Episode 1164 - Wynton Marsalis
Guest:Lock the gates!
Marc:Alright, let's do this.
Marc:How are you, what the fuckers?
Marc:What the fuck buddies?
Marc:What the fucksters?
Marc:What the fuck nicks?
Marc:What's happening?
Marc:I'm Mark Maron.
Marc:This is my podcast.
Marc:What day is it?
Marc:Where are we?
Marc:What year is it?
Marc:What is the truth?
Marc:What isn't?
Marc:What's happening?
Marc:How are you doing?
Marc:What's right in front of you?
Marc:Is what is right in front of you okay?
Marc:Is it okay right in front of you?
Marc:I hope so.
Marc:Because it's still pretty fucking gnarly in my head.
Marc:And down the road a piece.
Marc:Down the road a piece seems pretty fucking gnarly to me.
Marc:Hope you're voting.
Marc:Vote early.
Marc:Vote now.
Marc:Let's take a walk and put that ballot in the fucking mail.
Marc:Let's go.
Marc:Fill it out.
Marc:I'm going to stand here until you fill it out.
Marc:Do it.
Marc:So today, you're going to hear me talk to Wynton Marsalis.
Marc:I wouldn't say I was nervous, but he's like a music genius.
Marc:And also an encyclopedic music genius.
Marc:So I was, wasn't that I was nervous, just like there are things I need to know about jazz and I don't know about jazz.
Marc:I know about three things about jazz.
Marc:He knows everything about jazz.
Marc:And it was a little intimidating.
Marc:He's also, you know, he's the director of jazz at Lincoln Center, Pulitzer Prize winner.
Marc:He's won a million Grammys.
Marc:He got the National Medal of the Arts.
Marc:Comes from a family full of renowned jazz musicians.
Marc:And I'm like, yeah, Thelonious Monk's pretty good, right?
Marc:Thelonious Monk.
Marc:But it was an honor to talk to the guy.
Marc:And I listened to the hell out of his new record, man.
Marc:The Ever Funky Lowdown.
Marc:It's just one of these records.
Marc:It's like a masterpiece.
Yeah.
Marc:there's like three or four albums to it there's like 50 fucking riffs and songs and there's a narrative and there's poetry and it's like holy shit and i would never have seen it hadn't you know hadn't i been following him and been in friendly with the uh with the jazz at lincoln centered people you look at his discography he's done like 10 records a year for fuck's sake the guy does all these records i'm like where have i been
Marc:I've been collecting old records and having certain opinions about jazz based on I don't know what.
Marc:Winton is one of those guys, he's like too good.
Marc:He's like good at his own trip.
Marc:He's good at classical.
Marc:He can mimic people perfectly.
Marc:Just complete control of the instrument and his mind.
Marc:And I'm listening to this new record and it's like a fucking masterpiece.
Marc:And I'm like, are people going to know about the ever-funky lowdown?
Marc:The ever-funky... Funky?
Marc:It's how it's spelled, F-O-N, but funky...
Marc:i just was in that and the subjects he discusses are all relevant and he and his sources are are great sort of like the old time snake oil salesman and just you know folk stories and like fucking i it just it was one of those things where it's like wait why didn't i know about this well now i know i was happy i immersed myself in it and that i was able to uh
Marc:to talk about it and learn some things.
Marc:I looked to Wynton as a teacher, but he's a good guy, too.
Marc:He's a good guy.
Marc:And you're going to hear me talk to him soon.
Marc:So, if you haven't heard, Glow, the show Glow, is over.
Marc:They've stopped it.
Marc:You know, we were...
Marc:Two and a half episodes into shooting when the lockdown started and they kept pushing it down the road a piece.
Marc:And we were told that it's going to go.
Marc:We're going to do it.
Marc:Production is going to start in like March.
Marc:We'll probably be shooting in May.
Marc:And then a couple of days ago, they said, nope, it's done.
Marc:We're not doing it.
Marc:And yeah, I'm upset, but it's like we live in this fucking world.
Marc:There's like 15 people on that set and a lot of them are engaging all at once.
Marc:And they don't even quite understand this disease fully, let alone how to protect people from it in the way necessary to guarantee that we would even be able to do it in May.
Marc:I understand that.
Marc:Netflix's argument as to why they canceled it.
Marc:There was a lot of people that love the show over there, and there's a lot of you that love the show.
Marc:I get it, but it still hurts because the writers, Carly and Liz, had the final seasons laid out.
Marc:They know the story.
Marc:Part of me is like, why don't we make a movie down the line?
Marc:Why don't we just wrap it up with a two-hour Netflix movie?
Marc:I suggested that.
Marc:And people started tweeting about it and talking about it.
Marc:And then the head of Netflix, he emailed me, explained what was up.
Marc:He just basically said, we can't, you don't know when we can do it safely.
Marc:Yeah, I get it.
Marc:I get the business side of it.
Marc:I get the safety side of it.
Marc:I mean, this year has just been fucked up.
Marc:You know, I lost two cats.
Marc:I lost a girlfriend.
Marc:I lost my stand-up job.
Marc:I lost a glow job.
Marc:I'm okay.
Marc:But it's a bit much.
Marc:We might lose the country.
Marc:It's fucking a lot.
Marc:It's a lot.
Marc:And it was weird.
Marc:You know, when I talked about that the other day, about when the monster was in the hospital, and I personally had a certain sense of relief because I wasn't being assaulted and didn't feel like there was, you know, stepdaddy chaos everywhere.
Marc:And...
Marc:And he's back.
Marc:I just like he is instinctually authoritarian.
Marc:And so and the chaos he creates is intentional.
Marc:And the way it trickles down is intentional.
Marc:And, you know, the supplicants, enablers, grifters, small timers, short money people, conspiracy theorists, angry fascist freaks.
Marc:You know, all of them just, you know, follow in line and do their part to sort of disassemble, aggressively disassemble any sense of reality or truth to the point where, look, you know, lefties were no stranger to the conspiracy.
Marc:I mean, fuck, we invented deep state.
Marc:The lefties invented deep state and we had, you know, we were all disappointed that it turns out it doesn't exist because they didn't show up to take care of this.
Marc:All the more modern conspiracies from the 60s, a lot of them were kind of left-leaning.
Marc:The old-timey ones, like Zog and Illuminati stuff, that's been around a long time, and that was mostly Christian demonization of the Jews.
Marc:But, point being, as these elaborate mythologies kind of...
Marc:And grow malignantly as they are added on to by dumb people who like to connect dots and sort of make equations out of random facts, tie them together and call it truth and then throw in some mystical hokum.
Marc:And some religiosity.
Marc:And then, you know, they just sort of let that cradle in their dumb noggins.
Marc:And they're like, I got it.
Marc:I got the whole package.
Marc:I got the truth.
Marc:I know what's going on.
Marc:I know where it's heading.
Marc:You don't.
Marc:But the problem is, is that once it becomes a slippery slope or kind of a mushy middle zone of what is real and what isn't and who you can trust with the truth and who you can't, then all of a sudden everybody just is sort of like, who knows?
Marc:Who knows?
Marc:So you have no you're not tethered to a grounded reality anymore or a sense of order or truth or process context.
Marc:And you just kind of go through your life not believing any of that matters.
Marc:And you focus on your task at hand and you kind of like your brain goes a little dead in that area and you just take what they give you.
Marc:That's the plan.
Marc:That's the way authoritarianism works.
Marc:It's too much out there.
Marc:I just, you know, I don't know how everybody partakes in it so aggressively.
Marc:I can't take it.
Marc:So I'm sorry about GLOW.
Marc:I do have a couple of other things happening the last few projects that are going to be available of me.
Marc:are these movies I did.
Marc:Respect, the Aretha Franklin flick with Jennifer Hudson and Stardust, the David Bowie flick with Johnny Flynn.
Marc:I mean, I will give you more information on that stuff as I get it.
Marc:I'm trying to keep you in the loop.
Marc:I really am.
Marc:I really am.
Marc:My hand is okay.
Marc:I was a little paranoid.
Marc:I didn't get the chronic diarrhea disease from the antibiotics.
Marc:There's still a little tenderness deep in the tendon, which I hope doesn't flare up in some way.
Marc:And I lose my thumb.
Marc:But the bite is okay.
Marc:But it was pretty fucking overwhelming, man.
Marc:And it took me a while to accept Buster again as a friend.
Marc:It's hard to accept your friend when they bite your hand and cause an infection.
Marc:That makes you sick.
Marc:Like if your friend did that to you, would you would you right away be like, hey, pal, what's up?
Marc:I can only pet you with this one hand.
Marc:But I guess that's what you get when you own animals.
Marc:OK, so listen, I listened to a lot of Winton before I did this.
Marc:And there is a lot of Winton to listen to.
Marc:And I read some stuff.
Marc:But he's a you know, he is a giant.
Marc:In the world of jazz, he's a giant in the world of making sure that jazz survives and is understood and is taught and is appreciated and enjoyed almost all kinds of jazz.
Marc:Let's say all.
Marc:But I do believe there are some he likes better than others.
Marc:Really, it was an honor to talk to this guy.
