Interview with Wynton Marsalis Musical Director, trumpet
QUESTION:
With solos, how do you know when to start, how do you know when to stop? What’s going through your head?
WYNTON MARSALIS:
Really, soloing is just like talking. You don’t know exactly what you’re going to say but you have an idea and then, as it starts to come out of your mouth, you start to organize it. You even organize the sound of a sentence as you go along. You give, you take some and you give some. And even when you’re listening to somebody, you’re waiting for the time for them to stop, or even if they don’t stop, you’re waiting for a certain moment.
You say, “uh huh, uh huh.” And you might say that same “uh huh,” but the way you say it, that makes them think you don’t know what they’re talking about. Or if you’re bored you go “huh.” The inflection and the timing and the music of the language and all of this is something we’ve worked on our entire lives. We speak naturally in a certain syntax, the sentences, they come up, the noun, the verb, adverb. It’s a certain order and structure and we’ve always heard it.
In jazz, we have a harmonic form that repeats. And the easiest one to recognize would be the blues. Now, almost everybody can hear the blues. We did a concert in Chile once, a big rock concert for Amnesty International, 80,000 people, and we were worried before we started planning that they were going to throw stuff at us because we weren’t playing rock music. We started playing the blues by Duke Ellington — it’s called “Play the Blues and Go” — and the people in the stadium started to sing a completely unrelated song that was still a blues that they used to sing at soccer games.
So they heard the form of the blues, because what we were playing was a different tune. The form of the blues is 12 bars. And the blues is just a fundamental form. First it addresses all the central chords of western harmony. The I, II, IV, V chords.
QUESTION:
There’s a question of why you play 8-bar phrases. You know where to start and where to stop because it’s an 8 bar, 4 bar. Can you talk a little bit about how you know when to start and how you know when to stop?
WYNTON MARSALIS:
You can feel it.
QUESTION:
You can feel what?
WYNTON MARSALIS:
You can feel when the bars are passing, you can feel the amount of time. When you have harmony, you know because the chords are progressing inside of the passage of time. So for example, if I play something, a certain amount of time has passed. Now, without the melody, if you solo on top of that, you have a feeling. The form, the harmony is progressing even if you don’t have the melody. Like, if I say – [PLAYS PIANO] – it’s “Happy Birthday.” You can put another melody, it might be “Just a Closer Walk with Thee” — really basically the same progression as “Happy Birthday.” So when you’re soloing, you create melodies on top of the form, on top of this harmonic progression.
Now, the thing about playing jazz is that they’re not going to play the exact harmonies. The harmonic progression is always changing. So you have to be able to hear and use your reflexes to respond to whatever changes. As a matter of fact, we call harmonies “changes.” So you have to be able to respond to whatever changes are taking place. And that’s where improvisation comes in. That’s where it’s most like the democratic process. Because you can’t actually separate yourself from people that you might not like or want to be around. You have to deal with them, you have to be prepared to address changes. And the type of style that you address a change with determines your success. Not whether you’re successful in imposing your will, because if Eric [Reed] is playing the piano, I can’t stop the song and make him play the harmony I want him to play. That song is going on. So all I can do is address in some way what he’s played.
Now, I have options. I can play one long note that’s going to go through everything. I can play something fast. I could turn around and look at him to let him know I don’t like what he played and hope he doesn’t play it again. But he might say, “well you don’t like it, but you need to hear this.” So there’s always a give and a take.
QUESTION:
How could he just willy-nilly change the progressions? Isn’t this written down and fixed?
WYNTON MARSALIS:
Nothing is written down. Just like our Constitution. You can change it, you can amend it. It’s written down but it’s written down to be amended. And what you do, that’s part of the construction of it, that it can be amended.
QUESTION:
So it’s not like aerial acrobatics where if you don’t move exactly right, you’re dead.
WYNTON MARSALIS:
In terms of the precision acrobatics, everybody has to be in a certain space at a certain time. And if they’re not there, people are going to start losing their lives. Our music is not like that. If you’re not there at a certain time, somebody will wait for you. Or else they’re going to keep going and you have to catch up, but the music is going to keep going anyway. It’s like life. Regardless of what happens to you or me, tomorrow is going to come. And it came 200 years ago, it came 2,000 years ago, it came 20,000 years ago and it’s going to come 20,000 years from now. So we have to be able to adapt and to change. And when things don’t work out the way we want, that’s all right, it could still end up beautiful. It’s all in what you do with it.
