Wynton Marsalis's Blog, page 44

A Lost Thing Finding Itself. Jazz at Lincoln Center

Origin stories may not always represent a complete truth, but they do give people something to hold on to. What defines the origin of Jazz at Lincoln Center, which has just started its 31st season, is the need to prove itself. In 1986, the board of Lincoln Center issued a report that said, “Lincoln Center should focus on excellence in its core offerings and that no compelling case can be made for adding a new constituent in an area like jazz.” Three years earlier, Alina Bloomgarden, then director of visitor services, brought the idea of a permanent jazz program to the center’s president. “I submitted three proposals between 1983 and 1987,” Bloomgarden recounted. “My first two proposals were rejected; some thought jazz audiences would be rowdy(!).”

When the board finally gave its tepid approval, Bloomgarden invited Marsalis to help her plan a summer concert series. The incipient jazz program had to demonstrate its commercial viability as well as the merits of the music and, it seems, the community from which it comes. The first three concerts, in August 1987, celebrated women in jazz (Betty Carter, Sasha Daltonn, Marian McPartland and others), the pianist and composer Thelonious Monk, and the saxophonist Charlie Parker.

The founders of JALC believed that the stakes were high — not just for the music but also for the life of the country. By the late Eighties, many of jazz’s greatest innovators had died; jazz clubs were shutting down; most colleges and universities had yet to form jazz-studies programs; and some warned that the increasing popularity of electronic instruments, and the commercial aspirations that came with them, threatened the identity of the music. At the same time, the limitations of the civil rights movement were becoming more widely apparent; some schools, workplaces and neighborhoods may have been desegregated, but the country was hardly integrated. AIDS was ravaging American cities, giving many people a new excuse to demonstrate their disdain for others. The Cold War and its end gave a boost to militarization and globalization. And Reagan’s intensification of the War on Drugs precipitated the period of modern mass incarceration.

Not nearly of American society, but certainly of jazz, Wynton Marsalis was considered to be a savior. The stories about Marsalis reprised the ones told about Miles Davis in the Fifties and anticipated the ones told today about musicians like Kamasi Washington or Robert Glasper — that he would return artistic seriousness and market viability to a genre that had lost its way. But unlike those contemporary musicians, and like Miles, Marsalis radiated a brashness that all but dared critics to reject the savior mythology.

Marsalis’s own sense of what he was saving is recorded in “The New Orleans Function” (1989), a three-part suite styled after the city’s funeral marches, which is, in a way, a musical extension of Bechet’s origin story. The second part, a song called “Premature Autopsies (Sermon),” features an impassioned oration written by the critic Stanley Crouch and delivered by Reverend Jeremiah Wright. In addition to offering testimony to the profundity of jazz as art, Wright’s address, set to life-giving music, can be read as an assessment of American society and as a statement of purpose for Marsalis. Under the guidance of mentors like Crouch and Albert Murray (who was also involved in the founding of JALC), Marsalis had come to understand the possibilities for American culture held within the music. And so the sermon can also be read as a statement of purpose for what would become Jazz at Lincoln Center:

It is possible that we who listened heard something timeless from those who are the descendants of the many who were literally up for sale — those whose presence on the auction blocks and in the slave quarters formed the cross upon which the Constitution of this nation was crucified. Yet — even after that crucifixion, there were those who rose in the third century of American slavery with a vision of freedom.

There were those who lit the mighty wick that extended from the candle — and carried it. There were those who spoke through music of the meaning of light — those who were not content to accept the darkness in the heart that comes when you surrender to dragons who think themselves grand. There were those who said, “Listen closely, now” — those who said, “If you give me a fair chance, I will help you better understand the meaning of democracy.” Yes — that is precisely what they said. “If you give me a fair chance, I will help you better understand the meaning of democracy.” These are they who were truly the makers of a noble sound.

A chance, perhaps one fair enough, was given. After two summers of the concert series, Gordon Davis, a member of the Lincoln Center board at the time, advocated for a new committee to reconsider forming a permanent jazz program. In 1990, the board finally agreed to deepen its commitment by instituting Jazz at Lincoln Center as a funded department. Then, in 1996, ten years after its initial denial, the board voted to elevate Jazz at Lincoln Center to full constituency, joining the City Ballet, the Metropolitan Opera, and the other houses dedicated to European arts.

The leaders of JALC quickly undertook the construction of a facility designed specifically for the acoustics of swing- and blues-oriented jazz, one that could also accommodate the institution’s educational and archival pursuits. During the construction of Frederick P. Rose Hall at Columbus Circle, which cost $131 million, Lisa Schiff, the board’s chairperson, explained their fundraising strategy in just one word: “Wynton.” As part of his strategy, Marsalis performed with popular musicians outside of the jazz world like Stevie Wonder, Paul Simon and Bob Dylan. (As David Yaffe wrote in 2005, “Marsalis’s insistence on laying down the iron law of swing with rock and R&B icons added a rich tension to their performances.”)

Each accomplishment for JALC has brought a new set of challenges, and the building and operation of its own facility proved no different. JALC has often been criticized for its high ticket prices, but to its credit, it provides a set of offerings that extends far beyond the concert stage. These include pre-concert lectures, which are free but poorly advertised; live streaming of all concerts, which is also free; educational programming for people of all ages; and maintaining an archive of written compositions. These are JALC’s efforts to put Wright’s sermon — “I will help you better understand the meaning of democracy” — into institutional action. And yet, when Americans discuss how to address our deepest problems, how to steer this lost thing, we tend not to look to the arts, let alone to jazz, for guidance.

●

One can arrive at a more meaningful understanding of JALC and what it has offered the country by considering an institution that is often described as something of its antithesis: the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), which was founded in Chicago in 1965 and borrowed much of its thinking from the black cultural nationalism of the period. Originality, or the sense of it, guided almost everything AACM members did. Even though the first generation of AACM members was greatly influenced by swing and bebop, some of its members sought to distance themselves from that lineage by calling their music “Great Black Music” rather than “jazz,” a term that’s inescapably unoriginal. In the book A Power Stronger Than Itself, the trombonist and AACM member George E. Lewis quotes the saxophonist Roscoe Mitchell describing the aesthetic vision for his album Sound (1966), AACM’s first recording: “Sound is a composition that deals, like I say, with sound, and the musicians are free to make any sound they think will do, any sound that they hear at a particular time. That could be like somebody who felt like stomping on the floor … well, he would stomp on the floor.”

Lewis also recounts how such a relationship to sound and freedom manifested at AACM performances: “At a Roscoe Mitchell Art Ensemble event in December 1966, Lester Bowie opened the event by stalking across the stage wielding a shotgun. Later, drummer Leonard Smith danced with an oversized Raggedy Ann doll, accompanied by Malachi Favors’s banjo. Another performance saw Favors wearing bells on his ankles and stripes painted on his face.” (The JALC Orchestra members wear matching suits and ties for their performances.)

The AACM’s notion of artistic originality accords with its ideal of cooperative self-determination: the group initially relied exclusively on membership dues for funding, presented and marketed its own concerts, and made decisions about almost everything by majority vote. In addition to being an incubator for original music, the AACM, like JALC, made education and community development essential parts of its mission. And perhaps in this way, in the name of its own radicalism, the AACM could be said to be even more steadfast than JALC. Its strong anti-corporatist beliefs have prevented the organization from securing the sort of endowment that JALC enjoys.