Marc:As I mentioned earlier, his latest composition is called The Ever Funky Lowdown.
Marc:You can call it an opera or a polemic or a performance art.
Marc:Whatever you call it, you can get it at store.jazz.org.
Marc:And this is me talking to the amazing Wynton Marsalis.
Ooh.
Marc:You look good, man.
Marc:How are you feeling, Wynton?
Guest:Good, man.
Guest:How you been?
Marc:I'm hanging in.
Marc:Interesting time.
Marc:I got to tell you something, man.
Marc:You know, I've been wanting to talk to you for a while, and I'm not a music journalist or anything, but I'm a music lover, and I've spent some time in the last few years trying to understand and get engaged with jazz music.
Marc:But when they sent me this thing, the ever-funky Lowdown, and I was like, what is this thing?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And when I listened to it and I was like, holy shit, what the fuck is happening?
Marc:He's getting it all in.
Marc:It's all in one dark piece.
Marc:I mean, what possessed?
Marc:I don't even know how to describe it.
Marc:Is it an opera?
Marc:What is it?
Guest:No, it's just a story.
Guest:It's a game.
Guest:You know, it's a story.
Guest:It's a game with a satirical character.
Guest:And the music is just all kind of stuff that I grew up playing.
Marc:But I mean, but it's deep, man.
Marc:I mean, I get it.
Marc:I get that the pitch is it's a game and you've got Mr. Game and you've got this satire.
Marc:But I mean, you're selling it a little short by just saying, yeah, it's not like a fun record, right?
Guest:No, it's stuff that I learned across all these years just about people, about human beings.
Guest:Because I've toured for 40 years now and because I taught in so many schools all over the United States and I stay after every gig.
Guest:So I meet parents and kids starting in 1980.
Guest:So you figure it's 2020 now.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I'm afraid to fly.
Guest:So I also drive everywhere.
Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I've met so many people and their kids in so many states and places really all over the world.
Guest:But let's let's just say, especially in the United States, a lot of stuff becomes clear to me when I hear people talk to each other.
Guest:And when people talk about other people, my father used to always have a thing.
Guest:He hated for you to call a group of people.
Guest:They.
Guest:So that's why the second movement of this is called they.
Guest:He would say, hey, man, who is they?
Guest:Do you know them?
Guest:Have you met them?
Guest:Have you sat down with them?
Guest:Have you talked with them?
Guest:Because he grew up in very strict segregation.
Guest:And so it's really the things in the Ever Funky Lowdown are just things that I have observed and know about our country.
Guest:And of all the long pieces I've written, this is the one that I did the least amount of musical research for, because a lot of the styles are styles that I grew up playing.
Guest:And so far as the story goes, it's just what's apparent about about what goes on.
Marc:Well, yeah, well, it's right.
Marc:It's about America, but it's also about power.
Marc:It's about money.
Marc:It's about the black experience.
Marc:But then you sort of build from that and you talk about freedom in a general sense, how it relates to technology and what that means, what is freedom.
Marc:So, I mean, these are and this character is this sort of snake oil salesman, huckster, con man, president.
Marc:You know what?
Marc:Whatever, you know, you're going to call this guy.
Marc:It's sort of the dark trickster that runs through history.
Marc:And however you want to look at it, steals people's souls and sells them back to them.
Marc:I mean, you captured it.
Guest:That's what he does.
Guest:You know, he comes in many forms like you and I. We're the age where you remember Oral Roberts, Reverend Ike.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:The 1970s.
Guest:And it's a combination of many people, different rhetoric.
Guest:We've heard from different United States presidents, stuff, a game that Julius Caesar ran, stuff that Hitler used.
Guest:It's all the kind of differentiation between people.
Guest:And it goes all the way back to the beginning.
Guest:You know, Cain noticed Abel was different from him.
Guest:Right.
Guest:You can go in any tradition you want to go in.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And then the question becomes, well...
Guest:what's wrong with me?
Guest:There was something that's wrong with these people.
Guest:Especially, you know, this in the schoolyard, the bullies or the cool people or the this or the that.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You know, I was lucky growing up because I'd never really dealt with anything being messed with.
Guest:I mean, I grew up, there was a lot of fighting and ignorance, but I was always able to handle business enough to not be in the group
Guest:That was messed with.
Guest:But when we became integrated after Martin Luther King was killed, you had to deal with stuff, you know.
Guest:And it was always interesting to me who the kids would pick to be an outsider if they weren't black.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And it was always some strange kind of thing.
Guest:They would they would figure out who it was.
Marc:And it was always a kid that that was just different and probably couldn't protect himself.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Right.
Guest:God helped him.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:And, you know, if they couldn't protect themselves, God help them.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And they just were relentlessly bullied.
Marc:For no reason.
Marc:Just because they were weird.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Right.
Guest:So, you know, it was interesting because if you were black, if you were at that time where I was from, if you were black, you were such an outsider, you didn't even qualify for that.
Guest:It was just...
Guest:Like you had to deal with another equation.
Marc:Right.
Marc:But at least in that equation, you had peers, you had other black people, you had friends.
Marc:Usually they picked the one guy that was just too odd and didn't fit in.
Marc:And he had nowhere to go.
Guest:Man, in this case of this school, it was a girl.
Marc:Oh.
Guest:And man, they picked on this girl.
Guest:I was just relentless.
Guest:And I just remember thinking, man, you know,
Guest:Why?
Guest:And then it extends to groups of people and it extends.
Guest:Then as you grow older, you start to notice as the stakes get higher and higher.
Guest:But with Mr. Game, he's pulling the double switcher.
Guest:So it's like what you said.
Guest:He brings you in close to him so he can stab you while he has you looking at somebody else.
Guest:Then he sends you out with that wound and you still feel connected to him.
Marc:That's right.
Marc:And he also switches your brain to believe that he's helping or he's doing something good.
Marc:I like to focus.
Marc:I mean, you really it's so it's so ambitious.
Marc:The libretto, you know, which I had to read a couple of times because I listened to the album a couple of times.
Marc:It must be.
Marc:I mean, is it going to be released on CD or vinyl?
Marc:Because it must be nine records.
Marc:I mean, it's like.
Yeah.
Guest:That's the curse that was put on me.
Guest:I'm always writing long pieces.
Guest:I don't know why they're that long, man.
Guest:Come on.
Guest:There's like 55 tracks on this thing.
Guest:They're always like that.
Guest:I don't set out to make them like that.
Guest:Blood on the Fields was three CDs.
Guest:All Rise was an hour and a half.
Marc:Congo Square was two hours.
Marc:I don't even know how long this was.
Marc:But the thing is, there's a narrative, there's an arc, there are these setups of these... It's broken into, what, four...
Marc:What is it?
Marc:Four games?
Marc:Not four games.
Marc:Four prizes.
Marc:Four prizes.
Guest:Seven objectives and five prizes.
Guest:Five prizes.
Guest:Yeah, the seven objectives are what you have to believe in order for you to qualify for the prizes.
Marc:And those seven objectives, yeah, it's a way that the seven objectives, if you work through them, are just you annihilating your sense of self and ego in order to play along with the game.
Guest:That's right.
Guest:It's like it's like being a part of a game.
Marc:But really is about, you know, sort of exploring the idea of power and the idea of freedom in relation to, you know, I think the core of it, it seems to be the black experience.
Marc:But then, you know, the overarching of it is all of our experience.
Marc:It's about commodification.
Guest:You know, the truth is, it's the white experience.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:If you really check out Mr. Game is not talking to black people.
Guest:He's talking to white people.
Guest:He's talking to the white Americans.
Marc:Right, right, right.
Guest:And, you know, I was in that first generation that was really integrated, more or less.
Guest:We weren't really integrated, but, you know, I was in that kind of throat period.
Guest:It was really tough.
Guest:My parents were completely segregated.
Marc:Now, you grew up in New Orleans, right?
Guest:I grew up outside of New Orleans.
Guest:It's Kenner, Lil Farms, Browbridge, Towns.
Guest:We moved to New Orleans when I was 12.
Guest:How many kids?
Marc:Six kids.
Marc:And your parents.
Marc:And your dad was a musician and teacher.
Marc:My dad and my mom.
Marc:You know, dad's a musician, jazz musician.
Marc:And you remember, you have real memories of when it was integrated.
Guest:Man, I remember every... Yeah, I remember all about it.
Guest:I remember when King was killed.
Guest:I remember a lot of... After 1966, I can remember.
Guest:First concert I went to was James Brown at the Municipal Auditorium, 1967.
Guest:I can remember that concert.
Marc:That was good, right?
Guest:I remember going to all-black school, then going to all-white school.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:JB at that time?
Guest:Yeah, man.
Guest:You can't even... You can't describe what it was like to be in that kind of community and then
Guest:No, man.
Marc:Just hearing people screaming, fainting, screaming.
Guest:And if you're young, I was six.
Guest:I can remember the shoes I had on.
Guest:You know, just it was a communal thing.
Guest:It was cathartic.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:So, OK, so you black schools, white schools.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Just the whole the whole intensity of everything and the kind of hatred and the anger about it.
Guest:And you going and dealing with a.
