Current.org | Two music series with Wynton Marsalis

Marsalis at Tanglewood

Accustomed to rock's simplicity, kids need help following jazz or classical music as it develops, says Marsalis. In photo, he addresses a young audience during the TV taping at Tanglewood.

Jazz has never had nearly enough fans in this country — and music overall has too few informed listeners — so Wynton Marsalis is doing what he can about those problems.

He's working for jazz with his 26-part series Making the Music, starting Oct. 2 [1995] on public radio, and he'll do his bit for music education with a four-part series Marsalis on Music debuting Oct. 9 on public TV.

When the 33-year-old trumpet star discusses the universal lessons that a good musician learns, and what jazz says about America, he may sound like Ken Burns talking about baseball. Like Burns, Marsalis qualifies as a complete enthusiast, who threatens to pass along his excitement to the entire audience.

Jazz simply isn't as popular as anything that wonderful should be, he says. Nobody has tried hard enough to get the word out, just like nobody made enough of an effort to get children to learn math or citizens to vote.

"You take football, for instance," Marsalis said the other day at NPR headquarters, where he was working on the radio series. "You have football camps, you have high school football. You have videos on football, books on football. When you are watching a football game, you have three analysts who sit up there with diagrams. That's the effort that goes into making football available to the general public."

To make his try on behalf of music, Marsalis has his own diagrams and visual aids for the TV series--traffic maps to show the uses of accents and rests, and plexiglas models of buildings to represent the sections in a piece of music.

The pedagogical tools fit the purpose of the TV series, which is to foster basic appreciation of classical and jazz music for kids 9-15. Critics inevitably will compare Marsalis on Music with Leonard Bernstein's Young People's Concerts of many years ago, and Marsalis did indeed study some of Bernstein's shows and pencil scripts.

If Marsalis makes an engaging teacher in the TV series, he's a curious student in the NPR programs, which take a less academic and technical approach to the music.

"We're talking about what it takes to play jazz music--not the styles of jazz, not who's the great innovators in jazz," he said. "Of course, we keep coming back to Louis Armstrong or Charlie Parker or Coltrane, but that's for musical reasons."

"I wanted to do it to let the musicians speak," Marsalis said. "The public is presented with such a distorted image of the musician, especially in jazz, man. That's among our top two or three biggest problems."

With Marsalis leading an inquiry rather than handing down dictates, the series avoids being "Jazz According to Marsalis," though he's known as an advocate of Armstrong and Ellington, preferring their music to jazz-rock and the avante garde.

"We have a show on avant garde where we let the musicians talk about it," he says. "That's not my favorite style of music. I don't even like it, to be honest with you. But my copy is not going to reflect my dislike of that style."

There are hints, though. When trumpeter Jackie McLean mocks a screeching, dissonant horn, Marsalis joins in gleefully.

But he generally presents himself as an explorer of all jazz, weary of the factional sniping among musicians and critics, tired of writers' focus on "negative information" and attention to everything but the music itself.

"It's not for me to talk about how bad things are, or how the media messed over jazz," he said. "I'm not putting that in our shows. This show is not a response to the media. It's from the musicians to the people. It's what they would tell you if you went into their homes."

The players have plenty to tell you. Lionel Hampton's horn men Harry "Sweets" Edison, Al Grey and James Moody had so much to say, they were cutting off each others' sentences, said series producer Margaret Howze. "It was like they had never been asked these questions before." While they talked, old Hampton just stepped back and practiced at his vibraphone.

While the TV series is wrapped up, the radio programs are still in the works. Two months before the weekly series comes to air, Howze has recorded Marsalis' narrations for 10 programs and nearly all the interview segments for all 26. He's been to D.C. many times, two days or 10 days at a time, and he'll be back next week to write some more scripts with co-writer and Executive Producer Murray Horwitz. Later in the month, NPR's big Studio 4A will host a 17-member jazz band for the taping of Duke Ellington's Harlem Suite.

