[Below, click Play button to begin Marsalis: Trumpet Concerto in E Flat Major: I – Allegro (Haydn) . While audio is playing, volume control appears at left — a row of little vertical bars. This clip is 6:20 long.]
These days the man concentrates, as far as I can tell, exclusively on jazz (recording, playing, mentoring, producing). But my first exposure to him was through his recordings of classical music.
Of course, I’d already decided to like trumpet — cf., the “Midweek Music Break” on Herb Alpert of a few weeks ago. But I can no longer remember how I stumbled on this Marsalis album. (He won a Grammy both for it and for a jazz release in 1983 — the first artist to pull that off.) I didn’t (as far as I know) know anyone who listened to classical music, and knew (know) almost nothing about it myself. Still, I loved it from his first note.
Sometimes, I like to imagine music as the soundtrack for a scene in a movie. In this case (Haydn’s Concerto in E Flat Major: I – Allegro), Marsalis’s trumpet — that instrument at once so bright, so sharp, so soft, so unambigous — seems to tell the story of some master artisan or craftsman who takes complete, speechless joy in every second spent with his avocation. Even the little off-the-script Marsalis improvisation which begins at about 5:05 or so, leading to the piece’s conclusion — even that seems to capture such a person in a flight of free-association fantasy as he stands back to consider how to add one last touch to his handiwork.
If you like it, too, feel free to enjoy the second (andante) and third (allegro) movements of the same concerto:
Look at that baby face in the album cover. That album’s liner notes, from a 1982 Newsweek profile called “Young Man with a Horn,” included this commentary about his jazz playing:
The most memorable appearance at the 1978 New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival was the most unexpected–a skinny kid with glasses and a trumpet who ambled onstage one day during the mid-afternoon lull, hiked up his horn and blew the top off the jazz tent. One minute he sounded like Dizzy Gillespie, unleashing torrents of sixteenth notes at blinding speed. The next he throttled down into the middle register in an imitation of Miles Davis cool: whoever this local kid was, he was going places.
He was all of twenty-one years of age when this album (his first classical one, and just his third overall) came out. Precocious much?
s.o.m.e.one's brudder says
I think that I may have mentioned this (maybe even here) before, that it was a Marsalis concert in June of 1988 brought me to unexpected tears. Maybe the timing brought them, as you would understand. I’ve described it as hearing this music with “Bud’s Ears”. I could easily have imagined him sitting and listening to this music and grabbing me as I walked through the living room and forcing me to listen: “Listen to this man, play!”. Thankfully, this is NOT how I was introduced to it. The same show was led off by Lionel Hampton, for whom I fully expected to have the tears flow. Nope – it was Marsalis.
Found the criticism in the Wiki piece to be interesting, since I pretty much enjoy the music of all of the above. Maybe those who can’t play have the flexibility of “appreciating” better? LOVE, Stanley Clarke, but get how he might find Marsalis kind of stilted. Not seen the Burns program to have a sense of any self-aggrandizement – just love to hear him play. Classical, Jazz, Classical-Jazz. I don’t know, but I know what I like.
John says
brudder: So good to see the return of the first person. [laughing, nervously]
I don’t know if I knew about that 1988 concert before but it sounds familiar. At that time, he’d embarked on his Standard Time series of albums — classic jazz and show tunes (“old standards”) influenced a great deal by his father, Ellis. I wonder if some of what happened at the concert you saw subconsciously mirrored that father-son stuff (and not just the music) playing in your head around then?
And yeah, I had the same response as you to the “Criticisms” section of the Wikipedia article. I don’t think it was necessarily, y’know, professional jealousy. Not that I know anything about WM’s speeches and pronouncements on jazz, but I can easily believe him to be primarily a jazz classicist rather than an innovator; much of the criticism seems to have come from those in the latter category. Not (as the saying goes) that there’s anything wrong with that…
(At Marsalis’s site — I think it was the liner notes I quoted above — it mentions that his first trumpet was a gift from Al Hirt. Another connection!)
Froog says
I have this album! Well, it’s in a friend’s barn in Oxfordshire, along with all the other relics of my former lives. I haven’t actually got to play very many of vinyl records for…. 18 years now.