Guest:with a situation.
Guest:It was a situation you had to deal with.
Guest:And it wasn't a, I don't talk about it a lot.
Guest:People talk about these kinds of things, but in the, in the, in the ever funky, I realized that my white students I went to school were being gained.
Guest:So it's always kind of when a black person is talking, there's always something about what was done to us.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:No, that's obvious.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But there's something being done to a huge, a huge segment of the United States population.
Guest:And they're being gained in an unbelievable way.
Guest:And it continues to work.
Guest:And over the years, I always wonder, how long is this going to work?
Guest:If you fought for the Confederate Army in the Civil War, you didn't have a plantation.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You're just a guy out there dying for something.
Guest:For what reason?
Guest:To keep another person who you weren't even able to have the benefit of making money off of them?
Guest:And that continues to today.
Guest:I've seen it my entire adult life.
Guest:If it's not Willie Harden, it's something else.
Guest:Now it's the 400 people in Chicago who looted.
Guest:It's always something, man.
Guest:There will be 280 million people looking for a thousand.
Guest:It's just stupid.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Do you remember the day that your brain shifted into realizing that they were being gamed?
Guest:Oh, yeah, I remember.
Guest:Yeah, I remember it.
Marc:What was the incident?
Guest:Well, I was going to school, and the school was so prejudiced, the kids couldn't help it, man.
Guest:They were ignorant.
Guest:They were in the South.
Guest:Nobody had money.
Guest:And a girl came who was not from Louisiana.
Guest:She wasn't prejudiced toward me like the other kids.
Guest:So I just asked her, why you don't have the same hatred that these other people had?
Guest:And she said, oh, I'm from Montana.
Guest:We hate Indians there.
Guest:So...
Guest:I remember thinking, damn.
Guest:And then as we were going through schools, I always made pretty good grades.
Guest:At one point, I had another kid in our class tell me, he said, well, I think you're just as good as me.
Guest:I said, do you think I think that you're as good as me?
Guest:If he looked at me, we both started to laugh because everything was not... You always hear about fights and battles.
Guest:Yeah, we had them.
Guest:We knuckled up.
Guest:We had a lot of negativity, man.
Guest:We had fights.
Guest:We had a lot of stuff that I could tell you about.
Guest:You'll be good stories.
Guest:But we also laughed at stuff, too.
Guest:And when I told when I asked him that, we both started laughing and I teased him.
Guest:I said, you need to pick that math grade up.
Guest:And, you know, we became men.
Guest:We laughed about it later.
Guest:We remember that a lot of us, we got older.
Guest:We remember all of these things that happened when we were kids and we didn't have a sense of the world.
Guest:So, yeah, then by the time I was in sixth or seventh grade, I started to think about it.
Guest:You know, it's a game being run on people.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Because when you just because when you have those moments of laughter and connection and you sort of see past that the sort of black, white, left, right thing, you realize, like, well, we're all people.
Marc:Why is this working?
Marc:Why does this guy walk away with a different point of view?
Guest:Right, and you know, you fall into systems.
Guest:And with my friends that I've had since that time, now we're middle-aged.
Guest:We have kids that are grown.
Guest:White kids, people that I knew when we were kids, we say to each other as we've gotten older, man, can you believe this shit is still like this?
Guest:And the nature of our conversations are very natural and real.
Guest:It's basically like people who know each other.
Guest:It's not demographic conversation.
Guest:And I've always been very clear about my positions, too, about black and white issues.
Guest:I've never had that kind of handkerchief head.
Guest:Everything is cool.
Guest:I'm just going to smile my way through this.
Guest:I was never that type of person.
Guest:And they know me to not be that way.
Guest:And it liberated them to not have to fall into a role, too.
Guest:Right.
Guest:So I think a lot of what's in the ever funky is that kind of hustle is run on on on them.
Marc:But it's so well thought out and sort of lyrically played through.
Marc:I mean, the libretto itself is like 12 pages and it's tight and, you know, it's very specific in a way.
Marc:And there is a humor to it.
Marc:because of this character.
Marc:But the insights around technology and around freedom and around enslavement and around power and money, I mean, this seems like almost like a life's work.
Marc:I mean, I don't know a lot of the stuff you've done, but this seems to utilize this satirical character, this dark clown at the core of this thing to really sort of
Marc:Honing in on this stuff in a very specific and aggressive way was a great device.
Marc:And how long did it take you to... What was the inspiration for that guy?
Guest:You know, it didn't take long.
Guest:It's just a...
Guest:I mean, I grew up in the era where we were always teasing and joking and rhyming.
Guest:I mean, that's what we did in New Orleans.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And, you know, all the characters like Dolomite and the stuff in the 70s.
Guest:I mean, it's silly, but it was just what we would do.
Guest:Stagger Lee, all those stories, the great Titanic, you know, Petey Weedstraw.
Guest:There's things that we've memorized as kids.
Guest:And my little brother, Ellis, we call him the Oracle.
Guest:He and I have talked about this kind of stuff literally for 30 years.
Guest:He's the type of person who reads his studies all the time.
Guest:So he reads so much and studies so much that I started writing down stuff when I would talk to him.
Guest:His nickname is Lutte.
Guest:So I called him the oracle.
Guest:I would call him, look.
Guest:I said, look, tell me about this or that.
Guest:And look, I start talking.
Guest:I start writing stuff down.
Guest:And then all of my long pieces have like a kind of core or a thing that I'm trying to say about our central humanity.
Guest:I think this is most connected to a piece I wrote in 1999 entitled All Rise.
Guest:And All Rise was about all of the kind of nations of the world coming together to speak a common language.
Guest:And I was dealing with kind of claves and things that we all have in common.
Guest:We had a big choir, and it was with us in the New York Philharmonic and the Morgan State Choir.
Guest:And we later recorded it right after 9-11.
Guest:We were actually the first group to start playing a live concert after 9-11 with the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the Jazz Lakers Center Orchestra and a combined Northridge State Choir and the Morgan State Choir.
Guest:And so this piece is connected to that.
Guest:It's just this is more more focused and localized.
Marc:And I guess it's more satiric.
Guest:Yeah, it's the most satirical.
Guest:Well, I had another one called From the Plantation to the Penitentiary that I did in 2007, but that was for a small band.
Guest:That has a lot of satire in it, but not like this is a person talking.
Guest:So, you know, he's a carnival barker.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But, you know, now the stuff that's going on, and I always say it's not just the president.
Yeah.
Guest:The stuff that has been going on for a long time now is actually so satirical itself.
Guest:The truth is so that it's almost hard to make a satire because people think you're being for real.
Marc:Right.
Marc:The farce has become not funny.
Guest:Right.
Guest:It's like, wait, did this really happen?
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Marc:No, man.
Marc:No, it didn't happen.
Marc:I don't know.
Marc:It sounds like it could have happened.
Marc:No, man, I made that up.
Guest:No, it happened.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You know, my little brother calls it anti-reason.
Marc:Anti-reason.
Guest:He says, you know, anti-reason is always fighting with reason.
Guest:He said you got to be careful with anti-reason because once you start to defend anti-reason, you find yourself on the backside of your position.
Guest:So you become more addicted to anti-reason than your own health and safety.
Marc:And also, well, yeah, and also sort of like it's a perception cancer.
Marc:Like, you know, like if you lock into anti-reason, you'll disable your ability to see any sort of truth.
Marc:That's right.
Marc:Your acuity.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Your acuity suffers, yeah.
Marc:Well, the thing is, this guy's a carnival barker, but he's also letting you in on the trick, which is the ever-funky lowdown, the breakdown of all of these systems that you talk about.
Marc:When you get to the bottom line, he's revealing the secrets.
Guest:Right.
Guest:He turns around like his thing is he's run this game for millennia.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And he thought he thought this group of people was going to be different.
Guest:So in the end, he got angry and he said he's so tough because he gave you a wild card.
Guest:He gave you something to help you defeat the game.
Guest:And you still you didn't even remember who the wild card was like it didn't do any good.
Guest:So he got angry and he said, listen, this game is not even about them.
Guest:So he says, I gave you all a clue.
Guest:Now I'm just reveal the game.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And so he flips around from being kind of an anti-hero that just he couldn't take it.
Guest:He couldn't take another iteration of the game.
Marc:Well, ultimately, what it comes down to is that you earn the right to do nothing.
Guest:Right.
Marc:We're going to take care of everything for you.
Marc:And you just sit there.
Marc:You just sit there like a dummy and eat your ice cream and watch your thing.
Marc:Right.
Marc:That's right.
Marc:You only do things that will benefit you.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Right.
Guest:I read that in a speech that Abraham Lincoln did.
Guest:gave, it's actually in the Lincoln-Douglas debates, where he was talking about the perils of democracy, that people would only do things that, at the end of this paragraph, he says, he used the word self-interest, that people would get to a point where they only serve their self-interest.
Guest:So that's actually where that concept came from.
Marc:Well, it's interesting.
Marc:I realize that now, you know, that the idea of tolerance and the idea of empathy are choices, right?
Marc:Right.
Marc:I mean, you can be naturally empathetic, but that doesn't mean you have to honor it.
