American Gangster (32 page)

“That was what really amazed me,” says one old-line Lincoln Center board member, “watching him play Purcell…. I said to myself, ‘This is a once-in-a-lifetime individual.' If we ever wanted to do something with jazz, he had to be the one.”

“Look,” Wynton told the blue-blood board of Lincoln Center, his voice deep and smoky, the informality of his manner only adding moral authority, “I play classical and I play jazz and jazz is harder.” There was no reason, Wynton said, no reason at all, that jazz, America's “greatest art form, a democratic triumph of order and beauty over chaos,” shouldn't be accorded the same status as “European” Lincoln Center “constituents” like the Metropolitan Opera, the New York City Ballet, and the New York Philharmonic.

Smitten, the board agreed. However, it wasn't until 1998, when the decidedly un-hepcat mayor Rudy Giuliani idiosyncratically mandated that any plans submitted for the highly sought-after Coliseum site include a performance space for JLC, that Wynton set down, in the manner of Yahweh ‘s deca screed from Sinai, “Ten Fundamentals of the House of Swing.”

Written on cocktail napkins during a red-eye flight, “The Vision,” as Wynton calls it, reads like what it was intended to be: “a metaphorical blueprint of a groove, to be articulated into design, and then made real.”

Fundamental No. 1: “the entire facility is the House of Swing … we want all 100,000 square feet to dance and sing, to be syncopated and
unpredictable, but not eccentric.” Fundamental No. 5: “The two main performance spaces should represent two sides of the same thing, like night and day, or like a man and a woman.” The rest, as they say, is commentary, that is, “The Rose Hall, representing “woman, or night—this is not Jazz at Lincoln Center's main hall, because like a family we play no favorites—should sound like Lester Young, Billie Holiday, Paul Desmond, and Miles Davis.” The front, or “male,” Allen Room “should have the feeling of a street parade … an ancient Greek theatre … there should be a question of where the band ends and the audience begins … the room should feel like Duke Ellington's Orchestra—sensuous, spicy, and able to accommodate all tempos.”

The project's lead architect, the flamboyant Uruguayan Rafael Viñoly, who claims to be a former Tupamaro revolutionary and is mostly noted for designing massive convention centers, read Wynton's manifesto and was inspired. “The Fundamentals of Swing transcends every boundary,” Viñoly says, “it is an architectural plan immediately translatable into the language of art and love. Wynton's Vision guided my hand in everything I did at JLC.”

A copy of the “Fundamentals,” accompanied by Viñoly's plans, now fills a bedroom wall in Wynton's homey and spacious riverview pad on Sixty-sixth Street, directly behind the Juilliard School he once attended as a seventeen-year-old trumpet prodigy. The apartment is just a few steps, past Balducci's, from the stage door of Alice Tully Hall, where Wynton has conducted the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra for the past decade. The move to Columbus Circle will mean a longer walk to work, but it will be worth it. “Sometimes I'll get up in the middle of the night and look at the plans,” Wynton says. “It's like a dream, one I always knew would happen.”

Truth be told, however, Wynton, hard hat on his head, but unhappy with heights and deep water, isn't thrilled be on the rickety catwalks of the rising House of Swing. Not that he'll ever let on, decked out in his Brooks Brothers casualwear. Being cool is part of being the star, the front man, the artistic director. Besides, Brooks Brothers is a corporate sponsor. This is no problem, since Wynton, who'd rather play backup for Kenny G than be caught dead in Phat Farm, is pretty much Brooks Brothers to begin with.
Hands on, he does all his own ironing, the board in the cedar closet of his bedroom, alongside twenty or so hats, each on its own hook. On the road, he sometimes irons the clothes of the guys in the band, too. “They bring them to me because they know I'll crease them right,” Wynton says.

Clutching a naked girder as the late-fall wind whips through the open superstructure, Wynton says, “This is jazz steel.” It is a phrase he likes, “because we're not after something that is going to disappear. We're building an institution, one that is going to endure.” That's what people don't understand, Wynton says—the need for permanency. It is an issue, after all—this notion of an institutionalized House of Swing, especially a $130 million one crammed into the middle of the commercial colossus of the AOL Time Warner corporate headquarters.