QUESTION:
What would be an example of a mistake?
WYNTON MARSALIS:
Well, our form is not designed for it to be perfect. Thelonius Monk always used to say, “I like to hear people make mistakes.” When you make mistakes, it means you’re going for something. Our form is very human. And it’s exactly like something that happens in your house with your family. Some nights there’s going to be an argument about something, somebody’s going to get mad. You might get some food thrown at you if you’re not careful. It’s just a cauldron of activity. And sometimes it’s beautiful and it’s wondrous and glorious. And sometimes it’s not.
It doesn’t have anything to do what anybody else hears. It’s your hearing what you want to play. It’s just like when you’re talking. Sometimes you misspeak. You will say something, but what will come out of your mouth will not be what was in your mind. And you just hope that you don’t do it when you’re in the media. Some people call it a Freudian slip or it can be genuinely just misspeaking. You do that when you play.
A lot of times, to make a mistake just means your hearing is not developed or you’re not in the time in a certain way. You always are missing things no matter who you are because so much is going on. Anything can happen. What determines what happens is your, how much of a slave you are to convention. How much of your ability precludes you from participating in a wider arena of music. A drummer is going to know more rhythms than you know. A piano player will know more harmony than you know. The bass player will understand the bass function and the bass motion better than you will understand it. That’s their job. You stand up and solo, you’re trying to listen to all of that and find something that will respond to all of it.
There’s no limit to how great it can be, and there’s no limit to how sad it can be. You could play too long. That’s one of the most common mistakes: the rhythm section will be playing behind you and then they just have this collective sign when you take that next chorus.
That’s another thing about jazz music. It’s your choice. Our music is a music of choice. You choose how long you’re going to play. You choose what register you want to play in. You choose whether you want to play at all. Before you stand to play, you could look over at someone else and say, “four.” So you play four and they play four. Or you could say I’m just going to play a phrase and you come in and play. A bass player might lay out when you’re playing. The drummer might not play.
Now, a lot of this never happens because musicians, many times we get into a convention and we just play however it is we always played. But that doesn’t say anything about the possibilities that are afforded by jazz because we have infinite possibilities.
QUESTION:
When you were playing one night to the next the same tune, how different can it be?
WYNTON MARSALIS:
It depends on the musicians. When you have really creative musicians from night to night, songs will be totally different. I mean Wycliffe Gordon, Reginald Veal, I mean you never know what they’re going to do. Herlin Riley. Some musicians are just unpredictable. Just like some people. You’re afraid to bring them around your mama — you don’t know what they’re going to do. So musicians are the same way. I like the really creative musicians. They just play. We always say, you don’t judge what you’re playing, just play.
I’m just always trying to add things. But now, you can play jazz that’s all written out. Then you just use the language of jazz and you don’t improvise. And that’s just like reading. I mean, it’s not foreign to jazz music. Of course you could have music that would be all written out. But it’s not as much fun to play as music that’s improvised because improvising is like a conversation. It’s more unpredictable. You don’t know what’s going to happen.
A lot of times you would rather hear some written music (probably) because the written music is going to be much better organized. You’re not at the mercy of whoever’s playing. You know, when we play Duke Ellington’s “Tatooed Bride,” 17 minutes from when we start, it will be over. Now musicians, they improvise, 17 minutes from when they start, the first person might still be soloing. We know all the harmonies are going to be in place. You know exactly what’s going to happen.
QUESTION:
You make it sound as if improvising is a lot more fun to do than it is to listen to it.
WYNTON MARSALIS:
Improvising is a lot more fun to do for the musicians. But once we lost a certain type of discretion, it became painful for the listener on a certain level. One thing that the history of jazz can teach us, and actually the history of America in the 20th century, is how the ego can destroy a great idea. What happens is that it just becomes more “me, me, me.” It leads to just self absorption, self elevation. The desire to stick out like the class clown. Not to say that that’s bad, but just to say that everybody can’t want to do that.