Even though the AACM has been described as a radical, black-nationalist organization, its main concern has been with showing the way, through its music and its institutional example, toward equality and greater freedom for everyone. As Muhal Richard Abrams, the AACM’s founding president, put it, the organization operated from the idea that they were “helping ourselves up to the point where we can participate in the universal aspect of things, which includes all people.” Indeed, although their aesthetic sensibilities have taken the institutions in different directions, both AACM and JALC embody and extend theories for cultural change that attempt to deal with the damage done by racialized exclusion, discrimination and poverty.

But by prioritizing originality, sometimes at the expense of discernible meaning, the AACM is an example of how the artistic innovations we call “radical” can play out in counterintuitive ways. Artistic and social movements that have been labeled as radical often exhibit a functional conservatism — an inward-looking posture that is inflexible in the face of challenge or change. Conversely, what Jazz at Lincoln Center does has radical potential by way of the very same attributes that critics call conservative or misguided. For instance, when the location for Rose Hall was determined, many people scoffed at its placement within a high-end shopping mall at Columbus Circle, and perceived its isolation from the main Lincoln Center campus four blocks to the north to be a slight. But there may be no more appropriate location: nestled within a house of consumerism, JALC showcases the music born from a freedom struggle, one that encourages both players and listeners to reach for higher ideals.

For the AACM, freedom is achieved by shaking off restrictions (“an awakening,” as Abrams put it); for JALC, freedom is achieved through mastery of tradition and form — within limitations. In a 2002 interview with the pianist Ethan Iverson, and after a brief and positive discussion of the AACM, Marsalis elaborated on his thinking regarding the label “jazz.”

Everything can’t be it, if only because you can’t teach it to other people.

That’s a very pragmatic way to look at it. If I take my kid out here and say, “Everything that you do is basketball,” I can’t teach him how to play. You apply that to any field. You’re going to have a problem teaching people, if you don’t have a meaning. It’s great for you if you can realize something that intensely broad. But you’re going to have trouble with your next generation. Because to learn everything is hard.

And if there’s no standard of excellence, the most competitive students will not want to play. … The thing about conservatism is the comfort of numbers. Everybody agrees.

The tension between the “radicalism” that gets associated with the AACM and the “conservatism” that gets associated with JALC is akin to the academic and art-world debates between postmodernism and modernism. The AACM’s version of postmodernism eschews any notion of universal standards of excellence or of truth and beauty, often because those standards have been associated with white supremacy; for Marsalis and JALC, those standards may have historically been associated with white supremacy, but mostly what they’ve done is given shape to the cultural inheritance all Americans carry, and provided an opportunity for transcendence, or progress — by way of honest confrontation and mastery of form.

●

In January 2018, Jazz at Lincoln Center hosted an event with the magazine JazzTimes called the Jazz Congress — something like an academic conference for the jazz community, with panels about urgent issues and practicalities like audience development and digital marketing. The first panel discussion was titled “Jazz and Race: A Conversation,” a moderated talk between Marsalis and Iverson. Marsalis, wearing a gray double-breasted suit and dark tie, began the discussion by speaking from prepared notes:

I want to start by saying something about “black.” “Black” is not anthropological. That’s the first thing I want to clarify. It’s social and it’s political. … Race in our country is a stand-in for a dominant culture to create a permanent underclass to be exploited for social reasons, for rituals, for sacrifice and for economics. … Jazz music refutes the construct of sectarianism, which is used to divide and conquer people. It is itself a refutation of that. This is what I’ve learned. I grew up in black nationalism, in black power, which is itself a construct. The most difficult thing to do is to go deeper than whatever everything around you told you was true and the reality you could see. Because there’s another reality inside of another reality. And jazz symbolically is a unifier — that’s what it is. It is the result of hybridization of cultures.

That Marsalis gave this sort of introduction to the conversation is notable for its difference, in tone and groundedness, from more common public discussions about race, which often jump straight into tallying representation and assessing power on a who’s-up-who’s-down basis. The facile equation of representation, in the sense of visibility, and power, while not unimportant, is symptomatic of our fixation on high drama and our desire for easy solutions. It ignores the power, beauty and potential that “have-nots” actually possess, and those hard-earned qualities that the “haves” may lack — the cultural resources to make sense of and counterstate the pain inflicted by those systemic abuses.

Most crucially, against a society that continually confuses the two, Marsalis is almost always explicit about the difference between race and culture, between what is taken to be intractable and what we can change. Marsalis’s bold position — that the differences we give life to aren’t essential or determinative differences at all — relies on a lesson he learned from Albert Murray. “Identity is best defined in terms of culture,” Murray wrote in his 1970 book The Omni-Americans. “American culture, even in its most rigidly segregated precincts, is patently and irrevocably composite. … Indeed, for all their traditional antagonisms and obvious differences, the so-called black and so-called white people of the United States resemble nobody else in the world so much as they resemble each other.”

By contrast, when, during the second meeting of the AACM, the (“white”) pianist Bob Dogan asked, “You mean that if someone is a certain race then they can’t come into the group,” Abrams replied:

I mean that we are going to have to decide whether we will have an interracial group or not. Being frank about it, when we started we didn’t intend to have an interracial group. Not as opposed to another race, but we made it on the premise that each has his own, up to a certain height. Then, the collaboration and contact with the other races or body takes place. …This is not opposed to white musicians. We know that we clearly have economic, social and other obligations to ourselves because of our positions as black musicians. We’ve been lacking a lot of things, and we have to bring up ourselves.

After further debate, no affirmative group decision was made, but Abrams’s position became the de facto position of the AACM. Such a stance, even if it doesn’t represent the highest ideals, is understandable in the context of American life in 1965. And yet the hybrid nature of American culture stubbornly presented itself; over time, the AACM’s orbit expanded to include people outside of its initial vision of itself — whether in the form of artistic collaborations (as with John Cage and with concert stops in France and Germany), performing space provided by the University of Chicago, or financial support from the National Endowment for the Arts, which was hard-won and fraught with discriminatory practices.

by Matthew McKnight

Source: The Point

A Lost Thing Finding Itself Jazz at Lincoln Center

Origin stories may not always represent a complete truth, but they do give people something to hold on to. What defines the origin of Jazz at Lincoln Center, which has just started its 31st season, is the need to prove itself. In 1986, the board of Lincoln Center issued a report that said, “Lincoln Center should focus on excellence in its core offerings and that no compelling case can be made for adding a new constituent in an area like jazz.” Three years earlier, Alina Bloomgarden, then director of visitor services, brought the idea of a permanent jazz program to the center’s president. “I submitted three proposals between 1983 and 1987,” Bloomgarden recounted. “My first two proposals were rejected; some thought jazz audiences would be rowdy(!).”

