American Gangster (33 page)

One of the dumber, more patronizing misconceptions about Wynton is that he arrived in New York a malleable Mr. Natural, a Willie Mays–Joe Hardy tabula rasa of the brass section, to be molded by the neocon-ology of whatever mentor he encountered. The fact is, Wynton has always had a sense of his own destiny, from the time Al Hirt, the Bourbon Street tourist
macher
his father was playing with, gave him his first trumpet at six. He knew immediately that the trumpet was the instrument for him. “Trumpet playing is as old as dust, you know,” Wynton says. “Joshua didn't knock down the walls of Jericho with a saxophone. A trumpeter announces himself, a trumpeter is a priest, a shaman. It gives you power.”

We were talking about “Psalm 26,” the cut that both opens and closes Wynton's 1988 disc
Uptown Ruler
. Looking through a Bible as we sat beside the Lincoln Center fountain, I wondered what so interested Wynton about this particular Psalm of David, which says, “I have not sat with vain
persons, neither will I go with dissemblers, I have hated the congregation of evildoers; and will not sit with the wicked.”

“Well it sure doesn't have anything to do with George W. Bush,” Wynton exclaimed. Bush might seek to vanquish his own version of evil-doers, but Wynton didn't buy into this “us and them way of thinking…. I don't see why you shouldn't sit down with the supposed wicked. How else would you learn the ways of the wicked unless you sat with them?” But what really mattered to him about Psalm 26, Marsalis said, was the phrase “but as for me.”

“But as for me, I walk in my integrity. Redeem me and be gracious to me…. My foot stands on level ground, in the great congregation,” Wynton read aloud. “
But as for me
… like in all this magnificence, all creation, one individual voice could still be heard. That really jumped out at me.”

That's why, Wynton says, “you've got to work on your legend,” something the jazz man did most notoriously in his long-running feud with Miles Davis. Wynton (named for Miles's onetime piano player Wynton Kelly) had been viciously attacking Davis, claiming the lionized inventor of “the cool”—an early influence on Marsalis's own playing—was “tomming” by playing his
Bitches Brew
–style fusion. In retort, Miles said that Wynton was a “nice young man but confused” who should “mind his own fucking business.”

“You're afraid of Miles,” mocked Wynton's band members, betting him $100 each that he would not confront the famously irascible Davis when the two trumpeters played a festival in Vancouver, Canada. Taking the dare, Wynton jumped up onto stage right in the middle of Miles's show.

Wynton recalls: “Miles was playing the organ on a blues song, ‘C.C. Rider,' when I got onstage. ‘I've come to address the dumb shit you have said about me and my family,' I shouted. But Miles just kept playing. Like he didn't hear me. I had to say it again. ‘I've come to address the dumb shit …' Finally Miles looks up and says, ‘Come back tomorrow.' Then we got into it, him telling me to get the fuck off the stage. Then he picked up his horn and played. I guess he was trying to put me in my place, show me who was boss, but he played some sad shit. He had nothing left. That made me unhappy, to see a great player challenged like that and be without a response.”

Not that Wynton regrets the incident: “No, man. Miles knew what was up. He knew the Oedipal deal, he'd done enough of it himself when he was young. Cutting the heart out of those guys he'd come up on. So I can't feel bad about what I did. Besides,
it was fun
.”

Other incidents, generally falling under the rubric of “the jazz wars of the nineties,” have been less amusing. In 1993, reports leaked of an “artistic decision” by JLC to hire “an entire band of guys under the age of 30.” Given the JLC credo about the continuity of the jazz message, firing people like altoist Jerry Dodgion, trombonist Art Baron, and baritone man Joe Temperly—who had played with Duke Ellington's band—was a strange, possibly illegal (and soon to be withdrawn) move that opened Marsalis up to accusations he was packing the band full of easily controllable crony-clones.

There have been charges of so-called reverse racism at JLC. In 1996, much was made of the fact that of all the musicians given “nights” at JLC, only one, Gerry Mulligan, who had already died at the time of the show, was white. What about to Bix Beiderbecke and Bill Evans? Didn't they deserve a night? “Blacks invented jazz, but no one owns it,” complained Whitney Balliett in an oft-quoted
New Yorker
piece.