“Institutions create institutional music, and that is not what jazz is about. This is a music where nothing is ever played the same way twice,” says Howard Mandel, a writer who's president of the Jazz Journalists Association, echoing the often-heard objection against the supposed canonization of what is referred to as “the Marsalis-Crouch-Murray version” of America's music. It isn't that anyone doubts Marsalis's 100 percent dedication to the future of jazz (of the opinion that knowing the chord changes to “C Jam Blues” will absolutely save your soul, he's a tireless jazz educator, offering several dozen lectures and demonstrations each year). Problems arise with Wynton's alleged “neo-traditionalist,” anti-avant-garde bias against everything he personally deems as “unswinging,” that is, much of the past four decades. The fear is, while the legacies of Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington will be forever celebrated on Columbus Circle, such post-Coltrane artists as Cecil Taylor, Don Cherry, Albert Ayler, and Sun Ra will be written out of the music's history.

Some just can't stand the imprimatur of the uptown big-money squares. For her part, Lorraine Gordon, who owns and operates the Vanguard, the club started by her husband Max sixty-six years ago, says, “I love Wynton; he's my favorite. But jazz in a shopping mall? What's that about?”

Even Ellis Marsalis, father of Wynton, Branford, Delfeayo, and Jason, reveals mixed feelings. Ellis, considered by some observers to be the “hip-pest” of the Marsalis clan, once drove for fifty hours straight from New
Orleans to Los Angeles to see Ornette Coleman. “I went with Alvin Batiste, my friend. We didn't stop, except for gas. We just wanted to hear Ornette and tell him thanks, because he was really doing something new.” This is the same Ornette Coleman whose “harmolodic” approach has been found deficient in swingingness by the JLC brain trust, an aesthetic judgment that caused Ellis Marsalis to roll his eyes and shake his head. Standing in the crowded Vanguard dressing room, the elder Marsalis, a large, friendly man, casts a loving gaze at his famous son and says, “Jazz at Lincoln Center is a great thing. A lot of musicians are going to get work because of it. But Wynton's New York, you know, it's not
my
New York. My New York had clubs, little places to go, to relax and just play. This New York, it's kind of cosmetic. A really shiny surface. What's underneath, I don't know. But times change; you have to accept that.”

Wynton, of course, has heard it all before. Bestride the construction site like a jazz Howard Roark, feet on the six-inch-thick rubber “isolation pads” that will muffle the rumble of the A train Billy Strayhorn said was the quickest way to Harlem, Wynton decries, “Who could be against this? … Who says jazz has to be played only in dark rooms filled with curls of cigarette smoke? Always on the margin. That outlaw thing. That's a romantic, limiting fantasy. This is the greatest music ever produced in this country, made by the greatest musicians. You think it doesn't deserve something first-class, like any other great art?”

Yet even now, with people talking about Marsalis as a New York cultural leader-commissar on the par of a Balanchine or Bernstein, there is another kind of permanency to think about: the tenuousness of life around here these days. Wynton was in L.A. during the WTC nightmare, getting ready to put on his most recent magnum opus,
All Rise
, at the Hollywood Bowl: “I saw it on television. The planes, over and over. All I could think about was how perishable everything was.”

Indeed, our little tour of the future home of Jazz at Lincoln Center was held up for about half an hour that very morning. Bruce MacCombie, the JLC executive director, Laura Johnson, the general manager, and Jonathan Rose, the chairman of the building committee, were there. But Ted Ammon, chairman of the board, was not. It was strange, everyone said,
because Ted, the investment banker–jazz fan who had contributed more than $2.5 million to JLC, was not the type to be late. It wasn't until the next morning that people heard Ammon was dead, murdered in his Hamptons home.

A week later, at a memorial service for Ammon at Alice Tully Hall attended by several representatives of the Suffolk County homicide squad, Wynton eulogized, “We want to know the particulars of death—it repulses us, it calls us, it fascinates us … but only the dead know the facts of death, and they never tell.” Then, along with Wycliffe Gordon, Victor Goines, Walter Blanding Jr., and others from the LC Jazz Orchestra, Wynton broke into Jelly Roll Morton's “Oh, Didn't He Ramble”—“Didn't he ramble … Rambled all around, in and out of town … till the butcher cut him down”—a tune that has been played at New Orleans jazz funerals for a hundred years. They really ripped into it too, with Wynton, seemingly on the verge of tears, playing the happiest music he could muster, which, of course, is the N'awlins way. It was a priceless kind of thing, because even if Ammon's much-battled-over estate was worth $100 million, no amount of money could buy this: being sent off by Wynton Marsalis. Except the people at Alice Tully didn't quite get it, how to behave when a soul passes on. They sat there mute. Eventually Wynton had to say, “You know, you don't have to be so quiet.”

