For Wynton Marsalis, ‘The cause is people’
Jazz great hitting high notes in bid to revitalize jazz, American culture
 Dan Demetriad |
Uniquely, Wynton Marsalis, 46, has been honored both for his jazz and his classical trumpet playing, winning Grammy awards for recordings in both fields in the same years. But his deepest allegiance is to jazz: as the artistic director for Jazz at Lincoln Center, Marsalis has worked valiantly to bring jazz back to center stage in the U.S.; his fundraising clout helped raise $131 million to create and build the 100,000-square-foot nonprofit institution at Columbus Circle for the performance and support of jazz at home and abroad. Jazz, itself, was born in New Orleans, and so was Marsalis.
Marsalis began training on trumpet at the age of 12; he entered The Juilliard School in 1979 when he was 17. Over the next 20-plus years, he produced more than 40 jazz and classical recordings for Columbia Jazz and Sony Classical labels and won a combined nine Grammy Awards. In 1997, he became the first jazz artist and jazz composer to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize in music.
Recently, Contribute Editor-in-Chief Marcia Stepanek caught up with Marsalis to talk about his music, his fundraising for Jazz at Lincoln Center, his philanthropy, and his work to improve arts education. What follows is an edited transcript of that conversation.
You are from New Orleans; you were born there. American jazz was born there. How did Hurricane Katrina call you personally into action?
Out of sadness, and horror. I guess you feel that towards any person who got hit by a car, but in this case its your hometown, so its as if something happened to your family or your mother. So all of us felt we needed to help. I got publicity because Im known, but so many New Orleanians, even now, are doing what they can and doing everything in their power. A lot of people call me, asking what they can do to help, intelligently, to rebuild the city. We are all still running around trying to figure that out.
On the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday in 2006, you gave a stirring and provocative speech to students at Tulane University, urging them not only to help rebuild New Orleans but to help shake up what you said is a slumbering nation. What was your message and the reaction to it?
The students enjoyed the speech. I was mainly speaking to them. But it was interesting. I heard from people all over the country saying that it was time to say what I did. I was saying that the younger generation has got to demand more than what we, in our generation, have demandedespecially when it comes to civic awareness.
My daddy thought — no, he expected — that my brothers and I and our generation would make the world a better place. He was correct in his belief because he had lived in an America of continual social progress depression followed by prosperity, segregation by integration, and so on. And though I haven't quite pinpointed it, somewhere between my daddy's youth and mine, generational aspirations for a richer democracy changed to aspirations for a richer me — more wealth and more leisure time for a lower quality of work. And our political process? We didn't keep an eye on how our tax dollars were being squandered or how our interests were being poorly served by our elected officials.
When did we begin to lose faith in our ability to effect change? Perhaps the demoralizing murders of John and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King scared the civic-minded young people of the 1960s right out of their idealism into despair and then, to in difference. Perhaps it was the 1980s when the opportunity inherent in the American Dream was distorted from the land of "we" to the land of "to hell with anybody else but me." Maybe the preoccupation with technological progress has overshadowed our concern with human progress.
In any case, the result of this social inactivity is that generations are now named simply for the last letters of the alphabet (Generation X, Generation Y, and so forth). And these alphabet-named people are distinguished by their ability to manipulate new technology, buy new things with money they have not earned and be obsessed with the trivial lives of celebrities.
My message to young people is this, that what happened in New Orleans, what is happening around the world, is a signal opportunity to actually start to participate. Throughout the history of America, young people have been a part of change. Its time to seize the day.
In September of 2005, you organized the Higher Ground Hurricane Relief Fund benefit concert in Manhattan for New Orleans. That evening, the actor Danny Glover told the audience: "New Orleans is plunging its remaining population into a carnival of misery. )Katrina) did not turn the region into a Third World Country, as it has been disparaged in the media. It revealed one. It revealed the disaster within the disaster. Grueling poverty rose to the surface like a bruise to our skin. Hurricane Katrina revealed more than anything else, 'a poverty of imagination.'" Do you agree?
Yeah, I agree with it, and it plays out in school systems across the country and cities across the country. There are so many unresolved issues in our country, and now is, I think, a good time for us to begin to understand that racial tensions, poverty, what have you, are national issues, and they're not just going to resolve themselves with inaction. We have to work together to resolve these problems. Some people don't know we have problems but there aren't many. The only way you cannot know is if you just don't look at what's right in front of you. If you don't look at a homeless person, you don't know people are homeless. You can walk down the street and walk past 50 homeless people, and you can say, I don't see them. And they don't. But if you look at them, they're there.
You've always been outspoken, musically.
It's created a lot of bad reviews during my life.
And good ones, as well.
Some.
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