Marc:And, you know, you and tolerance and without tolerance, democracy doesn't work.
Guest:Well, without without without an overview and an embrace, you know, like when I went to school, I remember I would always if you called me a name, I was going to fight you.
Guest:So I got in a lot of scrapes.
Guest:But this is not a movie.
Guest:So one person is not really going to beat five or you're not.
Guest:Yeah, you're not.
Guest:You're going to.
Guest:So at one point, after two or three years of that, one of the people in my class, one of the big guy in our class, he's a German guy named John, he said, man, you're going to fight everybody?
Guest:I said, if they use the N word on me, yeah.
Guest:And there's the South in the 60s, people you say, early 70s.
Guest:He said, next time they jump on you, I'm jumping in too.
Guest:And the next time, he did jump in.
Guest:So it was just something you couldn't predict.
Marc:Was he on your side or the other side?
Guest:He was on my side.
Guest:He jumped in with me.
Guest:But hey, I had accepted.
Guest:I had accepted.
Guest:It wasn't...
Guest:After you accept you got to do something, you do it.
Marc:Yeah, well, that's something that Mr. Game repeats a lot.
Marc:What was it when you do something?
Marc:What is it?
Guest:What you do is what you will do, and that you do makes it true.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:What is that?
Guest:That you?
Guest:What you do...
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:What you do is what you will do.
Guest:Like when you do something, you're going to do it.
Guest:And that you do, it makes it true.
Guest:That's come from a friend of mine that's a police officer in Chicago.
Guest:He's retired now.
Guest:I was the best man in his wedding.
Guest:He told me he hate to go on domestic violence calls.
Guest:He said he will go into a home and it'd be like a brother killed another brother or a husband and a wife or a wife.
Guest:And he said, and almost every time he would walk into that home,
Guest:He would tell them they would be almost in shock.
Guest:He would say, man, you committed a crime.
Guest:You know, you killed them.
Guest:You see, you have to bring them back to earth.
Guest:He said, and they would always say, but I was just, but it was just, like, they didn't understand.
Guest:Like, sometimes the rage would overwhelm them as the mess of years of anger builds up.
Guest:And I was always struck by how he, because he would reenact it.
Guest:He had seen it, of course, tens, if not hundreds of times.
Guest:And he said that he would have to bring them into the reality of the moment.
Guest:So that's why I have Mr. Game say that you do makes it true.
Guest:Like, you know, when you when you act on something, it becomes even if it's not real.
Guest:Even if like even if Adolf Hitler said Jewish people had tails or they did this or they did that.
Guest:None of that is true.
Guest:But you killing them and putting them in concentration camps, that's true.
Guest:You putting people on ships and boats, selling them, sleeping with women who you owned, all the things you did, maybe none of why you did it was true, but that you did it is true.
Guest:So that's what Mr. Game is trying to tell you.
Guest:He's trying to bond you to him.
Marc:Right.
Marc:And I thought that the section on the record that I really got, like, there's a couple pieces that really stood out to me.
Marc:The stuff you wrote in the libretto about...
Marc:causing division within the domestic situation, the death of romance, the death of intimacy in the name of... It wasn't property.
Marc:Transaction.
Marc:Transaction.
Marc:I thought that was great.
Marc:But what I really liked was I can see the whole history of how you play music on these records.
Marc:I can see all of it.
Marc:I don't know if I can identify the classical so much, but it was...
Marc:But what was interesting to me was that the yes, no, when you get to yes, no, that was the only time it was specifically like fucking bebop, right?
Marc:Like, you know, you're doing that thing, that back and forth, like that argument with doing those, blasting those kind of hard bop riffs and shit.
Marc:And I was like, oh, there's that.
Marc:That was the only time on the record.
Guest:Well, you know, the music is a counterbalance to the word.
Guest:And with the orchestra, we play so much music.
Guest:That's actually a lot of improvisers.
Guest:Ted Nash is playing the alto and Chris Crenshaw is playing the trombone.
Guest:So I got them.
Guest:We in the background playing these kind of violent hits and this chord progression.
Guest:And him and Chris, they're going for their thing.
Guest:And they both have a very, very kind of free way of playing, a way of hearing music.
Guest:So they were perfect for that argument.
Guest:All I had to do was say fight.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:They got into their thing.
Marc:Right.
Marc:But it just felt structurally that was one of the looser parts.
Marc:Is that possible?
Marc:Yeah, in terms of the music, yeah.
Marc:That was like definitely, you know, yeah, no question.
Marc:Well, I mean, but I guess what I'm trying to figure out about you is the decision, because you started as a classical musician, right?
Guest:No, I started playing jazz and funk.
Guest:I mean, my dad is a jazz musician.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And I'm from New Orleans, so I started playing just tunes, like jazz tunes.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And the first band I played in was Fairview Baptist Church Marching Band when I was eight.
Guest:We played stuff like Just a Close Walk with Dee.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Just a Little Wilder Stay Here.
Guest:You know, New Orleans tunes.
Guest:Then the second gig, real gig I played was of all kind of pop music at an elementary school dance when I was 11.
Guest:And that was stuff that was on the radio, Stevie Wonder.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:And then...
Guest:You know, I was always trying to play modern jazz.
Guest:Then I met a guy who turned me on to a classical record and I won a concerto competition to play the Haydn trumpet concerto.
Guest:Then I was 14.
Guest:But during that time, I was playing funk gigs.
Guest:I joined a funk band when I was just turned 13.
Guest:And I was always trying to play with my father.
Guest:I mean, we just couldn't play good enough.
Guest:We always sitting in with it, but jazz was too hard for us to play.
Guest:But my brother, grandfather, and I, we still would get out there and try.
Guest:To play with your jazz band?
Guest:Oh, man, we always trying to play with it, but we couldn't.
Guest:The changes and stuff were beyond us.
Marc:What kind of stuff was he playing, your dad?
Guest:He wrote a lot of music.
Guest:James Black, great drummer from New Orleans.
Guest:A lot of their music is in the ever-funky lowdown.
Marc:Oh, yeah?
Guest:They had their own original tunes, and they played any tune in the jazz, like stuff that...
Guest:I remember the first song he ever wrote out for me was Someday My Prince Will Come.
Guest:He wrote out Miles' solo.
Guest:He said, man, check this solo out.
Guest:And man, just the changes.
Guest:If you don't know how to play on chords, man, that stuff.
Guest:Vols Hot, Sonny Rollins.
Guest:Charlie Parker's material like Confirmation, John Coltrane, Giant Steps, Countdown, real difficult song to play.
Guest:You know, all the stuff in the jazz canon, my father and them were always planted to a very limited audience.
Guest:I would go to his gigs all the time.
Guest:There was never a lot of people at him.
Guest:But he and Alvin Batiste, they were... Did that make you sad?
Guest:No, because I grew up seeing that.
Guest:I mean, I knew people didn't like that style of music.
Guest:So I thought, man, they believe in this music.
Guest:And they didn't complain about it that much.
Guest:I mean, my father, he believed in the music.
Guest:And then when I got older, I would ask him, man, you ever think about playing something people want to hear?
Guest:He said, man, then I'd be sounding like y'all.
Guest:He was never bitter about it, you know.
Guest:And I would tease him a lot.
Guest:Like when he played the piano, he played the piano once in the high regency.
Guest:And people would just talk over him.
Guest:So maybe I was 15 or 16.
Guest:And, you know, I was playing gigs like a professional probably at that time.
Guest:And I sat on the stool with him at the piano.
Guest:I looked at him.
Guest:I said, man, you don't get tired of people
Guest:Talking all over you when you when you playing, you're just not listening to nothing you playing.
Guest:He looked over me while he kept playing.
Guest:He said, do you get tired of eating?
Guest:Like, man, this is paying for you to eat your food.
Guest:You better shut up and sit here.
Guest:And so, you know, my dad, he was funny like that.
Marc:What do you think it was like, you know, when you think about it, because I mean, that that really is the thing about the journey of jazz for some people, because it did remain relatively unpopular during large chunks of time.
Marc:So the people that were playing it must have had like what you said, a belief in it.
Marc:But they were on some sort of journey.
Marc:I mean, what is it?
Guest:Well, you have to have education to understand the music.
Guest:I grew up with it.
Guest:I didn't like it.
Guest:It's just they understood the implication of music, the spirituality of it.
Guest:And as a group activity, man, playing jazz is the most cathartic thing if you've got a good swing and rhythm section.
Guest:Because you're creating these ideas and they just keep going and other people in the group are developing them.
Guest:But if you're an audience member and you don't
Guest:You're used to listening to kind of stuff on the radio.
Guest:You might be hearing 30 seconds of music repeated over and over again.
Guest:Man, to sit through 10 minutes of it, that's a lot.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Because I sat through many nights of hearing them play being like, damn, what are they playing?
Guest:But something happens that you hear it one day.
Guest:Right.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Do you remember what was it?
Marc:When did you hear it?
Guest:You know, I think I was like 11, going into 12.
Guest:And me and my brother were joking about the fact that the people on our albums had on wild costumes and looked stupid.
Guest:And the people on our daddy's albums had on suits and stuff.