When the board finally gave its tepid approval, Bloomgarden invited Marsalis to help her plan a summer concert series. The incipient jazz program had to demonstrate its commercial viability as well as the merits of the music and, it seems, the community from which it comes. The first three concerts, in August 1987, celebrated women in jazz (Betty Carter, Sasha Daltonn, Marian McPartland and others), the pianist and composer Thelonious Monk, and the saxophonist Charlie Parker.

The founders of JALC believed that the stakes were high — not just for the music but also for the life of the country. By the late Eighties, many of jazz’s greatest innovators had died; jazz clubs were shutting down; most colleges and universities had yet to form jazz-studies programs; and some warned that the increasing popularity of electronic instruments, and the commercial aspirations that came with them, threatened the identity of the music. At the same time, the limitations of the civil rights movement were becoming more widely apparent; some schools, workplaces and neighborhoods may have been desegregated, but the country was hardly integrated. AIDS was ravaging American cities, giving many people a new excuse to demonstrate their disdain for others. The Cold War and its end gave a boost to militarization and globalization. And Reagan’s intensification of the War on Drugs precipitated the period of modern mass incarceration.

Not nearly of American society, but certainly of jazz, Wynton Marsalis was considered to be a savior. The stories about Marsalis reprised the ones told about Miles Davis in the Fifties and anticipated the ones told today about musicians like Kamasi Washington or Robert Glasper — that he would return artistic seriousness and market viability to a genre that had lost its way. But unlike those contemporary musicians, and like Miles, Marsalis radiated a brashness that all but dared critics to reject the savior mythology.

Marsalis’s own sense of what he was saving is recorded in “The New Orleans Function” (1989), a three-part suite styled after the city’s funeral marches, which is, in a way, a musical extension of Bechet’s origin story. The second part, a song called “Premature Autopsies (Sermon),” features an impassioned oration written by the critic Stanley Crouch and delivered by Reverend Jeremiah Wright. In addition to offering testimony to the profundity of jazz as art, Wright’s address, set to life-giving music, can be read as an assessment of American society and as a statement of purpose for Marsalis. Under the guidance of mentors like Crouch and Albert Murray (who was also involved in the founding of JALC), Marsalis had come to understand the possibilities for American culture held within the music. And so the sermon can also be read as a statement of purpose for what would become Jazz at Lincoln Center:

It is possible that we who listened heard something timeless from those who are the descendants of the many who were literally up for sale — those whose presence on the auction blocks and in the slave quarters formed the cross upon which the Constitution of this nation was crucified. Yet — even after that crucifixion, there were those who rose in the third century of American slavery with a vision of freedom.

There were those who lit the mighty wick that extended from the candle — and carried it. There were those who spoke through music of the meaning of light — those who were not content to accept the darkness in the heart that comes when you surrender to dragons who think themselves grand. There were those who said, “Listen closely, now” — those who said, “If you give me a fair chance, I will help you better understand the meaning of democracy.” Yes — that is precisely what they said. “If you give me a fair chance, I will help you better understand the meaning of democracy.” These are they who were truly the makers of a noble sound.

A chance, perhaps one fair enough, was given. After two summers of the concert series, Gordon Davis, a member of the Lincoln Center board at the time, advocated for a new committee to reconsider forming a permanent jazz program. In 1990, the board finally agreed to deepen its commitment by instituting Jazz at Lincoln Center as a funded department. Then, in 1996, ten years after its initial denial, the board voted to elevate Jazz at Lincoln Center to full constituency, joining the City Ballet, the Metropolitan Opera, and the other houses dedicated to European arts.

The leaders of JALC quickly undertook the construction of a facility designed specifically for the acoustics of swing- and blues-oriented jazz, one that could also accommodate the institution’s educational and archival pursuits. During the construction of Frederick P. Rose Hall at Columbus Circle, which cost $131 million, Lisa Schiff, the board’s chairperson, explained their fundraising strategy in just one word: “Wynton.” As part of his strategy, Marsalis performed with popular musicians outside of the jazz world like Stevie Wonder, Paul Simon and Bob Dylan. (As David Yaffe wrote in 2005, “Marsalis’s insistence on laying down the iron law of swing with rock and R&B icons added a rich tension to their performances.”)

Each accomplishment for JALC has brought a new set of challenges, and the building and operation of its own facility proved no different. JALC has often been criticized for its high ticket prices, but to its credit, it provides a set of offerings that extends far beyond the concert stage. These include pre-concert lectures, which are free but poorly advertised; live streaming of all concerts, which is also free; educational programming for people of all ages; and maintaining an archive of written compositions. These are JALC’s efforts to put Wright’s sermon — “I will help you better understand the meaning of democracy” — into institutional action. And yet, when Americans discuss how to address our deepest problems, how to steer this lost thing, we tend not to look to the arts, let alone to jazz, for guidance.

●

One can arrive at a more meaningful understanding of JALC and what it has offered the country by considering an institution that is often described as something of its antithesis: the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), which was founded in Chicago in 1965 and borrowed much of its thinking from the black cultural nationalism of the period. Originality, or the sense of it, guided almost everything AACM members did. Even though the first generation of AACM members was greatly influenced by swing and bebop, some of its members sought to distance themselves from that lineage by calling their music “Great Black Music” rather than “jazz,” a term that’s inescapably unoriginal. In the book A Power Stronger Than Itself, the trombonist and AACM member George E. Lewis quotes the saxophonist Roscoe Mitchell describing the aesthetic vision for his album Sound (1966), AACM’s first recording: “Sound is a composition that deals, like I say, with sound, and the musicians are free to make any sound they think will do, any sound that they hear at a particular time. That could be like somebody who felt like stomping on the floor … well, he would stomp on the floor.”

Lewis also recounts how such a relationship to sound and freedom manifested at AACM performances: “At a Roscoe Mitchell Art Ensemble event in December 1966, Lester Bowie opened the event by stalking across the stage wielding a shotgun. Later, drummer Leonard Smith danced with an oversized Raggedy Ann doll, accompanied by Malachi Favors’s banjo. Another performance saw Favors wearing bells on his ankles and stripes painted on his face.” (The JALC Orchestra members wear matching suits and ties for their performances.)

The AACM’s notion of artistic originality accords with its ideal of cooperative self-determination: the group initially relied exclusively on membership dues for funding, presented and marketed its own concerts, and made decisions about almost everything by majority vote. In addition to being an incubator for original music, the AACM, like JALC, made education and community development essential parts of its mission. And perhaps in this way, in the name of its own radicalism, the AACM could be said to be even more steadfast than JALC. Its strong anti-corporatist beliefs have prevented the organization from securing the sort of endowment that JALC enjoys.

Even though the AACM has been described as a radical, black-nationalist organization, its main concern has been with showing the way, through its music and its institutional example, toward equality and greater freedom for everyone. As Muhal Richard Abrams, the AACM’s founding president, put it, the organization operated from the idea that they were “helping ourselves up to the point where we can participate in the universal aspect of things, which includes all people.” Indeed, although their aesthetic sensibilities have taken the institutions in different directions, both AACM and JALC embody and extend theories for cultural change that attempt to deal with the damage done by racialized exclusion, discrimination and poverty.

