The History of Jazz

by Ted Gioia

In retrospect, we can see that the resulting album, The Majesty of the Blues, initiated a new period in Marsalis’s career. In some respects, the new style marked an extension of earlier concerns—one notes the shifting meters of the deceptively simple-sounding “Hickory Dickory Dock”— but in other ways, Marsalis was moving dramatically away from his previous practices. The trumpeter who, as a teenager, had amazed audiences with his pure, clean tone was now exploring the “dirtier” approach favored by prebop jazz musicians, increasingly distorting his sound with a mute. Instead of living up to his early reputation as the “next Clifford Brown” or his midcareer tag as the bandleader who would build on Miles’s work from the 1960s, Marsalis now seemed intent on reviving the aesthetic of King Oliver and Bubber Miley. At the same time, Marsalis’s melody lines were becoming more compact; as he would later describe it, he was focusing on “clarion” phrases rather than imitating saxophone lines. The ensemble textures were more open and uncluttered.