Wynton Marsalis
           All Rise

* Wynton Marsalis (trumpet); Paul Smith Singers; Northridge Singers of
California State University at Northridge; Morgan State University Choir;
Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra; Los Angeles Philharmonic/Esa-Pekka Salonen
Sony S2K 89817  TT: 74:38 + 31:37

Summary for the Busy Executive: Jazz Mahler.

According to Harry Connick, Jr., if you ask Wynton Marsalis (or his
father, Ellis, for that matter) a question, you'd better make sure
you have time to hear the answer.  One thing tends to lead to another.
It's all good, it's all interesting, but it *is* long.  Mahler famously
remarked that a symphony was a world.  As a composer, Wynton Marsalis
has that same compulsion to include everything he knows about music,
music history, and world culture up to now.  He knows a hell of a lot.
The main difference between Mahler and Marsalis is that Mahler wants to
include *a* world, Marsalis *the* world.  What Marsalis really needs is
a more ruthless sense for the essential - a vision that can refine the
jumble of everything into a clear something.  At 106 minutes and twelve
substantial sections, All Rise is a work you'd better have time for.

It's fared better in Europe than in the States.  The French,
predictably, went gaga over it, and while I don't go so far, I don't
think them out of line either.  In the U. S., Marsalis has made too many
enemies to get a clear-eyed look.  I think especially of a small-minded,
most off-the-point review in the New York Observer.  A lot of people
seem to think of Marsalis as arrogant, but I disagree.  He's got opinions,
of course, and the knowledge to back them up.  However, he really is a
teacher, like his father.  He *wants* you to get it.  People put him
down for his involvement in the Ken Burns jazz series, especially his
view of the current state of jazz as relatively fallow.  Yet, nobody
seems able to put a real giant forward today.  Herbie Hancock?  Chick
Corea?  Alice Coltrane?  Compare them to Monk or Powell or Mingus or
Gillespie or even Davis.  Max Roach, Ornette Coleman, and Cecil Taylor
are the remnants of something, not the seeds of something new.  Marsalis
himself, as a jazz player, harkens back to the Fifties and Sixties.
Actually, I think Marsalis has it in him to be a giant, but not as a
jazz player.  He's ambitious for his music, and right now he pursues
something that seems impossible: a composer of classical jazz music, a
true fusion that takes into account not only the history of jazz, but
the history of Modern European music as well.

Blood on the Fields, which by winning the Pulitzer proved the only
purpose to the universe is whimsy, was so godawfully silly, only a genius
could have written it.  All Rise, however, marks a significant advance.
No longer does Marsalis include something simply because he thought of
it.  He works on all his composing cylinders here, and he seems obsessed
with structure, especially the structure of large works.  The structural
principle here seems the blues.  All Rise runs to twelve movements (12-bar
blues), three large sections (the ternary structure suggested by the
blues) of four movements each, and ternary structures are seldom far
away.  The blues shows up most nakedly in the penultimate movement,
"Saturday Night Slow Drag," as the ternary structure of the pop song
turns up in the previous "Expressbrown Local."  It would be amazing if
it all hung together, and it really doesn't.  Marsalis has written enough
for at least three substantial pieces.  However, each movement stands
sturdily on its own, and I have no idea what the composer should have
cut.  I do consider the finale a miscalculation - a fairly close
reproduction of New Orleans jazz and gospel.  To me, Marsalis should
have talked as much as possible in his own voice, rather than in the
voice of somebody else.  Musically, it's delightful.  Rhetorically, it's
so lightweight, it seems a mistake.

The work has a spiritual program: essentially, innocence, sin, and
redemption.  I don't begrudge Marsalis whatever he needs to get going.
The text, by Marsalis himself, doesn't sink to the hilarious bathos of
Blood on the Fields, but it's still pretty clunky.  Marsalis is a composer,
not a poet.  You can't tell me that the words he comes up with work
better than those of Robert Hayden, Gwendolyn Brooks, Sterling Knight,
Countee Cullen, or Langston Hughes (or, for that matter, Andy Razaf).
He really needs words worthy of the music to serve his evangelical
impulse.  He cripples himself in this regard.

Marsalis's musical ambitions rise fairly high.  He follows the dream
of Gershwin, Ellington, Taylor, Giuffre, Russell, Evans, and Schuller:
how to get classical and jazz players together in one music.  When I
was young and breathtakingly stupid, I used to think this a matter of
learning how to write for strings.  I'm older and less stupid (I still
think a jazz composer has to learn this), and I now see the problems
as more fundamental.  For one thing, jazz and classical music require
different approaches to rhythm and attack.  The rhythm section - drum
kit, string bass, and sometimes guitar - is the engine that drives the
jazz ensemble.  The symphony orchestra rests on the bedrock of strings
and employs percussion mainly as an exotic color.  Strangely enough, I
don't believe that a classical player has to improvise, particularly
when one has capable jazz soloists at hand, certainly the case here.
Marsalis proves he can write for strings in the "Wild Strumming of Fiddle"
movement, which closes the first section.  But he succeeds in integrating
the strings (that is, giving them something to do other than "sweetening"
the jazz ensemble) only in the first movement, "Jubal Step," and in solo
passages of the "Latin" movement, "El 'Gran' Baille de la Reina."

The range of styles Marsalis has mastered made my jaw drop. He tips his
hat to Ellington in "Expressbrown Local" and to the classic arrangers
of spiritual in "The Halls of Erudition and Scholarship" (my candidate
for Worst Title in the Entire Piece).  One expects, and gets, great parts
for woodwinds, but the brass writing magnificently exceeds even this.
As I say, Marsalis has managed to write twelve wonderful movements.  But
All Rise fails to hold together.  I have no idea why, for example, the
second movement follows the first or the third movement the second.  I
have no idea why "El 'Gran' Baille" is in the third section and not the
first.  The order of the thing -- beyond the spiritual program, the
musical order -- is important.  With a different arrangement of movements,
we would get a substantially different piece.  For me, the third section,
which should provide the emotional lift, fails to pay off, despite the
quality of the individual movements ("Expressbrown Local," for example,
counts as one of my highlights of the entire work), but playing with
order has a really good chance of providing that emotional bang.  Indeed,
if through some serious flaw in the universe I were given the task of
re-ordering, I'd seriously consider switching the first and last movements
of the work.  Ah well.  There's always the program mode of my CD player.
As it stands, I will probably listen to All Rise in fragments at a time.

Salonen keeps everything together, although does the Lincoln Center Jazz
Orchestra really need a conductor?  The choirs are good, the soloists
(instrumental and vocal) wonderful.  The engineering is a bit muddy in
spots, but a lot indeed goes on.  For me the virtues considerably outnumber
the flaws.

Steve Schwartz