But by prioritizing originality, sometimes at the expense of discernible meaning, the AACM is an example of how the artistic innovations we call “radical” can play out in counterintuitive ways. Artistic and social movements that have been labeled as radical often exhibit a functional conservatism — an inward-looking posture that is inflexible in the face of challenge or change. Conversely, what Jazz at Lincoln Center does has radical potential by way of the very same attributes that critics call conservative or misguided. For instance, when the location for Rose Hall was determined, many people scoffed at its placement within a high-end shopping mall at Columbus Circle, and perceived its isolation from the main Lincoln Center campus four blocks to the north to be a slight. But there may be no more appropriate location: nestled within a house of consumerism, JALC showcases the music born from a freedom struggle, one that encourages both players and listeners to reach for higher ideals.

For the AACM, freedom is achieved by shaking off restrictions (“an awakening,” as Abrams put it); for JALC, freedom is achieved through mastery of tradition and form — within limitations. In a 2002 interview with the pianist Ethan Iverson, and after a brief and positive discussion of the AACM, Marsalis elaborated on his thinking regarding the label “jazz.”

Everything can’t be it, if only because you can’t teach it to other people.

That’s a very pragmatic way to look at it. If I take my kid out here and say, “Everything that you do is basketball,” I can’t teach him how to play. You apply that to any field. You’re going to have a problem teaching people, if you don’t have a meaning. It’s great for you if you can realize something that intensely broad. But you’re going to have trouble with your next generation. Because to learn everything is hard.

And if there’s no standard of excellence, the most competitive students will not want to play. … The thing about conservatism is the comfort of numbers. Everybody agrees.

The tension between the “radicalism” that gets associated with the AACM and the “conservatism” that gets associated with JALC is akin to the academic and art-world debates between postmodernism and modernism. The AACM’s version of postmodernism eschews any notion of universal standards of excellence or of truth and beauty, often because those standards have been associated with white supremacy; for Marsalis and JALC, those standards may have historically been associated with white supremacy, but mostly what they’ve done is given shape to the cultural inheritance all Americans carry, and provided an opportunity for transcendence, or progress — by way of honest confrontation and mastery of form.

●

In January 2018, Jazz at Lincoln Center hosted an event with the magazine JazzTimes called the Jazz Congress — something like an academic conference for the jazz community, with panels about urgent issues and practicalities like audience development and digital marketing. The first panel discussion was titled “Jazz and Race: A Conversation,” a moderated talk between Marsalis and Iverson. Marsalis, wearing a gray double-breasted suit and dark tie, began the discussion by speaking from prepared notes:

I want to start by saying something about “black.” “Black” is not anthropological. That’s the first thing I want to clarify. It’s social and it’s political. … Race in our country is a stand-in for a dominant culture to create a permanent underclass to be exploited for social reasons, for rituals, for sacrifice and for economics. … Jazz music refutes the construct of sectarianism, which is used to divide and conquer people. It is itself a refutation of that. This is what I’ve learned. I grew up in black nationalism, in black power, which is itself a construct. The most difficult thing to do is to go deeper than whatever everything around you told you was true and the reality you could see. Because there’s another reality inside of another reality. And jazz symbolically is a unifier — that’s what it is. It is the result of hybridization of cultures.

That Marsalis gave this sort of introduction to the conversation is notable for its difference, in tone and groundedness, from more common public discussions about race, which often jump straight into tallying representation and assessing power on a who’s-up-who’s-down basis. The facile equation of representation, in the sense of visibility, and power, while not unimportant, is symptomatic of our fixation on high drama and our desire for easy solutions. It ignores the power, beauty and potential that “have-nots” actually possess, and those hard-earned qualities that the “haves” may lack — the cultural resources to make sense of and counterstate the pain inflicted by those systemic abuses.

Most crucially, against a society that continually confuses the two, Marsalis is almost always explicit about the difference between race and culture, between what is taken to be intractable and what we can change. Marsalis’s bold position — that the differences we give life to aren’t essential or determinative differences at all — relies on a lesson he learned from Albert Murray. “Identity is best defined in terms of culture,” Murray wrote in his 1970 book The Omni-Americans. “American culture, even in its most rigidly segregated precincts, is patently and irrevocably composite. … Indeed, for all their traditional antagonisms and obvious differences, the so-called black and so-called white people of the United States resemble nobody else in the world so much as they resemble each other.”

By contrast, when, during the second meeting of the AACM, the (“white”) pianist Bob Dogan asked, “You mean that if someone is a certain race then they can’t come into the group,” Abrams replied:

I mean that we are going to have to decide whether we will have an interracial group or not. Being frank about it, when we started we didn’t intend to have an interracial group. Not as opposed to another race, but we made it on the premise that each has his own, up to a certain height. Then, the collaboration and contact with the other races or body takes place. …This is not opposed to white musicians. We know that we clearly have economic, social and other obligations to ourselves because of our positions as black musicians. We’ve been lacking a lot of things, and we have to bring up ourselves.

After further debate, no affirmative group decision was made, but Abrams’s position became the de facto position of the AACM. Such a stance, even if it doesn’t represent the highest ideals, is understandable in the context of American life in 1965. And yet the hybrid nature of American culture stubbornly presented itself; over time, the AACM’s orbit expanded to include people outside of its initial vision of itself — whether in the form of artistic collaborations (as with John Cage and with concert stops in France and Germany), performing space provided by the University of Chicago, or financial support from the National Endowment for the Arts, which was hard-won and fraught with discriminatory practices.

by Matthew McKnight

Source: The Point

Wynton Marsalis isn’t afraid of the past, or holiday music

At 57, Wynton Marsalis has a lot of jazz in his bones.

Plenty of virtuosos and historians have spent time and energy learning a form, but the trumpeter grew up in one, with a family that was musical, even compared to musical families. Which may explain why it feels like Marsalis is a lot older than 57.

But he has turned his birthright — a youth spent absorbing music in New Orleans — into a mode of creative expression and preservation. As the head of Jazz of Lincoln Center, he has presented all manner of live music programming that speaks to the form’s vast and storied history and cultural value. He also is a composer, recording artist and interpreter.

Which is all to say, Marsalis at this stage in his life could slide lazily into the role of curator, but rather, he prefers to bring his music to listeners. So he plays three shows this week, one in Houston and two not too far outside, all with a holiday theme. His Houston show is one with specific ties. Marsalis has long admired the jazz that comes out of Houston. He references jazz educator Bob Morgan and drummer Eric Harland as just two examples. But he also is doing the show here thanks to Vincent Gardner, a trombonist and founding artist director of Jazz Houston.

Marsalis talked to us about jazz and musical traditions, including holiday music.

Q: I feel like holiday music has its own tradition. Which is an open door to a broader music question. Preservation of the history has always been an important thing for you. Even at the cost of other music forms that criticized you for not acknowledging progress. Take Jelly Roll Morton. He made some recordings. But that’s not how he got started. So your “Mr. Jelly Lord” album was big for me. It was a recent take on something others had been interpreting for years.

A: Yes, I never had this hatred of the past. I knew, for me, we were playing in the present. I think for some people they see the past as a shackle. I never thought that. But I think that is also a conservative way of thinking: That the past is a shackle. I feel like somebody thinks an idea and everybody agrees and we don’t question it. Jelly Roll played music. And if the essence today is the same, why not continue to try to play it? Kids get older and parents die, and both forget grandparents. These cycles of life and death aren’t changing. So I try to embrace all music. I try to keep learning.

