Wynton Marsalis

Denise Pelligrini on this weekend edition of Bloomberg Best. It objectifies a lot about basic prisons. Jazz is a national art form now, is Elvi is going to not be the King Man, Well, you're gonna put jazz i Felgus of the King Whitten Marcellus on why some insists jazz is dead. For somebody like me to complain is I'd have to be out of my mind. The Jazz great and managing director at Lincoln Center on music, race and the world. All this and more coming up in the

next hour of Bloomberg Best. All right, we've been looking forward to this one for weeks, oh have we? That's right, The one and only went and Marcellus on all the big topics. We had a chance to hear from him on the David Rubens Toun Show Peer to Peer Conversations. Let's listen in. So, do you get tired of people calling you a jazz legend? You feel older when they say that to you. Yeah, I like the word jazz. I don't like the legend. Um. Let's talk about your

family for a moment. Sadly, your father passed away in April at the age of eighty five because of COVID. So it must have been a very sad loss because you were very close to him, of course, Yeah, for all of us, for me and my brothers, of course, as he's our father. We loved him so much. He was such a such an example for us, and he was. He's such a kind man and a man with a with a large worldview and also a large person. He never he didn't do small things. He was very philosophical.

He wasn't a touchy feely type of person. He's from that generation to It wasn't a lot of hugging and I love it, I love you was going on, but there was underneath a lot of of resolve and and seriousness. And just just kind of deep love not just for us, but also he had many students who who love him and and love to tell stories about him, and he supported a lot of a lot of us. So, for those who may not be familiar, your father was a very, very prominent jazz pianist. When you were growing up, did

you you obviously looked up to your father. Um was he somebody who said I want you to be a trumpet player. I want you to be a jazz trumpet player. Did he not push you into that? No, he didn't push any of us into anything. You know, I went, I always hung out with him. My father really struggled when I was growing up. He was trying to play modern jazz uh in segrette in the era of segregation and in clubs and with a populist that didn't like

that style of music. So much of my experience was going to sparsely populated clubs with him and UH in colorful areas. So I love to go because I was always the only kid in the room. And it started when I was three, four or five years old, and it continued until I got into high school and started to work myself. But I always went with him and identified with his struggle really because he continued to play even though he didn't get audience support. He was not

well known, he wasn't famous, He struggled financially. He never complained, and he had he was very high minded in his belief in jazz and and and in his belief in the necessity of it as as a as a tool for healing people, in raising consciousness and things like that. So when you were growing up, you obviously experienced racial discrimination because there was a segregated area. That is that right, yah know, that defined the entire uh segregation, discrimination, racism.

That was just a part of life. Like it's it's not something you could uh as, there's not philosophy, I'm talking now, it's just how was your neighborhood looked a certain way the white neighborhoods was a certain way. Black people generally lived in our area on one side of railroad tracks. We had still had ditches in our streets, and any type of systems always worked against you, and you you had to uh, it was just what it was,

what the system was. You didn't have distance from it, so you didn't have It's easy to look back on a thing and experience it not the way you experienced it when you grew in it. When you grew in it, it was very much a fact of life. So I happened to be someone who never liked it. So I fought with it a lot and had a lot of problems in that system. But most people adapted to it and we're okay with it. They didn't like it, but they would sometimes. Sometimes you're not in a bad situation

in this case, we talked about racism. It could be anything, could be a health situation. The degree to what you're willing to fight against it really is is based on your your your ability to accept the pain of fighting against it. So are you surprised about the Black Lives Matter situation? Here we are in the year, well advanced past the time that you grew up, and we still have racial problems of that type. Yeah, we're not anywhere near advanced past what I grew up with, So no,

I'm not surprised by it. I had the honor to go into so many American schools throughout the eighties and nineties and early two thousand's it probably will over a thousand schools. So we have a segregation in our systems in general. So no, no, it doesn't none of None of it is surprising to me. So today, as a famous jazz musician, you're recognized all over the country, in many places around the world. Do you feel you are

still suffering from racial discrimination? Do you still feel, even despite your exalted status in the music world, you are really not treated the same as you would be if you were white. Yes, I feel that. I feel that in terms of the kind of intellectual patronization that I received, the low level of criticism of our music. Um, I'm subject to things, of course, nothing like what I grew up with. Nor do I make a habit of complaining about it constantly because I'm also treated in a way

with so much respect by so many people. Did for me to complain would be it would be past gratuitous. So you asked me the question directly, Yes, I will say, have been treated unfairly by by newspapers something like the New York Times. The way our institution jazz and then

