THE DUKE IS DEAD; THROW STRIKES:

Trumpeting Mediocrity: Was Wynton Marsalis ever that good? (Fred Kaplan, April 7, 2004, Slate)

The conventional wisdom about Marsalis is that he brought jazz back to life. According to this view of jazz history, the '70s were a dreadful decade dominated by fusion sellouts and tuneless screechers. Then Wynton came along. He dressed clean and played to match. An awesomely versatile musician (Maurice Andre called him the greatest classical trumpeter in a generation), he returned jazz to the basics. He also gave feisty interviews, painting himself as a keeper of the jazz tradition and—to the great annoyance of many musicians and critics—castigating those who followed more commercial or experimental paths.

There is something to this story line. The 1970s saw a lot of lousy, dumbed-down jazz. But by the time Marsalis came along, the air was already starting to clear. The most inventive avant-gardists had begun to revive the jazz tradition, in their individual ways while Wynton was still in high school. In 1974, alto saxophonist Anthony Braxton put out a two-volume album of standards called In the Tradition. Arthur Blythe made an album of the same title, on Columbia, in 1979. The same year, Chico Freeman recorded Spirit Sensitive, a gorgeous album of standards in the vein of early '60s Coltrane. In 1980, still pre-Wynton, Sun Ra made Sunrise in Different Dimensions, which included inspired rearrangements of Ellington, Coleman Hawkins, and Jelly Roll Morton.

Out of this trend grew an informal movement, which some dubbed "neoclassicism." It consisted of avant-garde musicians who spent the '70s developing their own styles and then applied them to traditional forms, seeking an expressive synthesis of tradition and innovation. By contrast, Marsalis found his voice in a study (and imitation) of those historical forms and, except for that brief period in the late '80s, never developed an individual style. Instead, he developed an ideology of jazz (his notion of tradition was "jazz"; others' notions were not jazz). And, as with all ideologies, his music gradually calcified.

This was the true nature of the intense clash that erupted between Marsalis and more progressive jazz musicians (and critics) in the early '80s. Marsalis and his mentor, Stanley Crouch, claimed that this was a debate between the keepers and the betrayers of the flame. Instead, it was an argument between those who saw jazz as a historical body of work to be preserved and those who saw it as a living, evolving art.

A hundred years from now, the only time anyone will ever listen to recordings of any of these guys is if they're playing the compositions of their elders.

Posted by Orrin Judd at April 12, 2004 1:27 PM