YET IT'S WYNTON WHO IS FREE:

Mr. Uptown And Mr. Downtown : They're miles ahead of the competition, and the hip thing should be to dig both of them (Francis Davis, March 3 - 9, 2004, Village Voice)

A year ago I played Dave Douglas's 2001 The Infinite for two friends, an avant-garde percussionist and a West Coast composer and performance artist, both of whom prefer boundary-stretching jazz to the likes of Wynton Marsalis, at whose name they practically sneered. Though they liked it, they professed to hear nothing experimental in Douglas, who sounded to them as conventional as Marsalis —just semi-electric and a touch edgier.

Douglas and Marsalis are usually seen as epitomizing not just opposing temperaments, as Miles Davis and Dizzy Gillespie once were, but irreconcilable philosophies of jazz. Although Douglas has succeeded in staying above the fray, the two have been waging a grotesque parody of a trumpet battle, through surrogates in print rather than on the bandstand. But maybe my friends were noticing something insiders have missed—without kissing electronica and Balkan polyrhythms goodbye, Douglas has been flirting with the mainstream since forming his quintet with Chris Potter on saxophones and Uri Caine on keyboards. [...]

As for Marsalis, his canon-keeping duties at Lincoln Center occasionally tempt him into interpreting music at odds with his own sensibility. Ornette Coleman was overdue for a tribute, but when his turn finally arrived at Alice Tully Hall last month, there could have been a banner above Marsalis and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra reading, "This is not our music." The arrangements of Coleman classics from the early 1960s, most of them by Marsalis or saxophonist Ted Nash, tethered harmolodics to a metronome and a tuning fork. Coleman was in the audience, but audible in the music only whenever Herlin Riley resourcefully evoked Ed Blackwell's tom-toms and on the few numbers where guest soloist Dewey Redman offered a bit of Ornette-like keening.

What makes Coleman all wrong for Marsalis is that his own music has no dark corners or slippery edges; how could it, given his dogmatic insistence that the essence of jazz is celebration? Fortunately, his reputation is unlikely to rest on misadventures like the Coleman tribute. You'll have to visit Brooks Brothers to purchase the full-length promotional CD Plays the Music of Duke Ellington, but the repertoire alone makes the humiliation worth it—the focus is on underperformed Ellingtonia such as "Almost Cried," from his score for Anatomy of a Murder, and "The Shepherd (Who Watches Over the Night Flock)," from his Second Sacred Concert. Marsalis solos only on two of the 13 tracks, even leaving growling honors to Ryan Kizor on "Concerto for Cootie." But nobody else active today knows this material as intimately as Marsalis, and the band's performances are infused with his spirit.

Music (art) is no different than the rest of life--in the words of Camus:

Art lives only on the constraints it imposes on itself; it dies of all others. Conversely, if it does not constrain itself, it indulges in ravings and becomes a slave to mere shadows. The freest art and the most rebellious will, therefore, be the most classical

Posted by Orrin Judd at March 3, 2004 9:16 AM