Guest:They looked like they had sense.
Guest:We were just laughing and playing.
Guest:So we put on one of the record's giant steps.
Guest:I thought, man, you know, that's like the first time.
Guest:Because my father had a picture of him with Coltrane and James Black on the wall.
Guest:And they love Trane.
Guest:Trane had come to hear them play in the 1960s, 1962.
Guest:So he had a picture of them with Trane.
Guest:And I know how much they respect the Trane.
Guest:So Trane was dead by this time.
Guest:So I said, man, I'm going to put that record on.
Guest:The next day I put Trane, I'll put Giant Steps on.
Guest:And, you know, I started liking it.
Guest:I said, wow.
Guest:Then I started to listen to Train Play with Miles.
Guest:I listened to Miles' record.
Guest:Miles started with Dizzy.
Guest:I checked out Dizzy's record.
Guest:And then I met Dizzy.
Guest:So then all the people I kind of knew from being around my daddy, whenever people come to New Orleans, they play with him.
Guest:And
Guest:Then from there, I kind of, I got into the music.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:From there, I got into the music.
Guest:And I started to be kind of obsessed with it.
Guest:Then I started wondering if I could learn how to play it.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Because the kind of music we was playing that we called jazz wasn't really jazz.
Guest:It was like instrumental pop music and funk, which I liked playing.
Guest:I had a great time.
Guest:But I still was wondering, I wonder if I could play, you know, with the same kind of thing like with Clifford Brown and they play with her.
Guest:You know, and that's what started me kind of on the path of,
Guest:of trying to learn how to play the music.
Marc:So it was like you knew you had to study it.
Marc:There was no question about that.
Guest:I mean, you didn't think you were going to make money studying it, but you knew.
Guest:You weren't going to play it.
Guest:Even my daddy, I would go sit in with him sometimes, and I had learned how to circular breathe.
Guest:That's where you can go and just never stop playing.
Guest:And man, I'd do my circular breathing thing, and I would go into my thing and do my couch, and I had to do my funk gigs.
Guest:And all the people just erupt in applause.
Guest:You know, I hold a note for two minutes.
Guest:My daddy called me over the piano.
Guest:Come here, man.
Guest:I come over there.
Guest:I'd be like, yeah, man, you're in that solo.
Guest:And he said, hey, man, the circus is down the street.
Guest:He would just doubt me, man.
Guest:But I would have to laugh because I know he was right.
Marc:You know, he was getting on you because you were just showing off.
Guest:Play some music, man.
Marc:We're not up there doing that.
Marc:You're not playing nothing.
Marc:So what would determine to him what would be playing music?
Marc:What determines that?
Guest:You're creating themes.
Guest:You have development.
Guest:You're hearing your way through chord changes.
Guest:You're interacting with the group.
Guest:You're doing all of that.
Guest:You're getting into all of that.
Guest:And you're concentrating on what you're playing.
Guest:You're trying to touch people with the depth of what you're saying rather than a kind of
Guest:external kind of kind of things like he called it the shiny suit you don't put the shiny suit on you plug it in and the lights go on people said wow look at those lights he was more just uh he was basic like communicate with people man they will follow you if you keep communicating with them but then I would tease him and say well dig you ain't communicate with them because they don't come out to see you play they see in our funk man we packed it every gig yeah yeah you know but he wasn't against us you know he came and he sat in on our gigs and
Guest:I remember we played a dance at a high school, McMain Senior High School.
Guest:My father came and played.
Guest:We played a Crusader song called Keep That Same Old Feeling.
Guest:And it has a bridge section.
Guest:And one of our other trumpet players was a guy named John Roche.
Guest:And he said, man, you can't have your daddy sitting on this tune because of that bridge section.
Guest:He ain't going to be able to hear that.
Guest:I said, man, my daddy's a jazz musician.
Guest:He ain't going to listen to it one time.
Guest:He's going to start playing it.
Guest:Man, they played that bridge the first time my daddy listened to it.
Guest:That second time, he just played through it.
Guest:And I remember my boy looked at me.
Guest:He had never heard something out of the bebop tradition.
Guest:He looked at me and said, man, what is that shit he's playing?
Guest:You know what I'm saying?
Guest:Because we had grown up listening to him.
Guest:We knew the magic of playing and being able to play.
Marc:But that was sort of like you were kind of on the classical, that was going to be your thing, right?
Marc:No.
Guest:Never?
Guest:I always wanted to play jazz.
Guest:I loved it.
Guest:I mean, and I still love classical music.
Guest:No, that was never my thing.
Guest:I came to New York to play jazz because I wanted to be like my father.
Guest:My essential thing was I wanted to do what they wanted to do.
Guest:My father wanted to come to New York.
Guest:All the jazz musicians I had met when I was growing up, Clark Terry, Sweets Edison, I loved all of them.
Guest:They were like uncles to me.
Guest:And I wanted to make them proud, and I wanted them to feel like I could play.
Guest:That was my main thing.
Guest:And they were always going to be like, man, you're sad.
Guest:One day you're going to learn how to play.
Guest:So I love classical music and I love playing it.
Guest:And I was fortunate to be to get a little bit of reputation for playing it.
Guest:And I practice a lot.
Guest:And still to this day, I love orchestral music.
Guest:And the one thing I'm grateful for is my father was not prejudiced against music.
Guest:So he always told me, man, listen to this music or study it or check this, anything, even playing in a funk band, which at first I didn't want to do.
Guest:Then I was 11.
Guest:My daddy said, man, playing the band.
Marc:So now the classical, though,
Marc:the classical music like what do you carry because i know that i can feel that you just by listening to these longer pieces that you did in this one the ever funky lowdown that you know you put a lot in you're a perfectionist you write this you write this stuff out that you know it's tight so is that something that you just is part of your personality or is that something you learn from classical music
Guest:No, when I developed it, I was playing classical pieces all through high school.
Guest:So I was hearing longer form pieces.
Guest:I never forget, I played a concert of Mahler's Second Symphony.
Guest:I was at the Eastern Music Festival.
Guest:I'd never left home in Greensboro, North Carolina.
Guest:And the final concert was Mahler's Second Symphony.
Guest:I thought, damn, it was such a big, massive piece with a choir.
Guest:But I couldn't, because the forms were so different.
Guest:But I had a kind of gift for just hearing forms.
Guest:So I was in theory classes in high school.
Guest:I was going to tell the form of Beethoven's Symphony, the form of Sibelius, the form of, you know, these pieces.
Marc:When you say form, it's just like the, what is the form exactly?
Marc:The repetition?
Guest:How you get from A to B to C to D. How you get from one place to another.
Guest:It made sense.
Guest:Would you repeat?
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:How do you, what is the cycle?
Guest:Everything is on the cycle.
Guest:And there are many different cycles.
Guest:There's sonata form, there's this.
Guest:Now, of course, the music is so wide open, there are many types of composite forms.
Guest:But it wasn't until I heard Jelly Roll Martin, Library of Congress recordings, and he was explaining how the pearls or these pieces he wrote, how he constructed them.
Guest:with sections and transitions.
Guest:And then I noticed Duke Ellington was doing the same thing.
Guest:And then when I was in my late 20s, I started to write longer form pieces.
Guest:Before then, I didn't know how to do it.
Guest:And the first piece I wrote was called Blue Interlude.
Guest:I think I was 28, 27, 20, somewhere up in there.
Guest:And then I figured out how to have my thematic development a certain way and how to connect these forms and use grooves.
Guest:Then the kind of psychological development of a piece through grooves.
Guest:And from that time, I've always worked on these pieces.
Guest:And they have a lot of outline.
Guest:I spent a lot of time outlining them, determining what keys are going, what I'm going to do.
Guest:And so I became kind of obsessed with working on them like a puzzler.
Marc:Yeah, that's good.
Marc:It's nice to have a compulsive hobby.
Guest:Yeah, man.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I always tell people I laugh when you write really big pieces for orchestra.
Guest:I always say, if you want to waste a lot of time, do this.
Guest:Because, man, when you're marking parts with dots and dashes and crescendos and schwarzandos, that's time consuming.
Guest:You might have 750,000 notes in a piece, and you're putting stuff over most of those notes.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But like once it comes to life, it makes it all worth it, right?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:For me and for all of us, I'm fortunate because in our orchestra, we have like 10 to 11 arrangers and everybody composes and we all play each other's music.
Guest:So for all of us, yeah, when we start working on our music, we get obsessed with it and we all play each other's music.
Marc:So when you got to New York,
Marc:When you got to Juilliard and you wanted to be a jazz musician to sort of like honor your dad's dream in some degree, what was the state of jazz at the time?
Marc:What year was it?
Guest:It was 1979.
Guest:Do you think about it that way?
Guest:Yeah, people were playing.
Guest:Woody Shaw had a great band.
Guest:Betty Carter was fantastic.
Guest:She was playing all kinds of music.
Guest:I would go out every night at 11 o'clock at night and just go all over, all the clubs.
Guest:The Brecken Brothers had Seventh Avenue South.
Guest:People playing in the Village Vanguard, a lot of the, like Tommy Flanagan, I mean, people were playing.
