Jazz and the Past

I went down to Sanders a few weeks ago to hear Wynton Marsalis’ third lecture. Is the line not outside, my roommate asked as we got closer. Maybe it’s too cold, I said. But when we got inside, the auditorium was just as packed as it had been the past two times. People were standing in the back. We gave him a standing ovation as he walked in.

The lecture was on music at the crossroads, a history of American root music. Marsalis played and talked and led his band through nearly a century of American melodies, detailing the possibilities for inclusion and social justice, and the parallel path of regular American history, mirrored by music. It was a wonderful lecture, studded with perfect gems of playing by the band. I’ve always loved Wynton—I played trumpet since fifth grade when the band teacher convinced me that drums were no fun, all the way to the end of high school, when an assistant band teacher gave me a book of jazz solos; and I played his version of “Caravan” over and over on my desktop computer, his “Autumn Leaves” recording in my head on the subway to school.

I couldn’t help but be disappointed, then, with one part of Mr. Marsalis’ lecture. It was something he did in the past two as well: show no love for the present.

Mr. Marsalis is no luddite. During the Q&A period, he sidestepped a chance to trash iPads and DJs—“The iPad has the potential to bring us together,” he noted. But he didn’t have good things to say about rap: “Rap: what can I tell you. It speaks for itself.” And he suggested that one of the problems with modern music is the fact that it exhibits “less musicianship, more pageantry.”

These are all valid points. He generously acknowledged too that he understands that people might like the music they grew up with, like rap—I do, for instance—and that he’s not making a moral judgment on such people. He suggested that he’d like to make his kids, now in their twenties, share their music with him and listen to his take on it, as long as they would listen to his and hear his words. Then they’d see, he said.

I only wish that he’d let us see, too. Marsalis pulls a careful and interesting particular thread through American history and music, identifying the development of the root music that he loves, demonstrating how it evolved and shaped the culture around it. But he full-stops at the present—even, a few weeks ago at least, in the 1950s. And that seems a waste of his thoughtfulness, talent, and archival knowledge.

We were in Sanders Theatre, with Latin on the walls and dead white men in marble robes watching the stage judiciously from the wings. The audience, while full and enthralled, was a largely adult one, a refined one. At the end of the performance the band bowed, after playing a triumphantly nostalgic tune (one which, in fact, it had played earlier), while people happily clapped. But that’s not what jazz is about—that’s not what jazz sounded like when, immediately afterward, as Marsalis walked toward the wing, his rhythm section came quickly to life, playing a gleeful and unrestrained encore, during which the audience loosened up, during which the energy of a smoky jazz club filled the wood-paneled room.

Instead of ending with Chuck Berry, let’s let Mr. Marsalis talk to us too about Radiohead and the Roots. Let’s let him demonstrate his beliefs and knowledge in a positive, and therefore constructive, sense. Let’s let the hallowed halls of Sanders and Harvard not immediately necessitate a hollow magnetism toward history. I want to hear Mr. Marsalis extend his judgment into the contemporary (and changed) world, in the same way that I want to hear our history professors’ perspectives on the presidential elections, our literature professors’ opinions on the state of writing today. If we end up decrying the present in favor of a remembered past, let us use such remonstrations as a guidepost for the future. Through tracing the side-streets of history, we can propose solutions and advancements for modern music, literature, dance, science, technology and art. Perhaps the past was a better place. Perhaps we do have much to learn. But let’s not ignore modernity. In that way we begin to make ourselves irrelevant.

Mark J. Chiusano '12 is an English concentrator in Winthrop House. He is a magazine chair emeritus.