concerning it has been covered is abominable. Even though we get articles, the quality of those articles are always very poor, poorly research the writers oftentimes down to the history and lack the intelligence and depth of engagement with the form to be qualified to speak on it in a paper of record. But because it's jazz, it doesn't matter. So that's only in direct response to your question because I don't want to. I don't want to confuse it with

when I was growing up. Are the situations that I found myself and on my father's situational grandfathers, or let's go back in the generations. So I'm not doing that, and I'm very, very grateful for how I've been treated by people all over this country of all kinds. So there's a story that when you were time, your father had you sit down with I think Al Hurt and maybe it's Miles Davis, and they said, how would you like to play the trumpet? And they gave you a

trumpet to play. Is there anything true to that? You know, when I was six, my father was playing without her and al Hert gave me a trumpet for my sixth birthday, So that's true. And my father Lady was talking to Miles Davis. He said, I'm getting my son a trumpet. Before before al got me a trumpet, my father was talking to Miles. You're standing without your mole, said don't get that boy a trumpets too hard. So that is

a true story. Okay, So as you grew up, you were actually, as I understand that, a classical musician more than a jazz musician. And when you went to Juilliard where you went to college, Um, you were interested in classical music. Is that true? No. I grew up always wanting to play jazz, but jazz was It's always much more difficult to learn in that time, especially than classical music. Because my father's a jazz musician. I was always around the music. I was raised in the culture. I love

the musicians. My father was a modern jazz musician. He wasn't playing New Orleans jazz, but at a certain time, when I was maybe ten or eleven, he started to play New Orleans music. And I also played and Danny Parker's fairew Baptist Church Band, which was a New Orleans traditional band jazz. It was difficult at that time for a person of my age, in my generation to figure out what it was because it was not a part

of the American mythology, whereas the classical music. He had competitions and and and classes you could go to so you could get a track record on your on your on your resume, Like if you see what did I do? It will say when I was fourteen, I want a competition to play the Hiding Trumpet Concerto with the New Orleans Philharmonic. But I was playing jazz the whole time. But what could I say that I did? I played in the club called Tyler's Beer Gardens on on on

a Wednesday. But one year you want to Grammy. The only person I ever went a Grammy and jazz and the classical music in the same year. It's funny story about my father. He went to the Grammys. He even was not into those kind of things, and he sat through the whole show and he was like, wow, you know, just the Grammys. So at the end of the show I won. I was in the back in the hotel with him and my mother. I was like, you know, getting ready to go out to the party or something,

and I was I was like, yeah, man. My daddy looked at me and he was wondering. He said, man, he said, I'm glad that was the Grammys. He said, yeah, I'm glad you want. I mean, don't don't get me wrong, it's great to do it, but you don't think this means you can play, do you? So? I still at laughed because I was like twenty two and I knew what he was saying, because I still, of course had a long way to go to learn how to play.

You could argue classical music came from Europe, and you can argue that other parts of music came from other parts of the world. But jazz was invented in the United States, and it's a classic American kind of invention. I would say, um, but why is it so hard for some people to understand that You've written a book about it, and you make it in your book sound like it's almost a religious experience to play jazz and

understand jazz. It's important to be an individual and who can play well, but also to play with the team. Can you explain why jazz is almost like a religion to people who care about jass? Well, jazz is our national art form and as such, it objectifies a lot of our basic principles. And if a group of people are are blessed to have an art form which you can have a civilization and a society, you may never create an art form that has that does that. It's

a blessing. So America was blessed with a group of musicians and a social condition that produced this music. That the music has three fundamental elements. The first is improvisation, which is our kind of individuality and what we what we believe in. We have rights and freedoms and things that are about the individual. Then swing, which is about nurturing common ground, finding balance with other people, working out an agenda as you go along under the pressure of time.

And then the blues. And the blues is an optimism, it's not naive. So the blues also implies an acuity. That's that's a democratic thing. Now, suffice to say that everything in the music ties into things that we do, down to the three branches of government, like the rivem section are what to a man, the Constitution is like

adding to an arrangement. I could go on and on, and after a while of giving you these examples, you'll realize these are not superficial things that are contrived, that they actually come out of the American way of life. Now to kind of give you it's gonna be a little longer answer, but it's important because the central question of jazz's position in our country concerns the relationship of slavery to the American identity and our mythology as a country.

