortunately,
there are only about 38 minutes of this first class mainstream jazz. Wynton
and his father, pianist Ellis Marsalis, had the chance to play with hardpop
drummer Art Blakey and The Jazz Messengers on this memorable occasion,
one of the best schools in jazz. On Marsalis, you can hear Wynton and
his father together with Art Blakey, Bobby Watson, Jimmy Williams, Billy
Pierce and Charles Famborough.
The 1961 born trompeter Wynton, brother of saxophone player Brandford and son
of teacher Ellis Marsalis, played funk and fusion as a kid. After the Art
Blakey experience, that ended in 1983, he toured with Herbie Hancock and
got his first Grammy for his jazz album Wynton Marsalis. He is a
controversial figure since he looks back to trompeters like Dizzy Gillespie,
Clifford Brown or Clark Terry. In his eyes, the free jazz and other avantgarde
got lost in a dead-end. In 1987, Wynton was able to establish the series Jazz
At Lincoln Centre, "that holy grail of American advanced culture".
As its artistic director, he could choose the contents of the concerts and
ignored systematically contemporary jazz influenced by rock and funk. Wynton
Marsalis demanded strict swing. That got him a lot of criticism that only
calmed down at the end of the 90s when an Educational Department was added to
the Lincoln Centre and its orchestra with its workshops in the whole of the
country got USA-wide recognition. Wynton Marsalis has recorded a whole series
of new CDs in 1999 (Swing into the 21st). -
Sheet music
by Wynton Marsalis.
 |
Wynton Marsalis in Marciac, France. Photograph: Sweet Swing
Blues (photo copyright Frank Stewart).
Wynton Marsalis. Photograph: Sweet Swing Blues
(photo copyright Frank Stewart).
|