Marsalis was floored by the criticism: “I'm thinking to myself …
this is Lincoln Center and they're talking about no white people?
” To this day, Marsalis discounts the race issue, saying it was “all about resentment, about me using my power as artistic director, which is what I was hired to do.” Today (when five of the fifteen LC Orchestra chairs are held by whites, including saxophonist Ted Nash, trumpeter Ryan Kisor, and the thankfully still-extant seventy-two-year-old Joe Temperly), Wynton insists, coyly, “I just want to have the best players who I feel good playing with.”

This skirmishing has led to much intemperate commentary. New-waveist saxophonist David Murray slammed JLC's reliance on standards as “fuckin' macabre necrophilia or some shit.” Pianist Keith Jarrett said Wynton was “jazzy the same way someone who drives a BMW is sporty.” A particularly amusing critique of the Marsalis mystique appears in a Web page titled “Livingston Squat … a place devoted to mirth at the expense of Wynton Marsalis and Stanley Crouch.” Here one finds the one-act play
Branford Tells Wynton
, a recounting of the traumatic 1985 scene when Branford informed his earnest younger brother he would be leaving the Wynton Marsalis Quintet.

“That's cool, Steeplone,” says Wynton (referred to as “Minton Bursitis”), understanding that a true jazzman must always seek to broaden his committment to the music. “Will you be going with some legendary veteran of the bebop tenor battles on Central Avenue in Los Angeles … or perhaps an underappreciated modern giant who cut his teeth during the fertile period of swinging sixties modernism?”

“Well, no,” Branford replies. Actually, he says, he is going to play with Sting, describing the former Police singer as “a down cat,” adding, “I can't be doing that historical shit
all
the time!”

Wynton wails: “Pop music! Pop music!
Oh, my brother!
…
my own brother!”

Nowadays, Wynton claims he doesn't read what people write about him anymore. “There was a really bad article in the
Times
, and I wrote this long letter of rebuttal. I was wondering, should I send it? My son, Wynton Jr., said I had to send it. ‘Daddy,' he said, ‘if you don't, then they'll write it again.' After that, I couldn't take the bashing seriously anymore.”

Besides, says Wynton, stretched out in his bedroom, he doesn't have time for jazz wars anymore. He's just gotten back from a month on the road with the LCJ Orchestra and another two weeks with his septet. “Playing, every night, playing.” That's the easy part, he says, going from town to town, driving in the bus, playing ball, scheming a way to beat Walter Blanding in chess, spreading jazz love along the highways and byways. What's hard is “working for free … this nonprofit thing. When you're working for free, you're tired all the time.”

Looking at the plans of the new building on the wall, Wynton says, “First, everyone was talking about $50 million. Then it was $74 million, $81 million. Then it's 115 … $115 million—heading toward 130! When I was growing up, if you got 130 pennies for jazz, you were doing good. Now we need $130 million. Can't be sitting around here, it has got to be gotten.”

Chances are he will, since, along with the other things Wynton Marsalis can do really well, raising money is very definitely one of them.

Gordon J. Davis, founding chairman of JLC (and until his recent resignation Lincoln Center's president), testifies to Wynton's magic with “lead donors.” “He's kind of the ultimate weapon,” says Davis. “You open the door, and in walks Mozart. Fund-raising-wise, that can be a compelling argument.”

It worked with Herb Allen, the legendarily secretive broker of such high-stakes media deals as the Disney-Capital Cities/ABC merger and Seagram's $5.7 billion purchase of MCA. A fraternity brother of Allen's at Williams back in the early sixties, Davis once managed to get Allen to write a $250 check for a campus civil-rights campaign. But he couldn't get anywhere with Allen on the jazz front until the financier had a little breakfast with Marsalis.

“Wynton came over and started talking, the way he does,” Davis said. “As it turned out, Wynton and Herb had similar views on the corrosive nature of today's popular culture, how it undermines everything.” Allen said he might speak to Steve Case, the AOL founder, who had also attended Williams and was often present at the Sun Valley confab Allen hosts annually for the likes of Bill Gates, Sumner Redstone, and Rupert Murdoch. Case was a jazz fan, Allen said. He might help.

After a few days, Allen called back, reports Davis. “My heart sank, because Herb said he hadn't gotten the money from Case. He didn't feel right about asking him. I was about to hang up when Allen says, ‘So I'll give you the money myself.' Ten million bucks. He said it was meeting Wynton that did it. He believed in him.”