Black Americans buying large in our country have little or no knowledge of jazz, and uh, jazz is the greatest achievement of the Afro American culture in the context of the American culture, meaning it's Afro American, but it applies to all Americas, as many things in American culture apply to all Americas. Our poor public education system make sure

that a certain group remains ignorant. And the average white jazz writer is actually a rock fan who's for a long time, which the jazz will actually be something else without black folks at the core of it. But it maybe jazz will just die away. That's why if you study jazz, there's a longstanding tradition of article after article, the decade after decade saying it's jazz dead. That's probably one of the most questions that's been asked since the

nineteen thirties. Now, all of this investment and the destruction of jazz is to further obscure a big lie that jazz uncovers. And it's important to look at this because it's it's a serious it's a serious thing to consider

if we are to transform our nation. If we say our nation is based on human freedom, and we're the first on earth founded on the glorious celebration of human freedom, dignity, and rights, how do we then reconcile and correct the systemic the humanizing ownership, brutalizing a large underclass of people for free labor because of their skin color. It's too much in justice to correct, so we're forced to say that those people are responsible for the problem. They're less

than human and it's just their condition. But if they aren't, if it's not their condition, it means that omnithology and belief about ourselves is not true. Now, if Elvis gonna not be the king, man, well you're gonna put jazz

if Elvis of the king. So let me ask you, if I were to go to and listen to a Tchaikovsky concert or a Beethoven concert, it's gonna be mostly sounding the same and where never, no matter where I'm gonna listen to it, no matter what the orchestra, they basically might play slightly better, slightly different, but basically you know what you're gonna get when you sit down with jazz, Am I wrong in that a jazz musician can kind of expand on what has been composed and kind of

play it differently every different time. Is that part of what jazz is? Uh? All about? The improvisation part? That one part allows you to You have a lot of latitude to do things. It's like the way Americans conduct business, all the innovations. We have the freedom we have to speak, the fact that we think we can step into space and use our personality to transform a tradition. Yes, we

have that freedom. But balancing that freedom is we have the responsibility to extend a courtesy and an understanding to other people who have those freedoms and nurture that common space. That's the part of jazz we struggle with. So in your book on Jazz, you talk about some of the grades who either played with or who influenced you, and I just like to ask your brief comments on some of them. Uh. Versus Louis Armstrong, you originally thought he was as you say and Uncle Tom, but you obviously

changed your view. I guess yeah, because it's it was It's hard for for later generations to understand, uh, the challenges of earlier generation, and and and and norms and and things of show business and what Louis Armstrong did, it doesn't mean that necessarily, even with my now I understand more of his genius and who he wasn't when he played. But it still doesn't mean And when I look at the movies he made, all the positions he went,

I still don't necessarily like that. I don't like a lot of where black people or in any of the American movies of the nineteen thirties and forties and in fifties, and as a matter of fact, some of it now a lot of it now uh that he has that same type of destructive mythology if you consider the fact it when I was a teenager, the heroic figure for black youth in movies were pimps. I mean, what is it for a pimp to be a hero and be

at the topic of mythology? So but to not get sidetrack with that, yeah, I thought that, But later I learned and understood who Louis Armstrong was as a musician, that's a totally different story. That man was a genius of such magnitude you can't even you could lie about how great he was, and you still wouldn't be saying enough. So you're a composer as well as a performer, educator, conductor, and so forth. One of the great composers in the jazz world was Duke Ellington. Uh did he have any

influence on you? Great? You know, I love Duke and the Duke's intelligence, his dedication over two thousand pieces, and uh, I of him. And because I grew up also listening to classical music, I love Beethoven. What about Disney Gillespie? Was he an influence on you? The thing about Disney, because that's hit me first, was the depth of his intelligence. I met him when I was fourteen, and just when he started talking with my daddy and other musicians listened

to him. Yeah, Dizney was a very intelligent He's part of the reasoning we we developed jazz at Lincoln Center. Because I didn't want to play in a big band, because I had always gonna play in small band music, and Dinney told me. I called him and asked him, man, what do you think I should do? He said, to lose ones orchestral heritage should not be considered and achievement. So he was telling me, because you need to figure

out how to keep our orchestral heritage. We we paid a lot of dudes to builoup orchestral music in jazz and for us to just give it away and say the big band is old fashioned, that's that's not intelligent. Let's talk a bit about jazz at Lincoln Center. So you began playing jazz at Lincoln Center when in the late nineteen eighties that evolved into Jazz at Lincoln Center, which is you're now the director of artistic director and music director of the Jazz Lincoln Center Orchestra. Is that right?

