High Standards

My late night listening for a couple of days this week has been Wynton Marsalis's tasty collection Standard Time Vol. 3 - The Resolution of Romance. The title is deadly accurate. Wynton solos on a series of classics with a hefty helping of romantic ballads to soothe the furrowed brow after a tough day, over a gorgeously tight ensemble comprising his dad tickling the ivories, Reginald Veal on bass and Herlin Riley on drums. It's the kind of stuff you might associate with muzak in a boring restaurant until you lend it your ears and realise this is on another level altogether. The highest.

At times, indeed most of the time, Wynton achieves a kind of fluid, easy perfection that thrills the ear even as it calms it. One example is on his version of Rodgers and Hart's Where Or When. The trumpet reminds us of what a gorgeous, unlikely melody Rodgers devised here. The accents of the main melodic line seem oddly off, yet absolutely right, as if it's not so much the notes as the words being played. The incredibly difficult is made to sound effortless.

The odd thing about Marsalis, though, is his insistence on the tradition and the need to play within the tradition, and his division of the sheep from the goats on these grounds. This seeps into the liner notes for the album, written by the equally fastidious Stanley Crouch. I suppose when you're as good as these guys and have made the highest demands on yourself in terms of technical ability you can afford to make high demands of others. But it can come across as a kind of prissiness. On the two occasions I've seen Marsalis play in Singapore, once with the septet and once with the big band, I've felt that kind of buttoned-upness about him. Great concerts but almost too planned, too much intended, calculated for a certain kind of audience.

A couple of years back Peter and Iris made me a present of the very fine hardback Jazz, A History of America's Music. This was based on Ken Burns's documentary series, which followed his rapturously received series on the Civil War and Baseball. I've never seen these, possibly they don't translate too well to an overseas audience in their utter American-ness, but I know how highly regarded they are - and if the wonderful pictures in the book are anything to go by the Jazz series must have looked stunning. I do know that the series also created a fair amount of controversy in terms of the history of jazz it sought to create. Marsalis was involved in it as an expert voice (or so I believe) and the stress was very much on the central figures within the tradition, particularly Armstrong, reflecting his take on how to read that history. In fact there's a very interesting interview with Marsalis in the book in which he lays down the law concerning the story of jazz in magisterial fashion. What he's got to say is interesting, but definite, and I can imagine lots of folk being not quite in agreement.

There's a kind of elitism about Marsalis that is forbidding. But at the same time I think it's necessary. This is not a social elitism but one defined by craft and when you're in the business of demanding for what you do the full weight of the respect it deserves you need to aspire to something beyond the merely excellent.

The great thing about all this for those of us with no talent whatsoever is we get to feast off the masters. It looks like I'll be carving out the time for more of these wonderful standards tonight.