A couple of hours later, Wynton, up in his apartment overlooking the Hudson playing chess with saxophonist Walter Blanding, remained puzzled. “To me,” he said, “death is not morbid; it's people's reaction to it that's morbid … nothing lasts, that's a given, but that's exactly why you've got to keep on working.” It was like on the final cut of the album
Last Date
, when Eric Dolphy, who would die less than a month later, says, “When you hear music, after it's over, it's gone in the air forever. You can never capture it again.” It was like Charlie Parker dying at thirty-four. If you're a player, you take that as an inspiration to keep playing, harder than ever.

Impermanence only increases urgency, said Wynton, whose first extended work was
Griot New York
, a 1991 three-movement piece performed in collaboration with the Garth Fagan Dance company. “That summed up how I felt about New York,” Wynton says. “In the middle, the city is
destroyed. Then the lovers, the two dancers, build it back up again. Heal it. I really wanted it to have this feeling of myth, urban myth, ultimate danger and redemption. To me it is a heroic story.”

The challenge is to battle disorder, things flying off into meaninglessness. There has to be a center, says Wynton, paraphrasing Yeats, his favorite poet. That's how it is in music, and buildings, too, Wynton said, especially “a temple” like the new JLC. Wynton addresses the issue in No. 8 among “The Fundamentals of the House of Swing.” It says: “We must have an icon that serves as the symbol for the facility everywhere.”

Certainly that icon will be the jazz temple's most spectacular design feature, the fifty-foot glass wall facing Central Park South that will rise above the bandstand of the Allen Room. It will be something new to see in this beleaguered, beloved city. Soon a guy and his girl will be able to stroll through the park, ride west in a taxi or hansom cab, incline their eyes, and look at what Wynton has called “this gleaming jewel, a beacon of civilization and American expression … one more beautiful vision of New York.”

“They will see Wynton,” says architect Rafael Viñoly, who invented the idea of the glass wall after reading No. 8 of the “Fundamentals.”

“Wynton in the window, blowing his horn.”

Sitting on the ledge that surrounds the fountain in the middle of Lincoln Center, Wynton is contemplating what Albert Murray, in his book
The Hero and the Blues
, refers to as the epic “journey … the fundamental commitment” of the artist, a heroism “measured in terms of the … complexities of the obstacles it overcomes.” In a few hours, he'll be inside Alice Tully Hall, leading the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra, including Victor Goines, Wess Anderson, and Herlin Riley—musicians Marsalis has known most of his life—to play in a seventy-fifth-birthday-celebration concert for saxophonist Jimmy Heath. But now he is remembering when he first came to Sixty-sixth Street, in 1979, to try out for Juilliard.

“I was nervous. My teacher thought I could make it. But you never know. I just wanted to do good on my audition, get a good scholarship. I didn't want to stay in New Orleans, the shit I had grown up around. The segregation.
I thought it would be better in the North. As I found out, New York was a segregated town, too, in a different way. I performed all my music from memory. I played the Haydn Trumpet Concerto. I played the Brandenburg, played Petrushka, overtures from Beethoven, Mahler's Fifth. The common repertoire, what you have to know if you play orchestral trumpet.”

Wynton would be out of Juilliard by 1980, touring with Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers along with his brother Branford—a whole other kind of education.

“That was exciting,” Wynton says, ticking off, with his usual total recall, the various apartments he lived in during those early, wild times when he first made his name. “I lived at 137th Street near Lenox, 108th between Broadway and West End, 99th and Broadway, 20th and Park, Bleecker and Broadway, in Brooklyn … I loved Harlem, I loved Brooklyn. Everywhere I lived, the City had something to offer. The musicians looked out for me. Art Blakey. John Lewis. Philly Joe Jones came and picked me up in his car. We'd pass a place and he'd say, ‘Oh, that where this and that musician lives, oh, there's where to get the best suits, over there they got really good Italian sausages.' He wanted me to know these things, thought it might be useful to me … because I was here, I was going to stay, and I was going to carry it on.”