Wynton Marsalis and Eric Clapton Play The Blues

[Carsten Wiethoff]

From http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entert...01414.html

Of course, he knows really why he is a controversial figure. Leave aside his own trumpet-playing, which is universally praised, and Marsalis is seen as the standard bearer for those who want to codify jazz as America's classical music, and whose focus is on recreating the music of the past rather than innovating. Given that many feel that innovation is the very essence of jazz, that's a controversial position. But he doesn't see it that way.
"My experience with people on a day to day basis is beautiful," he says, "it's like a dream. Construction workers call out to me when I walk by, people come and bring me pies, they work overtime at weekends." There's no doubting he has a public, although it's not as overwhelmingly positive as he suggests. "Who are you going to interview?" asked the US Immigration official when I arrived in New York to meet Marsalis. "He speaks too much tell Wynton that from me," were his parting words, a sentiment echoed by a member of Oscar Peterson's quartet I spoke to that evening.
The contradiction at the heart of Wynton Marsalis is that he is relentless in his pursuit of his vision of jazz (he gives me a long and comprehensive definition, but basically it must swing in the "ding-ding-a-ding" sense of the word), yet refuses to accept that his public utterances and his role at the Lincon Center should be seen as anyone's business but his own. In fact, his position as an arbiter of what constitutes jazz is so commanding that everything he does has consequences. During our interview he denies his authority time and again "it's not for me to say whether it's right or wrong" when it's perfectly obvious he has strong opinions on almost all areas. He is unafraid to judge, but is wary which of his judgements he reveals, hiding behind a bland wall of "it's not my place to say...". Flashes of what he really thinks come out when he's pushed. After stressing his good relations with David Murray (Marsalis plays basketball with Murray's son, Mingus) he concedes the point: "Did some people lose some gigs because I don't like their style of music? Maybe that's true, maybe that's false, I don't know. But that's not controversial to me."
When I ask if he felt hurt by the comments Miles Davis and the avant-garde trumpeter Lester Bowie made about him (Davis: "that motherfucker's not sharing a stage with me". Bowie: "everybody knows this cat ain't got it") he replies "not at all." He then goes on to describe Davis as "a genius who decided to go into rock, and was on the bandstand looking like, basically, a buffoon", and Bowie as "another guy who never really could play."
These judgements are not wholly without truth. Unfortunately, such forthright condemnations of post-Sixties developments (which Marsalis would deny were jazz) have come to define him as a purveyor of negativity rather than a celebrator, or curator, of jazz history. He is intensely frustrated that the focus is always on what he doesn't do rather than what he does do. Speaking about Ken Burns's mammoth television series Jazz, which was criticised for detailing the early years but skipping through the last 40, Marsalis could be talking about himself. "It's like I come to your house and you lay out a banquet for me and then I'm mad because I don't like the cigar you gave me at the end. Maybe the cigar wasn't that good, but why should that dominate the conversation about the meal?" And then, in a statement that does reflect the divide between him and his critics over post-Sixties jazz: "Maybe you went through that meal just to get the cigar. Me, I wasn't going to smoke that cigar at all."

From a different band:

And a crowd of young boys they're fooling around in the corner
Drunk and dressed in their best brown baggies and their platform soles
They don't give a damn about any trumpet playing band
It ain't what they call rock and roll
And the Sultans... yeah the Sultans play Creole