The grand jazz patroness Baroness Pannonica de Koenigswarter may have sent her personal car to bring the junked-up Bird to the Stanhope Hotel on a near daily basis and put up Monk in her Weehawken estate, but Wynton's philanthropic reach is a whole other deal. Watching him work a room, as he did the other night at JLC's gala “Tribute to Tito Puente,” pausing unhurriedly at every single $1,000-a-plate setting, is to see another bit of marvelous Marsalis class-defying technique. The knowing wink, the squeeze of the genius's hand upon the shoulder, the wordless Chaplinesque dance with the head and spreading cherub smile—you could call him Wynton Clinton, the way how he keeps the charm pumping.
Mostly he listens. It is a jazzman's gift, after all, listening to others. How else can you play? Talk to Wynton on the phone, and there will be a pause, a silence on the other end.

“You still there?” is the question. “Yeah,” Marsalis says, “I'm
listening
to what you're saying.” Oh, you say, surprised and pleased at the novelty of it all.

Still you wonder how long Wynton can stay iconic in the window of the jazz temple he's building over on Columbus Circle—and what might happen without him. “They've painted themselves into a corner at Lincoln Center, pushing Wynton so far out front,” says one prominent jazz critic. “He's good, but he's not Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington rolled up into one, the way they'd have you believe. Everyone knows, including Wynton, I bet, those long compositions like
All Rise
don't work. The way the programs are set up, you don't get Sonny Rollins, you get the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra interpreting Sonny Rollins, like somehow that's better than the real thing. It is dangerous, I think, this cult of personality—Wynton and the Wyntonettes—and there's no turning back now.”

Certainly, JLC is exceedingly Wynton-centric. Jonathan Rose, son of Frederick, says, “The whole idea of the facility is to make it welcoming and warm, the way Wynton is—for it to be a manifestation of Wynton's personality.” Russell Johnson, the famous acoustician working on the new JLC, says, “It is rare a hall is built so clearly for one artist.” Asked shortly before his death if JLC would be robbed of identity without Wynton, Ted Ammon said, “No one is indispensable. But to lose Wynton … that would leave a big hole, a very big hole.”

Even Albert Murray, who has an opinion about everything, demurs when asked if Wynton's extra administrative duties might be hampering his playing. “That's my boy,” Albert says. “Don't ask me to say anything about my boy.”

Wynton, who says he's “a scrub, like everyone else,” figures he can take the weight. Besides, he's too busy checking over this new translation of
The Iliad
and convincing me he is right about the popular culture (and I
am wrong) to worry about his own mortality. It is part of a long-running conversation, the kind Wynton likes. I contend that if Sonny Rollins could make something great out of “Surrey with the Fringe on Top,” shouldn't current musicians be able to improvise off today's pop songs. Wynton, who hates anything with even the hint of a backbeat, disagrees. He decrees this impossible because “all the pop songs they make now are so terrible you can't even mess with them.”

Isn't there one he likes? Not one single tune?

“No,” Wynton says. What about Nirvana's “Come As You Are”—that's got an interesting line. Wynton considers this, singing through Kurt Cobain's chord changes. “No, man,” he says. “I'm looking to play the melody, and there ain't none.”

So it goes. Wynton says the definitions of
hip
and
square
have never changed: the jazzmen remain eternally cool, everyone else is some bow-tie-wearing cornball. “That's the reason I can't get with the so-called avant-garde. All jazz is avant-garde. Sidney Bechet is still avant-garde. The squares are those fools on MTV, with gold teeth and the baggy prison pants, their asses hanging out. Minstrel-show shit. I won't let my kids watch it. ‘But it's Jay-Z,' they say. I tell them, ‘I don't care if it's F.U.-Z, you ain't watching.' Not when I'm around. Let them sneak their shit. That's what I had to do. My parents were strict. We always had to sneak our shit. If they're gonna watching that nonsense I better not know about it.”

Then the phone rings, which it often does. You can always tell when it is a babe, especially one Wynton, who has never yet had to say he doesn't get around much anymore (and has never been married), doesn't exactly want to talk to. His voice gets low and his eyes roll about in their sockets. “I didn't say I didn't want you to call anymore. I said I didn't want you to call me thirty times a day,” he says. When he hangs up, I say, “Don't make any entangling alliances.”