Q: Which sounds a lot like the old songsters, who weren’t blues players. Mance Lipscomb is among the most beloved here. But he’d play very different music on a Saturday night and a Sunday morning. And he’d also play very different songs for white and black audiences. He tried to read a crowd, but he wasn’t a “blues” player. He played songs.

A: Right. We need to be able to identify things, but we shouldn’t get stuck there. The problem is the grandfather is not the same as the father who’s not the same as the son. But that doesn’t mean you don’t believe in the experience of the grandfather. We had an interesting show in the hall the other night, Mary Chapin Carpenter playing with her musicians. And I stopped in the room backstage, and everybody was talking about jazz and folk music. And it all comes from the same thing: folk music and jazz. That’s why we are trying to get students to learn folk music and deal with the roots of American music. Blues is in the soil of all that.

Q: You’re doing these Christmas shows, which pull from a long tradition that has a unifying effect through one lens. Do you find the songs to have some relatable quality?

A: Mythology is common. There’s a common mythology. And the holidays are a good time to remind ourselves of that. Christmas reminds us of that. It’s the one time of year where traditional songs and things that used to be are noticed. So it’s like a renewal. Some new songs, but old songs. Classics. And they can live together. … That’s why everybody does it. Gene Autry, Mel Torme, Donny Hathaway.

Q: It’s like the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra. I was looking up the members. There are some from predictable hubs like New York, New Orleans and Chicago, but also plenty from the Midwest, England …

A: Yeah, somebody’s from New York, but not everybody is from New York. People tend to come here. New Orleans, people tend to be from New Orleans. But people come from all over interested in jazz. All around the U.S., the Caribbean. The music has a diverse population.

Q: Do you have a favored holiday album or song? I’m intrigued by the reach of Vince Guaraldi because of “A Charlie Brown Christmas.”

A: Hey, I love Vince in general. And if you’re around my age, “Charlie Brown” was the only time you heard jazz on TV. And now, years later, there’s less. (Laughs.) But we all remember that, because he was doing something you didn’t hear anywhere else on television.

by Andrew Dansby

Source: Houston Chronicle

JLCO with Wynton Marsalis and vocalists Vuyo Sotashe and Veronica Swift ring in the holidays

Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis spreads good cheer this holiday season as the world renowned jazz orchestra and guest vocalists Vuyo Sotashe and Veronica Swift perform Big Band Holidays throughout the U.S. The 14-city U.S. tour embarks in Ann Arbor, MI on November 28. The Big Band Holidays tour takes the band through Texas, and the Southeast then concludes with a 5-date homecoming engagement at Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Fredrick P. Rose Hall’s Rose Theater on December 19 – 23. The performance on Sunday, December 23 at 2pm, will be a Relaxed Performance, designed to provide an opportunity for children or adults with autism, learning difficulties, or other sensory and communication needs to enjoy our performances with their families in a more relaxed environment.

With soulful big band arrangements of songs both sacred and secular, Big Band Holidays is an uplifting tradition enjoyed by audiences of all ages and backgrounds. This year’s program, co-music directed by Victor Goines and Wynton Marsalis, will include imaginative new versions of classics like “Winter Wonderland” and “Dreidl, Dreidl, Dreidl.” Recent Big Band Holidays programs have featured such acclaimed vocalists as Cécile McLorin Salvant, Gregory Porter, René Marie, and Catherine Russell.

Taking the Rose Theater stage for the first time together, the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra welcomes two standout rising star vocalists to join this tradition: Vuyo Sotashe and Veronica Swift. These distinctive young talents have both been major hits in Jazz at Lincoln Center’s various venues — Sotashe was most recently featured in Monk’s Dream in The Appel Room in October, and Swift was a featured vocalist for the JLCO’s Benny Goodman: King of Swing shows in the 2017 – 18 season.

In addition to Rose Theater, Jazz at Lincoln Center’ offers a series of holiday celebrations in December. Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cla will present Riley’s Red Hot Holidays (December 13); a special Christmas Eve show, Barry Harris Trio (December 21 – 24); and Carlos Henriquez Octet (December 26 – 31). The full December lineup and additional information is available at jazz.org/dizzys.

Big Band Holidays will take place in Rose Theater in Frederick P. Rose Hall, home of Jazz at Lincoln Center, located on Broadway at 60th Street in New York City. For additional information and to purchase tickets, visit jazz.org.

Big Hand Holidays U.S. Tour:

November 28 | Ann Arbor, MI – Hill Auditorium at the University of Michigan

November 30 | Austin, TX – The Paramount Theatre

December 1 | Houston, TX – Cullen Performance Hall at University of Houston

December 2 | Galveston, TX – The Grand 1894 Opera House

December 3 | San Antonio, TX – H-E-B Performance Hall at Tobin Center for the Performing Arts

December 4 | Lufkin, TX – Angelina Arts Alliance

December 5 | Dallas, TX – Meyerson Symphony Center

December 7 | Nashville, TN – Schermerhorn Symphony Center

December 8 | Charleston, SC – Charleston Gaillard Center

December 9 | Newberry, SC – Newberry Opera House

December 10 | Atlanta, GA – Atlanta Symphony Hall

December 11 | Chapel Hill, NC – Memorial Hall at UNC Chapel Hill

December 13 | Lynchburg, VA – Historic Academy of Music Theatre

December 14 – 15 | North Bethesda, MD – The Music Center at Strathmore

December 16 | York, PA – Strand Theatre at the Appell Center for the Performing Arts

December 19 – 23 | New York, NY – Rose Theater, Jazz at Lincoln Center

Ticket Information for performances at Jazz at Lincoln Center in New York, NY Rose Theater ticket prices are $50 and up, dependent upon seating section.

All single tickets for The Appel Room and Rose Theater can be purchased through jazz.org 24 hours a day or through CenterCharge at 212-721-6500, open daily from 10am to 9pm. Tickets can also be purchased at the Jazz at Lincoln Center Box Office, located on Broadway at 60th Street, ground floor. Note: Hot Seats — $10 seats for each Rose Theater performance (excluding Jazz for Young People_® concerts and other performances as specified) and select performances in The Appel Room (excluding _Jazz & Popular Song concerts) — are available for purchase by the general public on the Wednesday prior to each performance. Tickets are subject to availability; please call 212-258-9800 for available Hot Seats performance dates.

Many of Jazz at Lincoln Center’s concerts stream live in high-definition audio and video for free to a global audience. These concerts are also available on Livestream’s mobile and TV-connected applications with real-time DVR, chat, photos, and other materials available to fans worldwide at jazz.org/live.