What happened in our music is that it became just, “my solo.” The only thing that’s considered planned is to play a solo. So then the art of listening became endangered. What about listening? How you listen to somebody else play? That’s a part of playing too. The listening became less intense, and this is the thing that we’re returning to now. We’ve been returning to it since the mid 80s. A return to group expression, to listening. That’s not to say that there haven’t always been musicians who were great listeners. They’ve always been out there. Just to say that that aspect of playing is not what has been the most celebrated. Because this thought that one person takes the music in a direction, well, music is too great for one person to take. You take the music in your direction but it’s still playing in more music. It’s like C is an important note. But the E-flat is important too. And so is this E-flat right here, and this one too, and that and this and all, all of them. And they’re all in that C. But no one note is more important than all of them. And many times in our culture, we’ve lost sight of that.
We don’t understand democracy. The whole question of a democracy. A lot of times what’s going on is not what you want to have going, and that’s how our music is.
QUESTION:
Can you say something about composition — how writing a piece of music down on a piece of paper is just improvising very very slowly?
WYNTON MARSALIS:
Composition is like improvisation, but you’re more careful with a composition than you are with an improvisation. Because an improvisation, you’re just tossing it off. The fun of it is that you just play it.
Once again, it’s just like speaking. You might say any kind of thing when you’re talking. But if you were writing that down, you’re not going to just write any kind of thing down.
QUESTION:
Okay, but if you’re in front of 3,000 people, you’re not just “kind of” talking.
WYNTON MARSALIS:
Well, the quality of improvisation, the quality of your thought and the depth of your feeling comes out when you improvise. So you do want to get in front of 3,000 people and just toss it off. That’s what you want to do. Not to imply that there’s no thought behind it. It’s just that when you sit down to write down what it is that you’re thinking, just the act of you writing it down makes you refine it a certain way, for better or for worse. It’s not even to say that a composition is better than an improvisation. Because you can believe what Bach probably played in some churches is far superior to what he wrote down.
Of course Bach and Beethoven were known as great improvisers, so you can believe some nights when they really were on, they were playing stuff that they only wished they could remember to write down. And then also they had the instrument. When you improvise you can do things that you wouldn’t be able to do if it was written down. Somebody presented Coltrane with one of his solos once in a written form, and he said “can you play that?” And Coltrane looked at it and said, just the complexity of ideas and the relationships and the technical feat — it would be very difficult to do that, reading it or playing it as an artifact.
QUESTION:
Could you improvise well on a piece that you never heard before?
WYNTON MARSALIS:
If I’m really hearing well, yeah. We always go sit in with people, and when you sit in with a lot of people you always are going to play songs you don’t necessarily know. You figure out the progression as it goes along. With me, I listen to the bass first. Try to riff, try to hear what the bass is doing. And then when I hear that bass progression, it just is going from key to key. That’s all a progression is. You just start to learn how to hear the direction that the song is going in.
QUESTION:
And what are you doing at that point?
WYNTON MARSALIS:
You start to play melodies that fit, that will work with that progression. Now, when you get to the part of the progression that you don’t know, you try to find a note that you can hold until you get to something that you can try. Or else you can lay out. See, silence is always good — when you’re unsure, lay out.
QUESTION:
What’s the limit on notes you can play?
WYNTON MARSALIS:
You can play any note, but it’s hard to make any note sound good. It’s like the more harmony you can hear, the more you know how to make harmony work. Just like cooking. You can use anything you want but if you don’t know how to use it, you’d better stick to the one or two things you know how to use. And one of them better be silence. Sometimes you gotta stick to, “well, I didn’t have anything in the refrigerator.” A master chef or somebody who could really cook can look in there and say “okay, put a little bit of this and that in there, yeah.” But now, me and you step in there – I don’t know.
QUESTION:
How do you make some of the sound effects you use on the trumpet?
WYNTON MARSALIS:
I first heard a great New Orleans trumpet player named Freddie Keppert do laughing on the horn. And King Oliver and all the earliest musicians, they mastered these things with mutes to make them sound like a vocal. I worked on some of them like a laugh, cry, shout, sigh, different ones I try to put in there to make the music sound more human. And this particular piece that were were playing is about a person who has to learn a lesson that they don’t want to learn, so it’s like nature is mocking them. So we’re laughing. It’s just part of the vocal nature of jazz music, these techniques that people have been doing for a long time. Part of the vocabulary.
