Jazz legend Wynton Marsalis has never been interested in remaining silent
Trumpeter and composer Wynton Marsalis, who is currently the artistic director of Jazz at Lincoln Center, is rarely not in motion. Luckily, The Dam Yankee podcast, in partnership with NL Times, caught the living jazz legend after his sold-out performances with the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra at the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam. Marsalis shared his thoughts about growing up in the culture of jazz, gaining the approval from his father, who was a storied jazz musician himself, his enduring career, and his thoughts on racial identity in America.
From his vantage point in the back row of his orchestra, Marsalis could see each of the 46 classical music composers whose name adorn the walls and balcony of the Concertgebouw's main hall, including Mozart, Chopin, Mahler and Tschaikovsky. He can discuss any of them as easily as any jazz musician, like the late trumpet player Chet Baker, who died in Amsterdam just a few years after Marsalis first visited the Netherlands.
He’s been performing at the famous North Sea Jazz festival since 1980, just four years after its inception. From 1981 to date, Marsalis has performed 4,777 concerts in 849 distinct cities and 64 countries around the world.
Dam Yankee: What was it like having a father that was so deeply involved in jazz music?
Wynton Marsalis: I remember my daddy came to play with our funk band one night. We played a song by the Crusaders called "Keep That Same Old Feeling." We were playing a high school dance. The other cats in the band knew my daddy played, but not how seriously. I asked them to bring my daddy up.
Our other trumpet player was a guy named John Roche, we called him Lebo. He said, “Man, you can't call your daddy up on this tune. What is he gonna do when we get to the middle section?” I said, “ My daddy is gonna hear it!”
I knew he was going to play without even knowing the music, because my dad had real good ears. So, we played that song through one time. Lebo had never heard stuff that came out of the bebop language, right? He didn't know how a jazz musician could play. Man, when my father finished playing, Lebo looked at me like, “Damn, man, what was that?” He started to try to sing the notes.
That's why my father was so cool. He came up and he played with us. He didn’t care if we were making money or how many of us there were. He played and he supported what we were doing.
DY: Did you grow up playing jazz?
WM: I grew up in the culture of jazz, even though I was playing pop music. I loved jazz, but it was hard to learn how to play it. Even with my father being who he was, it’s not what our generation did. We played funk tunes and said it was jazz. But whenever we had to play with the older generation, man, it was like two struggles. We couldn't play jazz and they couldn't play funk.
So they'd be trying to play jazz funk. They sounded terrible. And we'd be trying to play jazz and we would sound terrible. But we were younger, so we had the cache of youth. Everyone was talking about me as this trumpet player from New Orleans. I had an incredible buzz coming to New York for somebody that nobody knew or ever heard.
DY: Was there a specific moment when you felt like your father believed you could play well?
WM: No, I don’t think that moment ever came. But my father was proud. He knew that I had the courage to say the stuff people were saying privately in public and accept whatever came with it. When you're in a philosophical system that is crushing you all the time in thousands of little ways.
You are being used, not as the mainstream, but as the cantilever or the opposition party. You’re the minority. I just always wondered how could I be considered a minority in my own country? I'm not a minority.
We would sit in classrooms learning the history that did not rhyme with our experience. And we were forced to always take the position of a fool and to act not in our own best interest. If you act in your own best interests, you’re always seen as subversive. It's kind of like a Black thing, but it wasn't subversive to me.
And when Martin Luther King got killed, we were integrated into a school. That was rough. The roughest part of it was that you were always put under pressure to change your identity, to go with the national story that cast you in a negative light. So you had to fight that all the time. We had more of a voice in that time than a lot of people in those positions around the world have.
Listen to this entire episode of Dam Yankee wherever you get your podcasts, or watch the full videos on YouTube. Later in the episode, he goes on to discuss his experiences with Alvin Ailey, his incredibly talented family, and universal humanism.
Marsalis will be playing in Vienna and Budapest this week before returning to play in the United States. Tickets for all his shows can be purchased for various prices depending on seating and venue.