Additional information may be found at jazz.org | Facebook: facebook.com/jazzatlincolncenter | Twitter: @jazzdotorg | Instagram: @jazzdotorg | YouTube: youtube.com/jalc | Livestream: jazz.org/live

Jazz at Lincoln Center proudly acknowledges its major corporate partners:Bloomberg Philanthropies, Brooks Brothers, The Coca-Cola Company, Con Edison, Entergy, SiriusXM, Steinway & Sons, and United Airlines. ###

Press Inquiries: Rebecca Kim Assistant Director, Public Relations & External Communications Jazz at Lincoln Center rkim@jazz.org 212-258-9807

Blue Engine Records announces the release of “WINTER WONDERLAND”

Come walkin’ in a “Winter Wonderland” with the Wynton Marsalis Quintet, featuring Oni Marsalis, as Blue Engine Records releases the new holiday single. Recorded at Frederick P. Rose Hall, home of Jazz at Lincoln Center, “Winter Wonderland” will be available for streaming and download on all mass-market digital platforms on November 30.

In 2017, Blue Engine Records released “Jingle Bells” performed by Wynton Marsalis and Friends and featuring Oni Marsalis on vocals. The exclusive Spotify Singles track racked up over 2.4 million plays since its premiere last December. “Winter Wonderland” continues the label’s annual tradition of releasing swinging holiday tunes for jazz fans of all ages.

PERSONNEL:

MUSIC DIRECTION + TRUMPET

Wynton Marsalis

REEDS

Camille Thurman – tenor saxophone, clarinet

RHYTHM SECTION

Dan Nimmer – piano

Philip Norris – bass

TJ Reddick – drums

VOCALS

Oni Marsalis

About Blue Engine Records Blue Engine Records, Jazz at Lincoln Center’s platform that makes its vast archive of recorded concerts available to jazz audiences everywhere, launched on June 30, 2015. Blue Engine Records releases new studio and live recordings as well as archival recordings from Jazz at Lincoln Center’s performance history that date back to 1987 and are part of the R. Theodore Ammon Archives and Music Library. Since the institution’s founding in 1987, each year’s programming is conceived and developed by Managing and Artistic Director Wynton Marsalis with a vision toward building a comprehensive library of iconic and wide-ranging compositions that, taken together, make up a canon of music. These archives include accurate, complete charts for the compositions – both old and new – performed each season. Coupled with consistently well-executed and recorded music performed by Marsalis and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, this archive has grown to include thousands of songs from hundreds of concert dates. The launch of Blue Engine is aligned with Jazz at Lincoln Center’s efforts to cultivate existing jazz fans worldwide and turn new audiences onto jazz. Blue Engine’s award-winning, best-selling records include Live in Cuba, which captures the historic trip taken by the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis to Havana in 2010, and Handful of Keys, which pairs the JLCO with special guest pianists for a one-night romp through 100 years of jazz piano history. For more information on Blue Engine Records, visit blueenginerecords.org

Wynton Marsalis to speak at Kenyon spring commencement

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Internationally acclaimed musician and educator Wynton Marsalis, winner of nine Grammy Awards and the first jazz musician to win the Pulitzer Prize for Music, will be the featured speaker at Kenyon’s 191st Commencement on May 18, 2019.

Marsalis was nominated by a committee of faculty, staff and students. President Sean Decatur extended the invitation from the College to deliver the address.

Through his prolific touring, recording of albums, and advocacy of the arts, Marsalis inspired generations to explore the genre of jazz and embrace the role of the arts in America’s culture. In 1987, Marsalis co-founded Jazz at Lincoln Center, enlivening and expanding a global community for jazz. His work as a cultural ambassador continued with the creation of the 1995 PBS television program “Marsalis on Music,” as well as an NPR series that same year titled “Making the Music.” For both of these broadcast series, Marsalis won the prestigious George Foster Peabody Award.

“For decades, Wynton Marsalis has demonstrated not only incredible musical talent, but also an impressive commitment to promoting the arts and cultural literacy in America,” Decatur said. “Mr. Marsalis has opened doors for generations to share in his passion for music, and he serves as an excellent model for how engagement with the arts can lead to a fuller, richer life. I am elated to welcome him to campus in May to address the Class of 2019.”

Born in New Orleans in 1961 and named for jazz pianist Wynton Kelly, Marsalis was raised in a family of musicians. At age 14 he performed with the New Orleans Philharmonic, and at age 17, he became the youngest musician ever to be admitted to Tanglewood’s Berkshire Music Center. He went on to attend the Juilliard School in New York City and played with famed jazz musician Art Blakey before forming his own band in 1981.

Throughout his long musical career, Marsalis has produced more than 80 records, which have sold more than seven million copies worldwide, and has toured on six continents. In 1983, at age 22, he won his first Grammy Awards, becoming the only artist ever to win for both jazz and classical records in the same year — repeating the feat in 1984. In 1997, his oratorio “Blood on the Fields” won the Pulitzer Prize for Music.

“Wynton Marsalis’s advocacy for jazz and its rich history is unmatched, and there is no greater practitioner of or ambassador for jazz in America today,” said Professor of Music Ted Buehrer ’91, who recalls a 1991 Rosse Hall performance by Marsalis and his septet as a high point of his Kenyon experience. “As a jazz trumpet player myself, I grew up in the 1980s as Marsalis took the musical world by storm, and marveled at his dazzling musicianship.”

Marsalis was honored with the National Medal of Arts in 2005 and the National Humanities Medal in 2015. In the fall of 2009, Marsalis received one of France’s highest distinctions, the insignia Chevalier of the Legion of Honor, for his extraordinary contributions to American culture.

“Wynton Marsalis has upheld an immense appreciation for the arts and a deep commitment to cultural education — both of which are important to a liberal arts education,” said Senior Class President Sriya Chadalavada, an economics major from Cincinnati, who will introduce Marsalis at Commencement. “The Class of 2019 will benefit from hearing his perspective on how the arts and the liberal arts fit into our world after Kenyon.”

In addition to his expansive body of musical compositions, Marsalis has authored six books that explore the world of jazz music, including most recently “Squeak, Rumble, Whomp! Whomp! Whomp!”, a sonic adventure for children. Marsalis also has served as a cultural correspondent for “CBS This Morning” and as A.D. White Professor-at-Large at Cornell University. Honorary degrees have been conferred upon Marsalis by more than 30 colleges and universities; he will receive one more during Kenyon’s Commencement, when the College will award him an honorary doctorate of music.

Inclusion of wyntonmarsalis.org in the Library of Congress Web Archives

On October 5, 2018, Wynton Marsalis’ website received the following communication by the Library of Congress:

United States Library of Congress has selected your website for inclusion in the Library’s historic collection of Internet materials related to the LC Commissioned Composers Web Archive. We consider your website to be an important part of this collection and the historical record.

The Library of Congress preserves the Nation’s cultural artifacts and provides enduring access to them. The Library’s traditional functions, acquiring, cataloging, preserving and serving collection materials of historical importance to the Congress and the American people to foster education and scholarship, extend to digital materials, including websites.

The following URL has been selected:

http://wyntonmarsalis.org/

In order to properly archive this URL, and potentially other URLs of interest on your site, we may archive both this URL and other portions of your site, including public content that your page links to on third party sites such as Facebook, YouTube, etc. The Library of Congress or its agent will engage in the collection of content from your website at regular intervals and may include it in future collections. The Library will make this collection available to researchers at Library facilities and by special arrangement.

The Library may also make the collection available more broadly by hosting the collection on the Library’s public access website no earlier than one year after our archiving has been completed. The Library hopes that you share its vision of preserving Internet materials and permitting researchers from across the world to access them.