Guest:They were playing all over the place.
Guest:You had a lot of the great musicians.
Guest:And you could go out and hear people jazz.
Guest:I mean, people were struggling.
Guest:The scene was a struggle.
Guest:And I also played with some of the avant-garde musicians.
Guest:I played with David Murray.
Guest:I played with Lester Bowie.
Guest:The scene was scuffling in terms of the same with not having enormous amounts of people around it.
Guest:But musicians were dedicated to playing it.
Guest:betty carter she was unbelievable so you played with some uh some of the avant-garde guys yeah i played with hot trumpets let's the boy hot trumpets i was sitting with people but i finally got a gig with our blakey and the jazz messenger so that's how how i learned how to play was playing with art if it was not for what he played for like 50 years 60 years oh man he was you never saw anything like that
Guest:And that's considered hard bop, right?
Guest:Well, in the 50s, it was.
Guest:But by the time I played with him, he was playing a lot of different styles, some that didn't have names.
Guest:But he was a phenomenal man.
Guest:He was just as a person.
Guest:And with his playing, his musicianship, and his belief in the music, his integrity.
Guest:And we loved him.
Guest:And we all called him Boo.
Marc:It was like being in a family.
Marc:So when you signed on with him, you were like 21, 22?
Marc:No, I was 18.
Marc:18.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And you're part of this jazz messenger legacy.
Marc:Man, you know.
Marc:You're one of the guys.
Marc:No, I was sad.
Guest:I was up on the bench there, but I wasn't playing enough to say I was part of the legacy.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Well, I mean, what'd you learn from him specifically?
Marc:What working was about.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And what a good rhythm section was about?
Marc:Well, he's an absolute swinger.
Marc:But he worked.
Marc:Like, he was about working.
Marc:And where'd you guys tour?
Marc:Did you tour around the world with him?
Guest:All over America.
Guest:I mean, we were struggling.
Guest:We were like a chitlin' circle.
Guest:We were in a van.
Guest:And man, that first tour, we went from New York to Detroit, played gigs, Detroit to Seattle, Seattle to San Francisco, San Francisco, Houston.
Guest:I mean, we...
Guest:We used to call ourselves jazz passengers.
Guest:We understood something.
Guest:He gave us a good, clear understanding of what work it was, man.
Guest:Were people coming out?
Guest:You know, in some places, but we were playing mainly clubs.
Guest:People would come out.
Guest:We didn't play big venues.
Guest:People came out.
Guest:But, you know, we were...
Guest:Sometimes we will struggle.
Guest:It's always been a struggle, man.
Guest:When you try to maintain a certain integrity, it's a struggle.
Marc:In anything?
Guest:In anything.
Guest:In anything.
Guest:It doesn't matter.
Marc:So you got to New York in time to see a lot of people that were still around, that have been around since the beginning of modern jazz.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:But there was also another contingent of people who were doing... I mean, there seems to be this other world of Kenny G's and...
Guest:You know, I mean, but that's more like instrumental pop music.
Guest:And that was not, it's played up like there's like some battle or something between us, but it's not.
Guest:There was never... Well, not a battle.
Guest:Now I was throwing football with Kenny G. I didn't even know who it was.
Guest:We were throwing a football.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Where did that happen?
Guest:It's some jazz festival.
Guest:But it's like I always tell people, Onnit Coleman, let's just take that for example.
Marc:Onnit Coleman, all right.
Guest:If you read articles, somebody would say, Onnit Coleman, free jazz, this hard bop.
Guest:Onnit Coleman in the 1950s lived in New Orleans.
Guest:He stayed in the home of a trumpet player named Melvin Lasty, who we call Papi.
Guest:Melvin Lasty was the uncle of Herlon Riley.
Guest:Herlon Riley played drums with me for many years.
Guest:And in the Fairview Baptist Church band that I played in at 8, Herlon was playing trumpet at that time.
Guest:He's about 13.
Guest:Herlon is one of the greatest drummers in the world.
Guest:And for many years, Herlon played with the Ornette
Guest:Ed Blackwell, who played drums with Arnett on some of his earliest records, grew up playing with my father.
Guest:And he left New Orleans because of some racism.
Guest:His old lady was white.
Guest:And he went up to New York.
Guest:He played with Arnett.
Guest:So if I tell people, yeah, I saw Arnett or I talked to Arnett or this, they think, well, you know, you and Arnett.
Guest:Jazz.
Guest:Arnett was more like a member of my family or something.
Guest:It was more like a
Guest:I grew up hearing about Arnett.
Guest:When I first started talking to Arnett, he said, your daddy and Alvin Batiste came to see me in Los Angeles.
Guest:They drove all the way from New Orleans to Los Angeles and they could knock on my door and say, man, we just came here to see what you was doing in the late 50s.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So a lot of times you don't realize kind of our...
Guest:our bloodlines it's not it's not the way it's depicted with a lot of strife in it and that's just not the truth of it in oh in term in terms of the styles of jazz yeah in terms of who we are as people and how we how we interact with each other right right you know you guys are just you're doing what you do but you know the bond is deeper than you know like he's doing free jazz i'm doing this this he's doing that i'm doing this
Guest:Nobody is talking about that and going to people's house arguing and fighting with them and all of that.
Guest:You might have an argument, but it's not going to be about what style you're playing.
Guest:And if you have an age difference like between me and Arnett and great as he was, no arguing.
Guest:I was trying to learn something.
Guest:So when I saw him, I wasn't saying nothing, but how could I do this?
Guest:Or could I do this?
Guest:Mr. Coleman.
Guest:I wasn't calling him Arnett either.
Guest:You know what I'm saying?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Like, as I got older, I realized the world is open, man.
Guest:People come up with things, they have creativity, great.
Guest:It's kind of like when people ask me now, what do you think about Black Lives Matter?
Guest:What do you think about protests?
Guest:I say, you know, our problems are so pervasive and so widespread
Guest:I want any act that we go towards equality for everybody.
Guest:I want as many of those acts as we have acts of corruption and acts of denying people.
Guest:There's no one way to be corrupt.
Guest:So let all of the everything.
Guest:Yeah, great.
Guest:People are doing stuff.
Guest:They want equality.
Guest:They want to do this.
Guest:Fantastic.
Guest:You give some money.
Guest:Great.
Guest:You're protesting.
Guest:Fantastic.
Guest:You write an article.
Guest:Great.
Guest:You're arguing with somebody at a barbershop.
Guest:great.
Guest:You need all of that.
Guest:Instead of, well, you need to do this, or this needs to be one way, it needs to be many ways.
Guest:One person's way is not enough to solve the problem.
Guest:It's too large.
Guest:It's too pervasive.
Guest:It's been around too long.
Guest:It needs all of us to just be a part of it.
Marc:And it feels like in terms of the current moment and that you're releasing this record in what I don't think you could have anticipated, you know, the the the chaos and anger that's bubbling up now when you released it.
Marc:But it also seems to fit together.
Marc:Right.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Well, I wrote it in 2018.
Guest:So I had no idea that this pandemic would happen and it would expose our faults.
Guest:I could see our faults, of course, because I mean, I'm from our country and have been around the world.
Guest:But I also see other people's faults, too.
Guest:So that's part of me not having that kind of us versus them.
Guest:I've had the opportunity to be in other people's countries and talk with them and see how they deal with the problems they have.
Marc:And at the end of like in the record, you sort of choose to sort of elevate and focus on on Fannie Lou Hamer.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Out of that period, what made you choose her impact?
Guest:Well, my mama loved her.
Guest:She loved Fannie Lou.
Guest:And Fannie Lou was the eldest of 20 kids.
Guest:She grew up in the rural South.
Guest:She had just a natural kind of ability.
Guest:She's a voracious reader at a place where you were kept from reading.
Guest:And she got involved in the political process late with the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party.
Guest:She had an integrated party she brought to the convention.
Guest:She ran for Congress.
Guest:She didn't win, but she sang spirituals.
Guest:She had a depth of insight.
Guest:She fought that fight.
Guest:She came back.
Guest:She was beaten.
Guest:She was shot at.
Guest:Everybody tried to turn around.
Guest:She never turned around.
Guest:And she spoke the language of the people.
Guest:She came the longest distance.
Guest:And she was all about realizing what the Constitution put in front of us.
Guest:And then she went back to the community, started Freedom Forum, teaching people how to deal with health, to deal with raising kids, small business organizations.
Guest:She was a powerhouse, man.
Guest:And my mother absolutely loved her.
Guest:So I grew up knowing about Fannie Lou just because my mama was always saying,
Guest:Boy, you need to listen to Fannie Lou.
Guest:Child, Fannie Lou Hamer is the final word on everything.
Marc:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Marc:So that's a tribute to Fannie Lou and your mother.
Guest:Well, you know, I mean, Fannie Lou, my mom is up to Fannie Lou.
Guest:And Fannie Lou, because Mr. Game said, here, I'm gonna give you a freedom fighter.
Guest:So I had to pick somebody who people didn't remember because he's going to make the point.
Guest:This freedom fighter, and he puts them all, Harry Tubman, you know, Lincoln Steffens.