I wrote the song to have these effects in it, but on any given night, you never really know what you’re going to play. I guess if you had tapes of all the gigs, like two months of gigs, it would be shocking how different a lot of the music is, because you really play very differently. I really like improvisation, and I don’t like to play the same thing all the time. I like to play something totally different. Even if I’m playing New Orleans music, I don’t want to try to play like King Oliver played. First, you can’t do it. You’re not going to sound good. And I don’t like to just play triads. I try to play whatever I’m hearing. And that’s part of jazz music. That’s what it is.
The fact that you’re playing written music doesn’t make it less alive. That’s a part of the tradition of art that has existed forever. Something written down or re-creation, even when you go home to your parents and you tell a lie about the touchdown you didn’t score in the football game, that’s a re-creation. And it’s artistic. It’s just as artistic as the Iliad. There might have been 50 people fighting over a patch of grass as big as a football field. But when you read it, you think it’s all the armies in the world coming together. And there’s a tendency to scorn re-creation. Re-creation is an important part of life. But creation is too. So with jazz, you don’t have to make that type of choice. It’s not either-or. It’s both. You can re-create.
You can take a song like “My Funny Valentine,” a great version Miles Davis did of it in 1964, he could have just played the melody, had he wanted to. And I’m sure many nights that’s what he did. That particular night he didn’t. He completely recreated it. So it stands as a landmark in jazz. But that doesn’t mean the nights that he didn’t recreate it, it wasn’t beautiful.
QUESTION:
The 2s and 4s and 8s — why not 3s and 5s and 11s?
WYNTON MARSALIS:
Well in, in a lot of jazz, there’s 2s and 4s. But nowadays a lot of it is not 2s and 4s. Like in this piece I wrote, “Big Train,” there are a lot of 3s. We played on 5, 6, 5, 6, 5 bar phrases, 6 bar phrases, 3 bar phrases. It’s easy to hear the 4 and the 8 bar phrases because you’re used to hearing them.
But you know, in modern music, Stravinsky was writing 3-8 bars and stuff. And before him, the musicians had been putting these little odd bars, phrases and stuff. But the challenge is to improvise on it. If it’s somebody like me, I don’t necessarily even think that’s more. Some people believe the more dissonance you have, the more difficult it is to play on, the better it is. I don’t really believe that. I believe a triad can be great too. A four-bar phrase, nothing wrong with it if you’re dealing with it.
QUESTION:
If you’ve got a whole bunch of jazz musicians sitting around with an extraordinarily complex harmonic structure, the rhythm, what’s going to hold them together?
WYNTON MARSALIS:
If the harmonic structure’s very complex, that’s going to hold them together because they’re all going to be concentrating on making sure they don’t get lost in that form. If we have a complex harmonic form, once you get lost, you never find your way again because the harmony goes around in a circle. You could be two beats away from where it is, but once you can’t hear it, you will never hear it. You’re trying to hear the chords and the harmonies and it’s just going on, it’s not going to stop for you to figure out where it is. You hope somebody in the rhythm section will give you some big downbeat or something to say “man, you are lost.”
QUESTION:
So “Big Train” you wrote with very complex rhythms, but are the harmonies listenable? Because partly what you’re getting at is when it’s so inaccessible harmonically, audiences can’t hear it.
WYNTON MARSALIS:
Well, I think that a lot of times that was the direction 20th century music went in. Especially music out of the European tradition, and Americans just grafted onto it for no real reason, Just a feeling of intellectual inferiority maybe. That the whole question of unlistenable music. That’s a long debate I have a lot with a lot of my friends. And they have good points about the kind of music that I feel is inaccessible.
A lot of people like it. My personal feeling is, I don’t like stuff that has an elitist quality or a noisy quality. But a lot of people listen to my music and say that. So it depends on your point of reference. Each time I write a piece of music, I try to write a different way. I try to learn something through the process of writing. Something about composing, something about orchestration, something about form. I have general questions that I’m asking myself all the time. “What if I did this?” or “I wonder how this would sound.” And also, the compositions generally are done for specific people. “Big Train” was done for the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra: the one that’s together right now.
And I try to invent another form. That’s the first thing, that’s very important to me, is the form of the piece. And I tried to make it so that it is like the thing that I want it to be like. Not like something else. This is supposed to be like a train. I did “In this House on This Morning,” I wanted to be like a church service. Something like “Express Crossing” that we did with the New York City Ballet, I wanted that to be like an express train, or a piece that I did for the Chamber Music Society [of Lincoln Center] called “Come Along Fiddler,” I wanted it to be like what somebody would play in their house for you, if you came and they were just playing the fiddle.