Our web archives are important because they contribute to the historical record, capturing information that could otherwise be lost. With the growing role of the web as an influential medium, records of historic events could be considered incomplete without materials that were “born digital” and never printed on paper. For more information about these web archive collections, please visit our website (http://www.loc.gov/webarchiving/).

“The Word At Birdland” A Conversation With Budd Mishkin, Wynton Marsalis and Ruben Blades

Birdland Theater is proud to announce that journalist Budd Mishkin will be interviewing musicians Wynton Marsalis and Ruben Blades in an intimate and compelling conversation on Thursday, November 15 at 7pm. The evening will include questions and interaction with the live audience.

Budd Mishkin is a broadcast journalist, interviewer, live event host, public speaker and panel moderator. He was one of the original anchor/reporters who helped create NY1 in 1992 and spent 25 years at New York’s 24 hour news channel. From 1992-2017, Budd served as a sports anchor/reporter, covering a wide variety of New York sports stories and anchoring NY1’s nightly show “Sports on 1: The Last Word.” In 2003, he created the weekly series “One on 1 with Budd Mishkin,” profiling influential and intriguing New Yorkers from a wide range of fields. Over 14 years, “One on 1” profiled some 400 prominent New Yorkers: poets and politicians, athletes and artists, the old timers and the rising stars. In addition to Budd’s television news and sports work, he’s created and hosted live events and moderates panels at venues throughout New York and New Jersey including the 92nd St. Y, the Museum of the City of New York, Barnes and Noble, the World Science Festival and others. His guests on stage have included Wynton Marsalis, Dan Rather, John Turturro, Cal Ripken Jr., Kirk Douglas, Suzanne Vega, Ed Koch, Kareem Abdul Jabbar, Harry Belafonte, Gloria Steinem, Graham Nash, Steven Van Zandt, Bob Costas and many more.

Rubén Blades was born in a rooming house in a small Latin American country, but he refused to see limitations or barriers; his work has crossed geopolitical borders, cultures, and genres, and has made an impact throughout the world. He has won 17 Grammy and Latin Grammy Awards, and currently stars in the AMC television series Fear the Walking Dead. As a composer and vocalist, Blades is one of the most successful artists in Latin music. His landmark albums in classic Afro-Cuban salsa are touched with rock, jazz, pan-Latin, and worldwide influences. His 2017 album Salsa Big Band was named the Latin Grammy Album of the Year. Blades has collaborated with rock, jazz, pop, hip-hop, reggaeton, and salsa artists, and has composed hundreds of songs and dozens of hits, known for their eloquent, socially charged lyrics, colorful characters, and memorable melodies. ASCAP honored him with its Founders Award, and the Grammy Recording Academy with its Heroes Award. He is the subject of the 2018 award-winning documentary Yo No Me Llamo Rubén Blades directed by Abner Benaim.

In addition to his music, he was recently seen starring in Hands Of Stone opposite Robert De Niro, Edgar Ramirez and John Turturro, and in Safe House opposite Denzel Washington and Ryan Reynolds. Blades has played memorable roles in films with such acclaimed directors as Robert Redford in The Milagro Beanfield War, Robert Rodriguez in Once Upon a Time in Mexico, Spike Lee in Mo’ Better Blues, Alan Pakula in The Devil’s Own, and Jack Nicholson in The Two Jakes. He was nominated for three Emmys for his roles in the television movies The Josephine Baker Story, Crazy From The Heart, and The Maldonado Miracle. His work in over 35 films and documentaries also won Blades a Cable ACE Award, plus Independent Spirit and ALMA Awards. The Hispanic Organization of Latin Actors honored him with its Raúl Juliá HOLA Founders Award, and the Hispanic Heritage Foundation honored him with its Arts Award.

Beyond Blades’ artistic success, he holds degrees in political science and law from the University of Panama, and an LLM from Harvard Graduate Law School. The Loeb Music Library at Harvard University formed The Rubén Blades Archives in 2008 to collect his work and papers. He has received Honorary Doctorate degrees from Berkeley University in California (Chicano Studies), Lehman College in the Bronx (Humanities) and the Berklee College of Music in Boston (Music). In 2006 the president of Chile awarded Blades the Pablo Neruda Order of Cultural Merit, and in 2010 the president of Ecuador honored him with their Orden Nacional al Mérito Cultural. New York University Steinhardt has appointed him Scholar in Residence for the 2018/2019 academic year. Blades has always had an eye for political activism. In 1994 he formed a political party, Movimiento Papa Egoró (“Mother Earth” in the indigenous Embera language), and ran for President of the Republic of Panama, coming in third place with 18% of the vote. In 2000 Blades was named U.N. World Ambassador Against Racism. From 2004-2009 he served as his country’s Minister of Tourism.

Wynton Marsalis is an internationally acclaimed musician, composer and bandleader, an educator and a leading advocate of American culture. He has created and performed an expansive range of music from quartets to big bands, chamber music ensembles to symphony orchestras and tap dance to ballet, expanding the vocabulary for jazz and classical music with a vital body of work that places him among the world’s finest musicians and composers. Always swinging, Marsalis blows his trumpet with a clear tone, a depth of emotion and a unique, virtuosic style derived from an encyclopedic range of trumpet techniques. When you hear Marsalis play, you’re hearing life being played out through music. Marsalis’ core beliefs and foundation for living are based on the principals of jazz. He promotes individual creativity (improvisation), collective cooperation (swing), gratitude and good manners (sophistication), and faces adversity with persistent optimism (the blues). With his evolved humanity and through his selfless work, Marsalis has elevated the quality of human engagement for individuals, social networks and cultural institutions throughout the world.

“The Word At Birdland”

A Conversation With Budd Mishkin, Wynton Marsalis and Ruben Blades

Thursday, November 15 at 7pm

Birdland Theater, 315 West 44 Street, NYC

$30 cover, $10 food/drink minimum

www.BirdlandJazz.com or 212-581-3080

Russian, US Jazz Legends Honored With Global Peacemaker Awards At Event In Washington

WASHINGTON (UrduPoint News / Sputnik – 02nd November, 2018) Russian saxophone virtuoso Igor Butman and US nine-time Grammy winner Wynton Marsalis were honored with Global Peacemaker Awards by The Sustained Dialogue Institute (SDI) at an event in Washington.

In addition to the SDI, Thursday’s event was organized with the support of Susan Carmel, the chairperson of the American-Russian Cultural Cooperation Foundation.

“We are encouraged to have such a like-minded partner as the Sustained Dialogue Institute, the very title of which speaks against mutual isolation in case of disagreements and promotes the idea of ‘all-weather’ dialogue even on the most contentious issues,” Russian Ambassador to the United States Anatoly Antonov said in his speech at the event.

The ambassador noted that Marsalis last year was awarded with the Order of Friendship, by decree of Russian President Vladimir Putin, for his contribution to promoting cultural ties between Moscow and Washington. Antonov also said that Butman is one of the most prominent representatives of “cultural diplomacy.”