Moving kids beyond rock

The TV shows are an equally massive production job, though the result was crammed into four intense hours. Marsalis lectures a peanut gallery of kids at the Tanglewood Music Center in Massachusetts, illustrating concepts in the Bernstein style by summoning up snatches of music from musicians standing by, including two jazz bands, the Tanglewood student orchestra led by Seiji Ozawa, and cellist Yo-Yo Ma.

The shows were produced by Emmy-winning Peter Gelb of Sony Classical Film & Video and presented by WNET, New York.

As befitting his crossover training and talents, Marsalis gives almost as much weight to classical music as to jazz--and markedly ignores rock entirely. He knows "mechanized music" doesn't need help grabbing kids. In fact, he says, labeling certain kinds of music for young people is just a divisive "marketing ploy" by the music industry.

Kids are accustomed to knowing everything about a rock song within a few seconds, Marsalis complained during a Los Angeles press tour session with TV writers last month, and most kids have little experience paying attention as themes develop and repeat, as they do in the extended works of both jazz and classical music.

To keep the TV series looking lively, the producers bring in a variety of visual stimuli, including some eye-catching traveling crane shots, pretty but irrelevant computer animations and even some Miro paintings. These distractions predictably will be criticized as "pandering to the MTV generation" when TV critics file their previews in a few weeks, judging from their questions after a screening at the press tour.

Though the musicians in the NPR programs sometimes deliver talk that's as expressive as their music, the really exhilarating moments of both the TV and radio series come when they pick up their instruments.

In the fourth part of his TV series, Marsalis engages the supposedly reluctant Yo-Yo Ma in a couple of delightfully jazzy instrumental conversations, trumpet to cello, and the two young superstars take turns coaching students.

As in real life, the kids don't always get it easily. Marsalis tries to teach a talented 14-year-old soloist how to make his trumpet growl, but the kid just can't do it.

In the TV series, Marsalis has the luxury of having two jazz bands plus the Tanglewood student orchestra, which take turns illustrating stylistic distinctions by playing different versions of Sousa marches and a Tchaikovsky ballet suite.

In both the NPR and PBS series, Marsalis puts learning in the foreground. "I'm really interested in learning about music myself, so passing on knowledge is just a natural part of music," Marsalis told reporters at the press tour. "Certainly, I've gotten a lesson from every musician I've ever met."

He learned from his father, a jazz pianist and teacher, and from older New Orleans musicians. And before he was out of high school he was teaching kids even younger than himself.

After working on the NPR show for a while he has learned something about radio production as well. One session with NPR's cultural programming v.p. was especially helpful, he said. "Sandra Lewis--we had a meeting where she laid out a way I could understand the form, like with riffs and ensemble parts and solos, in terms of the main points of the show, secondary points and repetition of ideas."

Her analogy helped him understand why the script had him repeating his themes so often. "She was saying that the repetition of ideas is like a riff," said Marsalis. "In music, you have to have things repeated for people to follow."

This sounded like the warm up for his sonata lecture. With its more instructional approach, the TV series teaches definitions of "cadence" and "polyphony" as well as "groove" and "tailgating."

But most of what remains with the audience of both Marsalis series will be an afterglow of some great musical moments and a big infusion of his enthusiasm and outlook.

His tips for successful practicing in the TV series amount to 12 commandments for wholesome living, which may actually connect with some kids, coming from somebody as undeniably cool as Marsalis.

The most important thing for him to put across is the soul of music, Marsalis said in an interview.

He compares what a student might learn from two different teachers. "You might have one teacher who knows a lot, but you will learn less from that teacher than from the teacher that has that love and that feeling. Because a lot of what you learn from a teacher is not information. It's a feeling of how to be in the world."

He urges kids not to show off, to work extra hard on their weak points, and to invest themselves in their music and everything they do--"the way you tie your shoes, the way your hold your fork."

"How you feel about living in the world is who you are. There's nothing worse than pessimism coming through a horn. ... You have to think like the blues: things are bad, but they're going to get better."