Why Wynton Marsalis thinks jazz is the perfect metaphor for democracy

Transcript

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Amna Nawaz: He’s been called the Pied Piper of Jazz and Doctor of Swing, but renowned Trumper and composer Wynton Marsalis has now launched a new project, a kind of call and response for these times.

Senior arts correspondent Jeffrey Brown met Marsalis at the Jazz at Lincoln Center for our series Art in Action, exploring the intersection of art and democracy, part of our Canvas coverage.

Jeffrey Brown: The music is vibrant and alive, but, says Wynton Marsalis, our democracy is threatened, with warning signs everywhere.

Wynton Marsalis, Musician: I’m seeing what we all are seeing. We’re lost. We’re blindly flailing about the world.

Jeffrey Brown: And while many responses are possible, his, as always, is jazz, an art form of individual statements or improvisation and collective swinging together, music, he believes, to heal divisions.

Wynton Marsalis: Our music takes us away from that into the feeling of community, which is shared responsibility, shared rights and the creation of space for others to be creative and to be a part of the process.

And it’s just an assertion of who we are and a reassertion of the importance of freedom and of civic engagement by artists.

Jeffrey Brown: Marsalis has been a leading cultural figure for decades, founder of Jazz at Lincoln Center in New York in 1987, its artistic director ever since. He was born into a musical New Orleans family, from early on playing with older brother Branford, learning from their father, Ellis, a pianist and educator who died in 2020.

Wynton Marsalis: I want as much as possible to try to communicate to you all.

Jeffrey Brown: A key mission, preserving and passing on that tradition, as we saw in 2011 as he led a festival for high school musicians around the country called Essentially Ellington that continues to this day.

Marsalis was born and raised in the cauldron of the 1960s and, he says, now sees a nation in peril once again.

Wynton Marsalis: We have very bad leadership, not just the president, all over, very bad leadership. Terrible leadership is easily corrupted. And we need to assert — those of us in the nation who believe in a plural America need to strongly assert it. We need to be figuring out a creative vision that brings us together.

Jeffrey Brown: His answer? JazzCall for Freedom, a new multipart project that includes a video series intended as a kind of civic engagement dialogue, starting with professional musicians choosing and recording a brief clip of music from a song from the past that they think speaks to our moment.

Alexa Tarantino, Saxophonist: It’s really stripped down and right to the core, and that’s exactly what this initiative is. It’s getting to the heart of the matter.

Jeffrey Brown: Alexa Tarantino, a saxophonist, composer and band leader in her own right, is a member of the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra. She worked with Marsalis to choose leading contemporary musicians to participate.

Alexa Tarantino: The main element of jazz and performance is call and response and communication. And so the fact that we are able to start something like this that puts out our own form of creative expression and encourages others to respond with theirs, it’s that musical element personified, but with this political charge.

Jeffrey Brown: Among the videos recorded so far, Cecile McLorin Salvant singing Stevie Wonder’s “Visions,” the group New Jazz Underground with Sonny Rollins’ “Freedom Suite,” students from Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Jazz Academy performing “America the Beautiful,” and one by Chris Lewis, another composer and band leader, as well as sax player with the orchestra.

His pick, a piece by jazz great pianist McCoy Tyner, who died in 2020, titled “Contemplation.”

Chris Lewis, Saxophonist: He recorded it in the 1960s, which at a time — tumultuous time in American history, right, civil rights movement. And so to him that was a time of contemplation.

Jeffrey Brown: What is a piece like that say now?

Chris Lewis: I think it’s a time for us to be contemplative of what’s going on both internally and externally. And so it’s important for us to engage with our community and to understand that your value system is not necessarily the only value system. And jazz teaches us that.

It teaches you that I believe this thing. But just because I believe this does not mean that your belief system is invalid. We both can believe different things and respect that and also create music together.

Jeffrey Brown: In turn, the responses are now coming in from music-loving and playing citizens from around the country recording songs meaningful to them.

Marsalis is also looking to history with other parts of the JazzCall for Freedom with audio recordings including “Let Freedom Swing,” a 2004 live performance that featured new jazz compositions with texts by leaders of the past such as Nelson Mandela, read by Morgan Freeman…

Morgan Freeman, Actor: I cherish my own freedom dearly, but I care even more for your freedom.

Jeffrey Brown: And Vaclav Havel read by Alfre Woodard.

Alfre Woodard, Actress: That I stand behind what I do.

Jeffrey Brown: What does it all add up to?

If I’m looking at like a minute video of a piece of music, “Visions” by Stevie Wonder or a piece by Sonny Rollins, McCoy Tyner, Duke Ellington, what does that actually do? I mean, does that change anything?

Wynton Marsalis: Music is the art of the invisible. So yes, a song — you think of the freedom songs of the ’60s. You think of the songs that we rely on today that have a consciousness. And you think of all the classic hymns and great songs that we have — people have sung around the world, not just our songs.

Music is the art of the invisible. So it touches things deep inside of us.

Jeffrey Brown: As for Marsalis himself, he recently announced he will step down as head of Jazz at Lincoln Center next year, a huge shift for an institution that’s aimed at giving jazz a place in the larger culture and for him.

Wynton Marsalis: It’s just that time. There’s no bad reason. We have a lot of great, fantastic talented younger musicians. We have dedicated older members. It’s time for me to be one of those members. It’s time for me…

(Laughter)

Jeffrey Brown: You’re feeling that?

Wynton Marsalis: Oh, man, it’s that time. But it’s just I have been in the public space a long time, since I was 18 or 19.

Jeffrey Brown: Yes. Yes.

You’re not retiring?

Wynton Marsalis: No, the musicians don’t — we don’t retire. We always — and I will always be a part of the institution as needed, and, of course, for the art form. I mean, it defines my life.

My father was a jazz musician. I grew up in the culture of music. And there’s no greater cause I could put any time to the service of than this fantastic music that’s had so many great musicians.

Jeffrey Brown: An art form he insists as urgent and necessary as ever.

For the “PBS News Hour,” I’m Jeffrey Brown in New York.