That’s how “Big Train” is. To me, it’s one of my most accessible pieces, because it doesn’t have a lot of counterpoint in it. It’s not a lot of 6/4 and 5/4 meter changes. It’s very singable, and it’s a lot of train onomatopoeia. All kind of train whistles and sounds of a train and train bell is ringing, and I’m always trying to interpret that train sound a different way.
QUESTION:
Like the laughing.
WYNTON MARSALIS:
Right, a lot like the laughing and the mocking cries and stuff that was in “Back to Basics.”
QUESTION:
How do you separate making it sound like a train from writing a piece of music? I mean, you could have some train whistles on stage and sound exactly like a train.
WYNTON MARSALIS:
Well I want to make it sound how a train sounds to me. I’m a musician so I don’t want it to be too literal, but I want some literal things in there. I was reading this thing that Picasso said, that he likes to take something that’s very commonplace, that everybody knows, and put it in with something else that’s very abstract that nobody knows. Like that bull with the handle bars. Those handlebars could be bull horns too. And to me, that’s like the trombones. They could be on a train. Or the flute could be up there. The train is loud, but the train is soft too. You have many different cars on the train. You have the caboose. Then you have the feeling of the caboose. That caboose leaving, boy, that’s one of the softest things in the world. When you’re looking at a caboose from a long way away. First it’s the color, red it is. You know red, it could be loud, but it’s not. You never see a loud caboose. The caboose always is a certain type of red and when you see it going away from you, it gives you a feeling of nostalgia. And you don’t even know why. This is what I felt when I was growing up because I lived down the street from a railroad tracks.
You have the power of a train, and you have the whole romantic notion of a train. Like at night, the lights are on on a train. They pass you and you can see the people inside of the train. And you know, whenever you see some people inside somewhere even if you’re inside of the train, and you’re looking into people’s houses and a light is on and somebody’s in there, you always wonder, “I wonder what they’re doing in there.” It has a romantic type of feeling to it.
Then on the train you have the sleeper car too. And you have just the whole train lore. You have the Orient Express. You have the different metaphysical trains. The things like the underground railroad. You have the gospel train or the glory train.
The train is not really in movements. It’s more like — it’s like in cars. You have one car here like the engine. Then you have another car which is like the coal car. Then you have another car which is like the oil tanker. And you have another car which has corn in it. Each car has a different emotion in it. And some cars have the emotion of a child. Then in the middle of the train, you have the big thing of the engine, like the heart of the train is the drum. And it goes from the west to the east.
It starts off with Herlin playing kind of like a thing that I used to hear Art Blakey play all the time. But he interprets it his own way. And in the middle of it, he switches to this little drone thing, that’s like eastern. And I just went right from one to the other. From the west to the east. And in the middle he makes kind of the sound of that train on the tracks. So when I was writing it, I had to ask myself, well, do I want a lot of transitional material? I said no, it’s a train. There’s not a lot of transitional material in a train. It’s a train and a little thing and another train. Then a little thing and another train. And so the train is in the west and then all of a sudden, the train is in the east. When you’re in the east and you get on a train, it’s just like you’re on a train in the west.
QUESTION:
How much of the “Big Train” is actually written out?
WYNTON MARSALIS:
A lot of it is written and a lot of it is improvised. I started off immediately with a little written material and immediately a solo. Because I wanted to make it clear that the soloing itself is thematic material. It’s not something that existed and the solo was stuck in the middle of it. No, people soloing is a part of the train.
QUESTION:
But when you heard the solo in your mind as much as you could, you knew that it was a certain person.
WYNTON MARSALIS:
Yeah, I knew it was a certain person in this incarnation but I wrote it so that it could be any person playing on any section. Only certain sections have to be a certain instrument. I tried as much as possible to make it so that it didn’t have to be any particular instrument. But in some instances, like certain things about the wind and the air, it has to be a high instrument. And the drum solo in the beginning, it has to be drums. It can’t be trombone or something. And the piano solo has to be piano. But a lot of the other solos, it could be in any combination.
Source: PBS Live from Lincoln Center