Guest:He said, all these people did stuff, and you don't even remember them.
Guest:So, yeah, Fannie Lou was heavy, man.
Marc:Yeah, I had to do a little homework myself.
Marc:Oh, yeah.
Guest:Yeah, all of us, you know.
Guest:If it wasn't for my mama, I wouldn't know who she was.
Marc:I guess this is a bigger question in terms of the impact or how these ideas.
Marc:I mean, these are ideas that you have.
Marc:All the ideas you have about music is here.
Marc:All the ideas you have about power in the world is in this piece.
Marc:About religion, about technology, about freedom.
Marc:And then underneath it is all your music and the people you got singing and doing all the other things.
Marc:So because for me, I listen to something like this.
Marc:It's like everybody should hear this.
Marc:Everybody should understand what this is talking about.
Marc:But you're still up against the fragmentation of the media landscape against, you know, like, what is a jazz?
Marc:Where does it fit in?
Marc:So how do you kind of...
Marc:Cross that.
Marc:How do you accommodate that idea that you put all this work in with these great ideas and they're put in a way that people can understand and it doesn't get out there as much as you want it to?
Guest:Well, everything is a continuum.
Guest:You know, you're just part of a long progression and a procession.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I'm happy to be a part of it.
Guest:Like I mentioned, our orchestra, we all work on music.
Guest:And we are serious.
Guest:And the pandemic has made us be even more serious.
Guest:Our organization is serious.
Guest:When we recorded it, our carpenters, our stage crew built the stage for us.
Guest:You should have saw what they built in our studio.
Guest:I mean, you can't make people want to be a part of something.
Guest:Music is great.
Guest:And we've been a part of it.
Guest:And I'm happy to be a part of the music.
Guest:And you can't determine where
Guest:When people listen to your music or whether they will like it, all you can do is make it be as good as you can possibly make it.
Guest:And, you know, I'm dedicated to it.
Guest:It's been a blessing for me.
Guest:My father was dedicated.
Guest:And all the great musicians and the cats in my band are dedicated.
Guest:You hear the way they play the music on the record.
Guest:We recorded that in nine hours.
Guest:We did a session in a day.
Guest:In three hours, I was thinking, man, it's 50-something.
Guest:It's going to take us a long time to record that.
Guest:The orchestra was like, no, it's not.
Guest:We come in here to play, man, take care of business.
Guest:And that's how they've been for the last 20 years.
Guest:You know, all these years, for me, it's been a blessing doing it.
Guest:At Jazza Lincoln Center?
Guest:Man, it's been so much of a blessing meeting people, not just in the orchestra.
Guest:Our board members, people have been a part.
Guest:I didn't know about any of this kind of stuff, man.
Guest:I'm a guy from Lil Farms, Louisiana.
Guest:And to look around and see all the people who've participated in it and what they've given to it.
Guest:Yes, it's moving.
Guest:My singers, when they finish, all of us in the band, because they're like the oldest of us, they're like the age of what our daughters would be that age.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Man, we were getting full thinking about the amount of work they put in, how great they sounded.
Guest:They did an unbelievable job because a lot of their parts are really hard.
Guest:It doesn't sound it.
Marc:Well, I mean, I think that speaks to also, you know, what the power of it is about, you know, getting back to, you know, realizing when you were a kid that your father, what drove people was a belief in the music and then the understanding of what it's like to be in the community of musicians or to be engaged in a piece of music with other people where the where where the dialogue is happening.
Marc:Right.
Guest:That's right.
Guest:And that's why I believe in democracy.
Guest:It seems stupid to say it now.
Guest:People think, oh, man, you know, you I never have been like a handkerchief head.
Guest:And it caused me a lot of problems with critics.
Guest:I never was like a person who just go along with whatever white folks say you need to go along with.
Guest:That's never my vibe, even when it was was behind weapons at stake.
Guest:So now I'm too old to be in that mode.
Guest:It's not a kind of mindless optimism.
Guest:This is a system that requires participation.
Guest:And if we allow ourselves to be duped and we don't realize the possibility, especially for those in lower economic classes, which is which is firmly where I come from.
Guest:Though I'm not there now, I firmly come from there.
Guest:And I understand the importance of participation because I'm a jazz musician.
Guest:If I stand up on the bandstand and play all the solos, musicians are not going to play that way.
Guest:If I'm dictating every moment of the music, it's not going to sound good.
Guest:When you open the music, when our band started everybody arranging, we played
Guest:200% better because we're playing each other's music.
Guest:We start to have ownership over everything.
Guest:Then you develop trust.
Guest:You're not the only one who can do something.
Guest:A lot of people can do things.
Guest:As one of my father's sayings, hey, man, it's a lot of talent, people homeless.
Guest:He talked to a homeless person for a long time.
Guest:Man, what you talking about this dude about?
Guest:Man, this cat used to be an architect.
Guest:He come back and tell you the whole story.
Guest:He said, man, there's a lot of talent all over the world.
Guest:Don't be fooled.
Guest:And I think what we learned in our orchestra and our group was when you open up the floor,
Guest:You have a much better time.
Guest:You don't want to just listen to yourself play all night.
Marc:I always notice that the last time I went, because the guy, Greg, Greg Scholl.
Marc:Oh, yes.
Marc:Yeah, he's great.
Marc:You know, he hooks me up when I go to the city, you know, because I would just go.
Marc:The last time I went, it was Marcus.
Marc:Who is the bass player from Electric Miles?
Marc:Marcus Miller.
Marc:Marcus Miller.
Guest:That's a good dude, too, man.
Guest:Yeah, I saw him do it.
Marc:Yeah, he did a night of, it was just like some pieces from that period of Miles, right?
Marc:From Electric Miles.
Marc:But like in any jazz, like when I watch the old footage in terms of the democracy thing, there's something amazing about when one guy's solo and then there's a couple other guys just standing around.
Guest:You better be listening to what they're playing because when you start playing, you got to continue what they were playing.
Guest:That's what they're doing.
Guest:Yeah, you better listen, man, because the music has got to be continuous.
Guest:So you got to really follow them.
Marc:So what were some of the, like, just looking back real quick in terms of, because I know you recorded with Dizzy Gleps.
Marc:You did a record with Dizzy.
Marc:Sure, yeah, with Dizzy, yeah.
Marc:And you've worked with a lot of guys that you grew up listening to.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Is that about the biggest thrill in some ways?
Guest:Yeah, to know them because they're so soulful.
Guest:Even the ones that didn't like you, like Betty Carter never really liked me.
Guest:But she had so much integrity.
Guest:Man, I loved her.
Guest:I saw a concert of her in Germany one night.
Guest:Man, she was singing so good.
Guest:And she had so much belief in the music.
Guest:She taught younger musicians how to play.
Guest:She wrote arrangements.
Guest:And me and her got into it one night.
Guest:And man, I finally got tired of my best with being Acosta out.
Guest:And she looked at me and she said, if some of that passion will come through your horn, we might actually hear something.
Guest:And I love the way that they were.
Guest:You know, I love Sarah Vaughn.
Guest:I was playing with her and I learned this one obscure Duke Ellington song.
Guest:Tonight I should sleep with a smile on my face, but I didn't really know all the chords.
Guest:So I messed up the bridge.
Guest:How many people in the world know that song?
Guest:You know, this woman sat down to the piano and played the hell out of the entire song.
Guest:Because I didn't know at the time that she had played second piano in Billy Eckstein's band.
Guest:And she truly could play.
Guest:And when she finished playing all these flourishes and stuff, she looked at me and she said, you have to learn these songs thoroughly, baby.
Guest:You didn't get that bridge together.
Guest:Here's the progression.
Guest:She showed me the progression before she was making faces.
Guest:And she said, you got to be more thorough.
Guest:And I just started laughing.
Guest:I said, man, I was 21 at that time.
Guest:So, you know, John Lewis, I'll tell you another story, but I was complaining to John Lewis, great piano player, the music director of Modern Jazz Quartet, about some critique I was mad about.
Guest:He was listening to it, man, he's patient.
Guest:After a while, he looked at me.
Guest:He said, you know, he said, too much complaining, even about an insult given up to someone, is really a form of, a veiled form of egotism.
Guest:Can we rehearse this music?
Right.
Guest:You know, they were always full of stuff, you know.
Guest:Great, sweet citizen.
Guest:Y'all got so many stories from being around them so much.
Guest:Did you have a relationship with Miles at all?
Guest:I did, but it was very rocky.
Guest:Because when I came up, Miles, you know, you start playing a lot of electronic music.
Guest:I was like, man, I'm playing jazz.
Guest:When I first met Miles, I had a derby on and a polyester suit.
Guest:And he looked at me, he could tell I was country.
Guest:So he said, so you're the police, huh?
Guest:So I went to Herbie.
Guest:I said, man, what is he talking about?
Guest:I'm the police.
Guest:He said, man, he made you the one coming to clean this shit up.
Guest:So we started laughing.
Guest:I didn't understand what he was saying.
Guest:Then he started saying jazz wasn't nothing, blah, blah, blah.
Guest:I wasn't this, I wasn't that.