“Last year during the Saint Petersburg International Cultural Forum he successfully launched ‘Jazz Across Borders,’ the first jazz conference in the history of Russia. It was attended by over a thousand participants from 32 countries,” Antonov said. “This month Saint Petersburg will host the second conference. I am confident that its status will keep growing, and Russian jazz will become all the more popular both at home and abroad.”

The ambassador went on to say that Butman is deeply involved in developing the Russian jazz school and last year became head of the State College of Brass Instruments in Moscow, which will soon become a full-scale Academy of Jazz Music.

Carmel, in her remarks, said the event celebrates the power of international dialogue and cultural diplomacy by showcasing two outstanding humanitarians and world-renown legends of jazz.

“Honorees and beloved musicians Wynton Marsalis and Igor Butman embody the principles and values behind the Sustained Dialogue Institute’s prestigious award, and I applaud their work separately and cooperatively towards greater cultural understanding, dialogue and mutual respect,” Carmel said.

Butman, at the same event, said it was hard to say why he and Marsalis get these awards but speculated that it might be because they make something happen between the United States and Russia. Butman also said he has constant dialogue with Marsalis, who sends his students to the Russian “Future of Jazz,” festival, which gathers students from various countries such as China, England, Japan, Italy and France.

“We love and respect each other and have many of the same music idols,” Butman said. “By the way, some of Wynton’s idols are Russian – like Tchaikovsky, Stravinsky and Rimsky-Korsakov. I also have a lot of US idols – including Marsalis himself.”

Marsalis, for his part, expressed his gratitude for the honor then explained to the audience why it meant so much to him.

“This award is even more special to me because of the presence of my brother in swing – who has travelled many kilometers to join us here tonight – Igor Butman,” Marsalis said.

The US jazz artist stressed that music can nurture common ground and bring people together in harmony.

“Jazz is the sound of freedom, born of the quest for harmonious dialogue through the resolution of conflicting perspectives – under the pressure of time,” Marsalis said. “That’s what Igor and I are truly about in our respective countries and when we come together. The human soul knows no nationality.”

The Sustained Dialogue Institute is an international organization focused on creating a world where people coexist peacefully and overcome conflicts through dialogue. The institute is currently working on three continents and has chapters in 50 college campuses.

An Evening of Cultural and Diplomatic Dialogue at the US Institute of Peace

The United States Institute of Peace — the soaring glass and limestone building near the National Mall designed to reflect America’s commitment to ending global conflict — is perhaps not the first venue that comes to mind for a swinging session by two legendary jazzmen.

But on November 1, Russian and American jazz icons Igor Butman and Wynton Marsalis not only received the National Dialogue Award from the Sustained Dialogue Institute — they also gifted attendees at the ceremony with an electrifying private concert. Twenty Carmel Institute of Russian Culture & History students were among the guests.

Founded in 2002, the Sustained Dialogue Institute — which promotes the method of peacemaking developed by its first leader, Dr. Harold Saunders — has been deeply involved in peacebuilding across the world. Saunders was a key drafter of the Camp David Peace Accords, and also served as Assistant Secretary of State under President Jimmy Carter.

First presented in 2014, the National Dialogue Award mission statement asserts that the honor “aims to promote the values of dialogue, especially sustained dialogue, in the transformation of national and global conflict. It seeks to reach across national and transnational boundaries to bring people of every age together for a better world.” Previous awardees include US Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg; US Congresswoman Gabby Giffords and her husband astronaut Mark Kelly; US Senator George Mitchell and US Congressman John Lewis; and Carmel Institute founder Susan E. Carmel.

The Sustained Dialogue Institute proclaimed that Butman and Marsalis each received the award "in recognition of the monumental contributions they have made bridging divides through the arts, including through the use of music and student exchanges to bring young people and others together from across the world." “We love and respect each other and have many of the same music idols,” Butman said in his acceptance remarks. “By the way, some of Wynton’s idols are Russian — like Tchaikovsky, Stravinsky, and Rimsky-Korsakov. I also have a lot of US idols — including Marsalis himself.”

Marsalis returned the compliment, telling the audience, “This award is even more special to me because of the presence of my brother in swing — who has traveled many kilometers to join us here tonight — Igor Butman.”

Both artists emphasized that music transcends cultural differences and geographical boundaries.

“Art and especially music itself has no borders,” observed Butman, “and our mission as musicians is to build new humanitarian bridges between nations and countries. Jazz diplomacy and musical education is our tool to help people all over the world to overcome boundaries and erase barriers.”

Jazz, Marsalis believes, is a musical genre uniquely suited to the task: “Jazz is a unique and very powerful language that helps to bring peace and understanding to this world. Jazz is the sound of freedom, born of the quest for harmonious dialogue through the resolution of conflicting perspectives — under the pressure of time,” he said.

Anatoly Antonov, the Ambassador of the Russian Federation to the US, praised not only the musical talents of Butman and Marsalis but also their committed cultural outreach efforts. “Today we are celebrating two luminaries of jazz art,” Ambassador Antonov noted. “They have fans all over the world, and their musical creativity, bypassing language barriers, helps people to better understand each other.”

Offstage, Butman and Marsalis have each dedicated themselves to an ambitious schedule of education and cultural dialogue initiatives.

In 2017, Butman successfully launched Jazz Across Borders, the first jazz conference in the history of Russia, which has since become an international event. In 2018, he became, with Herbie Hancock, the co-artistic director of St. Petersburg’s International Jazz Day.

As the Managing and Artistic Director of Jazz at Lincoln Center, Marsalis, the first jazz artist to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize, has been appointed both as a UN Messenger of Peace and as a Cultural Ambassador for Jazz by the US State Department.

Ambassador Antonov also had special words of thanks for Susan E. Carmel, the Gala Chair and Founder of the Carmel Institute of Russian Culture & History. "We highly appreciate everything you do to build trust between our peoples,” he said. “Cultural dialogue allows Russians and Americans not to lose the experience of communicating with each other, and creates a groundwork for the restoration of bilateral relations at the political level.”

“Wynton and Igor both know and live this model of substance and the model of sustained dialogue,” said Susan E. Carmel. “They know that the global challenges we face today and in the future can be positively influenced and changed through person-to-person dialogue, cultural and musical dialogue, and educational exchange and dialogue.”

Echoing the words of her late brother-in-law and music educator, Dr. Charles Hoffer, Ms. Carmel asserted that "living is more than existing. Do people need music? Not in the sense that they need to eat and sleep. But they do need it in terms of a rich human life. Humans need music, beauty, gentleness, sensitivity to others, and all the civilizing elements that create a life of substance."

Shortly after delivering their own remarks, with National Dialogue Award medals hanging from their necks by bright blue and gold ribbons, Butman and Marsalis launched into a thrilling set of jazz standards. A delighted audience clapped, cheered, and even shouted their appreciation, ultimately rewarding the jazz greats and their sidemen with a standing ovation.

Ambassadors and high-ranking diplomats representing more than twenty countries were in attendance, a fact that was interpreted as a hopeful sign by Sustained Dialogue Institute president Mark Farr. "This is positive proof that despite worldly challenges, these collaborations unite us. Cultural diplomacy can bring peace to the world," he declared.

By Kimberley Heatherington

Source: American University