I think this was one of my very earliest purchases. In high school, my record buying was exclusively classical; I was a bit averse to rock and pop back then, and hadn’t really had any exposure to jazz or anything else. Mostly I would just buy works I’d come to know from BBC Radio 3, although occasionally I might strike out on a random impulse to try to expand my horizons a bit – Oh, I really don’t know anything about Haydn. I ought to check this out.
It was only some years later that I discovered his jazz playing and the penny suddenly dropped – Oh, hey, this is that young black dude who played Haydn and Mozart!
Jayne says
Oh, yeah, when you see a kid bl0w the top off of a jazz tent, and is Miles Davis cool, you know you’re going to see him around for a long time.
I’ve loved that trumpet from the first moment I heard Louis and Dizzie. My parents had a lot of Chet Baker, too. :-)
John says
@Froog: I have a feeling that archaeologists will excavate that barn in another thousand years or so* and wonder how such a rich cultural trove ended up in a simple wooden structure. Clearly it must have been some kind of burial facility — like a pharaoh’s tomb, keeping its owner company in the next world. And yet the mummy itself has gone missing — hmm, must’ve been tomb raiders!
Even back in the old pre-Internet days, I picked up on new (to me) artists because someone I knew recommended them, or because of something I’d read in Rolling Stone, or (as you say) because I’d heard them on the radio or a film soundtrack (especially Kubrick’s). That was true of nearly all musical genres. But classical? No match on any of those possibilities, for 99% of what I eventually come to listen to and like. I had a girlfriend for a little while who was Gershwin-crazy, which led me in that direction (and thence to Copland, I’m pretty sure). And at some point I’d picked up on Switched-On Bach — probably for its novelty appeal.
But classical music in general? No idea. I don’t think I can even shrug in an “It must be fated!” way.
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* Who knows? They may even be led there by a copy of this comment exchange lying around on an old earthquake-battered hard drive in the remains of one of Google’s server farms. (They may even be Chinese archaeologists, and wouldn’t that be ironic?)
John says
@Jayne: My father was a drummer — not of the jazz, but of the drum-and-bugle-corps variety, yet drums in any case tended to be where he’d focus when listening to (and leading us through) the Big Bands. I knew the names of Buddy Rich and (especially) Gene Krupa well before Baker and even Harry James.
The stereotype in rock bands is that different personality types specialize in playing different instruments. (Like the psychological specialization of players in particular baseball positions.) Bass guitarists (so they say, but whadda I know?) tend to be more inner-driven, perhaps moodier, than lead guitarists, and so on. I think the same must be true in other musical genres. When I saw Krupa and Rich performing on TV, they seemed like such unhinged individuals. Maybe because drums and other percussion instruments were considered “background” to what the audience was clearly meant to listen to, these Big-Band drummers developed (or were born with) outsized personalities, and playing styles, which enabled them to stand out from their bandmates and from their counterparts in other groups.
No doubt to Dad’s chagrin, my attention, though, was always drawn to the frontmen. Brass frontmen especially — didn’t care much, for a long time, about woodwinds (clarinetists).
For many years — maybe still? — the NJ Jazz Society (I think it was called) used to host this annual summer weekend of mostly outdoor concerts, at a little historic village in the forested northwest part of the state. Roaming from tent to tent, some fans no doubt were drawn in a particular direction by the thump-thump-thumping of the ground from over that way. Some probably followed the vocalists’ voices, or the mellow notes of electric guitars and such. For me, though, the call of trumpets and trombones seemed to part the branches of trees and bushes, beckoning me thataway like the magical gestures of enchantresses.
Jayne says
@John – It’s hard to ignore horns. One of my brother’s played the French horn in H.S. and drove us all crazy. I sat in front of my son’s middle school band the other night (at honor’s night) and I was really amazed by what those kids were doing. I kept staring at the brass section, thinking my son, and daughter, need to start taking lessons (they’ve taken piano/guitar). Max w/the trumpet, and Lu, maybe a clarinet. I’m still working on my banjo. ;)
John says
@Jayne: When I was growing up, a kid who lived a block over — a few years older than I — was evidently taking trumpet lessons for a loooong time. Not that we ever, y’know, saw him playing… but it was impossible not to notice him on the neighborhood soundtrack.
Your comment over on the other thread about Old Crow Medicine Show got me trolling the Web for videos and such. I see that one of their members specializes in an instrument called the “guit-jo”!