Guest:So I started to bite back at him.
Guest:And then I jumped on his bandstand.
Guest:That made him really mad at me, man.
Guest:I jumped on him one night in Vancouver.
Guest:I was sitting in the thing with Cash in my band, and they was like, man, I heard Miles on the radio saying, you wasn't shit.
Guest:Your daddy wasn't shit.
Guest:You got to deal with this.
Guest:So I made a bet with them.
Guest:I said, man, I'm going to go jump on him tonight.
Guest:And I went out there and jumped on him.
Guest:He cut the band off.
Guest:He was really mad.
Guest:So after that, me and him had a real, you know, he didn't like that.
Guest:He wanted to be the only one picking on you.
Guest:He didn't like to be picked back on.
Guest:But I still learned a lot from him before that.
Guest:It's three or four things he told me that I thought were really insightful.
Guest:And you could see why he was the genius that he was.
Guest:He just had another type of intelligence.
Guest:I remember one question he asked me was interesting.
Guest:He said, how did you figure this out?
Guest:And I knew what he was talking about because he wasn't talking about my plan because I couldn't play.
Guest:It's like a gauntlet of misinformation that you have to see your way through to figure out what playing is.
Guest:And it's more about just acuity.
Guest:And he actually understood that it's hard for an older person to understand what a younger person has to face in their generation.
Guest:Very difficult.
Guest:Now I know that I'm much older.
Guest:It's very hard for me to look at a 20-year-old person and understand what are the obstacles in their way.
Guest:Right.
Guest:You know, whereas he was thinking about that and could see it.
Marc:And what else did you learn from him?
Guest:About sound.
Guest:I asked him something about sound.
Guest:And he said, you know, nobody can teach you nothing about sound.
Guest:That sound is so deep within what you're playing.
Guest:And if you want to develop your sound, you don't get a progression like you do if you're working on scales.
Guest:You got to go deep inside and stay in there for a long time.
Guest:And then it starts to evolve.
Guest:And he said Dizzy had told him to hold longer notes.
Guest:And he told me, when you're soloing, hold on with notes.
Guest:He said, and then you have to be comfortable when you rest to hear your sound.
Guest:See, if you're playing, you don't never rest.
Guest:Then he told me, as long as you're playing with people that's playing loud, you're not going to develop your sound.
Guest:And it made me laugh because they were playing loud on his bandstand, you know, with a lot of electronic instruments.
Guest:But then I understood what he was saying.
Guest:And things like that.
Guest:He was smart conceptually, too, about other musicians.
Guest:He talked about Fats Navarro, about Dizzy's playing, who Duke Ellington was.
Guest:He had a lot of information.
Marc:And he seemed to be able, as time went on, to really surrender stage to other musicians.
Marc:He didn't seem to be that egotistical on stage.
Guest:Yeah, but then he wasn't playing his chops.
Guest:He wasn't playing that much.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I mean, by that point.
Guest:But he was always like that.
Guest:Even when he was younger.
Guest:Yeah, he loved great musicians.
Guest:He loved Train.
Guest:He had the greatest bands.
Guest:He's very smart.
Guest:So in addition to his ability, he also understood a lot about the fundamentals of the music.
Guest:He understood who Louis Armstrong was.
Guest:He knew how to break his ensemble up.
Guest:And he knew how to give musicians space.
Guest:And he inspired them to play because he believed in the music.
Marc:Yeah, because I talked to, I met Herbie Hancock briefly at a thing.
Marc:I hosted a conversation with him around that Blue Note movie.
Marc:Right.
Marc:And, you know, it just seems like, you know, Miles had a profound effect on how he conceived of how to play.
Marc:And I had to, like, sort of start to get into Herbie.
Marc:And, you know, it's sort of astounding.
Marc:That guy's an astounding musician.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah, he is, and he was playing with Miles Young.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Herbie was 23 playing with Miles.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Tony Williams was 17.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But when you hear them play, the kind of clarity they play with.
Guest:Now, I had the opportunity to play with Herbie, Ron, and Tony when I was 19.
Guest:I went on the road with them, Herbie Hancock Quartet.
Guest:Uh-huh.
Guest:And man, I had no idea what they were playing.
Guest:And the first time we played a song called The Sorcerer, I never even heard chord structures like that.
Guest:I'm two years from New Orleans and playing a funk band.
Guest:Man, they start playing, and Ron Carter told me before the first gig we played in the Playboy, in the Hollywood Bowl.
Guest:I was getting ready to walk on stage with them, and I was thinking, man,
Guest:We'd only had one rehearsal.
Guest:I said, I have no idea what in the world I'm doing up here with these musicians.
Guest:And Ron tapped me on my leg.
Guest:He said, listen, man, if you get lost, just listen to me.
Guest:I'm going to be following you.
Guest:And don't worry about shit.
Guest:And women out there.
Guest:And man, I can't tell you how that made me feel.
Guest:You have no idea the nerves.
Guest:It's one thing to be nervous, you're going to mess up a part.
Guest:It's another thing when you have to improvise on something, you have no idea what you are playing.
Guest:But that was a deep moment for me, just the kind of love he showed me in that moment.
Guest:And you knew what he was saying, and he did it?
Guest:Oh, man, definitely.
Guest:He looked out for me like I was his son or something standing up there.
Guest:No question.
Guest:No question about it.
Marc:That's so scary.
Marc:And Herbie was nice to you, right?
Marc:Yeah, and Herbie's nice to everybody.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah, he's like gold.
Guest:Herbie's like gold, man.
Guest:He's nice to everybody.
Guest:He's Buddhist.
Guest:I was complaining about the money I was making to Herbie.
Guest:I'm 19, man.
Guest:I'm not really playing that much on my horn, but I'm complaining.
Guest:Man, I'm getting paid so-and-so and so-and-so.
Guest:So Herbie, before we go out on a gig, Herbie go say, man, look out into the audience.
Guest:I looked out into the audience.
Guest:He said, you see those people?
Guest:I said, yeah.
Guest:He said, if you don't walk out on the stage,
Guest:Nobody is going to leave.
Guest:If I don't walk out, everybody is going to leave.
Guest:That's why you're paid what you're being paid.
Guest:Then he said, let's go out, man.
Guest:Let's go out.
Guest:So, you know, the jazz musicians, they like that, man.
Guest:It's just a matter of fact.
Marc:Right.
Marc:And you've been around them your whole life.
Guest:Yeah, but I grew up with it.
Guest:A lot of musicians I knew actually before I was in New York, like R. Blakey, Dizzy, I met all of them.
Guest:First time I played for Dizzy, my daddy said, hey, Diz, this is my son.
Guest:Went and he's a trumpet player.
Guest:I was 15.
Guest:And Diz gave me his trumpet.
Guest:He said, yeah, play the trumpet.
Guest:And his mouthpiece was really shallow, different from my mouthpiece.
Guest:I went to play something.
Guest:Man, what I played sounded terrible.
Guest:So Dizzy looked at me.
Guest:He was trying to figure out what to say.
Guest:He said, yeah, practice, motherfucker.
Marc:And we started laughing.
Marc:And how long has been jazz at Lincoln Center?
Guest:How long has that been?
Guest:Since 1987.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And that's home, right?
Marc:That's the place.
Guest:Oh, man, yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah, so for our staff, board, everybody, they're so for real, man.
Guest:They've showed me so much in this pandemic because it's such a hard time for us, man.
Guest:We don't have any revenue coming in.
Guest:My people, they're still dedicated.
Guest:They're still working.
Guest:We're putting all kinds of stuff up online, getting recordings out, blogs.
Guest:The musicians are working, putting on summer camps.
Guest:We got staff members calling people, everything, man.
Guest:I mean, it's moving, actually, to think about what they're doing in this time.
Guest:And, you know, we still have a long way to go.
Guest:It's a struggle.
Marc:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:Well, I mean, it's a struggle on all levels, and I think that this new record was, like, it's just great.
Marc:Like, it really blew my mind, and it's definitely a, speaking of struggle, it is an assessment of the reality of the situation that is pretty dire and pretty focused and even funny in a way, but dark and beautiful, man.
Marc:It's a great record.
Guest:Man, thank you so much, man.
Guest:Thank you for talking to me.
Marc:Yeah, man.
Guest:It's great to see you too, man.
Guest:I'm glad we got to soon hook up.
Marc:Yeah, me too.
Marc:When we get through this plague, I'll come by the place and watch you play.
Marc:Yeah, come to rehearsal.
Marc:Yeah, thanks, man.
Marc:Take it easy, Wynton.
Marc:Love and respect.
Marc:I enjoyed that.
Marc:I learned things.
Marc:I was a little nervous.
Marc:I tried not to pretend like I knew things I didn't.
Marc:The new record, Ever Funky Lowdown, is available at, you can get it at store.jazz.org.
Marc:Now I'm going to try to do a folk hybrid electric blues riff that I got the rhythm of, kind of.
Marc:There you go.
Marc:That's a strong recommendation.
Marc:It's almost good.
Marc:Listen up.
Yeah.
guitar solo
Guest:Boomer Monkey LaFonda.
Guest:Live in the hearts of us all.