We wanted to fill fill fill a space in the American arts and and provide enough education and music and advocacy, enough concerts for us as a nation to have our native art form when it came it came time for us to address our mythology incorrected so that we can move forward as a nation. So we've we've we've succeeded behind beyond any of our wildness imagination with the volume of concerts we've been able to do. We built three concert halls in the middle of men Manhattan on fifty

nine Street, the House of Swing. We have put on concert series over thirty years. We have twelve education programs and even since this pandemic, I mean we've we've put out over over five hundred, six hundred pieces virtually. You know, we're we're we're deeply engaged. So when you started Lincoln Center, many people Lincoln Center open in the nineteen sixties, people thought, Okay, this is opera, symphonic music, classical kind of music. You

came along and said maybe we could have jazz. What do people say initially when you said we need to do more jazz at Lincoln Center. We we had a lot of support from the top of the organization. Everybody was everybody was dedicated. And you know when when it was found to baby Lincoln Center didn't think about the music, or maybe the initial founders of Rockefell and they didn't

like the music. It doesn't matter. The Constitution was not written with the rights of African Americans and Native Americans in mind. But the Constitution can be amended, and it has been amended. Let me ask you on a normal time before COVID came, and hopefully when COVID's gone, you'll return to the situation had before. Are you on the road half the time and half the time in New York or How do you divide your time and how

do you divide your time between playing, conducting, composing, and teaching. Well, I do many things. I'm also the managing director of our organization, so I deal with with everything in USA. Executive Director Greg Show, and our management team, they're all fantastic, uh colleagues. If if anything, I mean I work, I work all the time, so I don't I don't separate anything. My my work is also my hobby. And this pandemic

because as I always respected all of my colleagues. But I'm gonna tell you that the pandemic has given me such a greater appreciation of the quality of people. I've been blessed to work with our orchestra. We still have a vast majority of our staff on. We're open for business with getting things done. The orchestra is so supportive of the mission of the of the organization. We have a level arrangers in our orchestra. That's something that has

never happened, composers, teachers, the phone calls I get. Then when you get to our staff and our managers of every division of our building, our financial, our CFO, I can go position to position people's dedication will bring me to tears. And that's why you know we're we're we're struggling like all the arts organizations are, because we've lost the ability to earn revenue. But we are so for real about our our mission and achieving it even under

this type of darrest. I think it's really the greatest blessing I've had in my life has been to work with this high quality of people for this amount of time. So I'm I'm so grateful for that opportunity. I don't even consider it to be worked when you go overseas. Is jazz popular outside the United States? Jazz has never really been popular, So no, it's not. It's not popular like like like phone was popular, like rock and roll is popular. It's not popular. It is. It is a

jazz is meaningful and it's necessary. So those who are interested in that like jazz. Those who are not, they don't. They don't like that. There's a lot of other things to life. We need to teach our kids about the music. It is a national art form. And I always make make the point people say, what's gonna be new and jazz? I said, people are gonna listen to it. That's what's the new thing. Let's suppose somebody says, I've never been exposed to jazz very much. I guess uh us into

went and Marsalis. I'm persuaded he knows what he's talking about. Uh So I'm gonna listen to jazz. What is it that that you would tell people about why the jazz experience as a listener is so uh compelling compared to other forms of music. Well, because it has a development section, so you have to follow what musician has played from one point. It's like what I loved about that beats open symphony. It wasn't just one thing repeated over and over and again. It was a thing and then another thing,

another thing. Jazz is the music is most in the world. Like conversation, jazz is a music that the prizes individuality. You have a lot of great individuals you can interface with, from Lester Young, the Billy Holiday to Check Korea, Herbie hank I got you can name just name musicians. You have great groups that you can love. They're play in different forms, and you have the whole appro Latin form of jazz that that takes you everywhere from Brazil to

Cuba to Puerto rico. It. It integrates your citizenship and your understanding of the world, and mostly and most important, it gives you tremendous pride and being America because we didn't have to denigratee or cut anybody down or do anything negative to anybody to create this. It's a non predatory form. It's a symbiotic form. And you can be as rich as you want to be in jazz and nobody else has to be poor. You're a teenager by

my standard, so you're very, very young. But you'll continue to do this for another couple of decades because this is what your love of doing. Is that right, man? I still smell simulac on you. I don't know what you're talking about. Yeah, I'm gonna do this till I die if I can, if if the good law willing, and people will have me. I've been I've been blessed to do something kind of this, attract and get unbelievable

support from people. That's why earlier when I answered the question of racism, for somebody like me to complain's I'd have to be out of my mind. And that's it for Bloomberg Best. I'm at Baxter and I'm den This is Bloomberg footsc regated gaut Gications lot to Cows and World