Wynton Marsalis has always been a ham — on and off stage. Fitting his overall musical genius into his extremely informed and learned revolutionary stance, though, is a bit of a cheek. Marsalis knows this and seems to take a certain prideful delight in speaking his mind on everything from the state of Black America to classical music. In a recent interview, Marsalis, who will perform tonight at the Mann Center for Performing Arts along with Yacub Addy and Odadda, discussed how racism has crippled America’s most authentic musical art forms and how Americans have lost their moral objectivity.
Born in 1961 New Orleans, Marsalis says that he witnessed the privilege and hardship of Blacks speaking their minds openly.
“I started out committed to just saying what I wanted to say and being about a certain belief in equality. But what it goes back to long before jazz or music in general is that I grew up segregated in little small towns in Louisiana. My father was 26 before he could ride on the front of a bus. I was born in 1961 and in the ’60s, the country was still a certain way and I was only ever in the world of Black people. You knew that white people existed, but didn’t see them. And when Martin Luther King was killed, my mother sent us to a white school and that’s when I learned just how — it wasn’t just the kind of cruelty and unkindness to me or my brother, but it was the off-hand kind of racism that you had to deal with. It was the teachers also. The teachers would be a certain way,” said Marsalis.
Marsalis’ exposure to white supremacist notions and dictates bore early witness to the acceptable and prescribed carriage of Blacks by a white racist society. It was a lesson he claims to have learned while still in elementary school.
“I learned this in elementary school — the value of having your own integrity and representing your own point of view and taking what comes with that. It went with me. It made you always consider what you were being rewarded for. Many times, if you are a Black person, you will be rewarded for acting against you own best interest. And I’d see it all time. You would hear a white person say, ‘Oh, I really like so-and-so; he’s such a nice guy,’ and what that means is that he is not reflecting any kind of fire or passion or he doesn’t have a real intellectual take on something. Or he’s not willing to defend things that are in his best interest, but he’s willing to go along with whatever just so that people will consider him to be nice,” said Marsalis.
In finding his own integrity and going against the grain of racial precepts, Marsalis was able to translate his understanding of white supremacy and Black oppression into forms of music expression that gave voice to some of the most brilliant, but voiceless American citizens.
“I had a great uncle who was born in 1883 and I was very close to him. He had a great saying, ‘It’s all in how it hits you.’ He was old enough to remember the Robert Charles Riots in New Orleans that happened in 1900 when a Black guy was incensed because the police talked to him a certain way and told him to get off the streets. He created a riot and killed a lot of people and it brought a certain type of real staunch segregation back to the city of New Orleans. My great uncle would talk about that and say that ‘It just didn’t hit him right that day.’ And for me it’s always been a matter of representing the tradition of jazz in myself and my family and all the people I grew up with. Guys who maybe couldn’t put five sentences together, they never would be a part of any great intellectual conversation, but it would simply be a matter of expressing an opinion,” said Marsalis.
Like many of his contemporaries, Marsalis considered himself a young nationalist, eager to move out of the ‘oppressive South’ and onto the more sophisticated and racially diverse East Coast — more precisely, Harlem, New York. But Marsalis found that the racism that permeated the South also saturated the whole of America. An impromptu trip to Poland and East Germany with legendary musician Art Blakely opened Marsalis’ eyes to the realities of life beyond American borders and outside of racial categorization. There was an appreciation for America, but also a more sophisticated understanding of intrinsic nature of white supremacy. It all brought him back, once again, to the ignorance he first noted as a child.
“When I was in elementary school there was one girl who wasn’t prejudice and ignorant like the rest of the kids. So I asked her, ‘Why aren’t you ignorant and prejudice like the rest of the kids?’ And she said, ‘Oh, I’m from Montana. We hate Indians.’ On and on, I could tell you about story after story where I learned about universal ignorance that is not applied to race. So, as I traveled around the world I began to see my situation in Louisiana or the Afro-American situation or any of these small situations in the context of the larger situation. So my focus became less on the kind of myopic nationalistic, backward viewing of the African-American experience,” said Marsalis.
But how to maintain personal and racial integrity in the face of social and cultural opposition? Marsalis said that even as a high-profile performer, he was unable to get around the repercussions of speaking his mind when it appeared in print. The first article he did with Jazz Times magazine at eighteen, still haunts him.
“In the article I gave a lot of caustic comments about musicians and music and I’ve always been very opinionated and expressive of those opinions. I didn’t understand what it would be like when those words were printed because I had absolutely no sophistication at all and I was not savvy. I saw Dizzy Gillespie about three months after that and I was trying to live the article down. I walked over to him and he opened up his trumpet case and what did he have in the case? That article! And so when I was asked questions I would answer honestly. The most difficult thing has been to maintain a level of honesty even when you know it is going to come back on you,” said Marsalis.
Speaking to the portrayal of African-American youth in the media as criminally immoral, Marsalis said that it is not the fault of the young people, but the lack of generational connectedness which passes down tradition, heritage and ritual as a means of life-lessons, that plagues them.
“We have dropped the ball in such a large way when it comes to teaching our young people how to deal with their sexuality and it is manifest in our dance; it is manifest in our music. We have done such an unbelievably terrible job, but you know in boxing they say that the punch that knocks you out is always the one you don’t see. And we so ‘don’t see it’ that we don’t even look over in the direction where it’s coming from and it just keeps hitting us. We keep saying that my parents didn’t like my music, or people used to say that about jazz. But look at what’s going on. It’s not the fault of the young people though. When you don’t have rituals of courtship or a way of teaching your young people what will be expected of them and how their fertility rituals are the ways we continue our families, and you leave them out there to be exposed to this and that, then turn around and say, ‘What’s wrong with our young people?,’ it is wrong. Especially our girls — the unbelievable levels of misogyny in this time are under our noses — we see it all the time, but we are doing nothing about it,” said Marsalis.
The response of anger and frustration with the American system of commercializing culture to its detriment and demise, according to Marsalis, has led many to become despondent and reactionary. And fighting the power is second to maintaining one’s objectivity.
“When people mess with you constantly you lose a point of rationality. You’re not trying to analyze scientifically what you’re going to tell them; you just want to tell them that ‘I dislike you maybe even more than you dislike me.’ So the build-up of all the years of minstrel shows and all the ignorance and when you’re being totally disrespected and then, you can’t read, you might get angry about something that happened in 1818 or 1905! I was angry about stuff that happened to my grandma and I wasn’t even there,” said Marsalis.
Marsalis describes the move from moral high-ground to sexually-obsessed and ‘anything goes,’ was a slow shift that began after the ’60s when little compromises began to turn into gaping disparities.
“Many people who came into the ’60s actually had the moral high-ground on their parents. They were for women’s rights, they were for getting out of Vietnam, they were for the Civil Rights Movement, they were for all the things that our nation stood against for some reason. Since that generation of people, what generation has had that kind of moral high-ground over their parents? I know I didn’t have it over mine and I know it certainly won’t be my children’s generation having a moral high ground over mine. They want to defend the rights of someone standing around singing, ‘Pop that (expletive)’” — that’s something that’s gone terribly wrong.”
For ticket information, call (215) 893-1999 or visit www.manncenter.org. |